Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #138: History and Horror: "The Lorelei of the Trenches"

World War I Nurses

World War I was horrific. The use of heavy artillery, poison gas, machine guns against tactics used in the Napoleonic War (e.g., marching infantry straight into the line of fire) cost millions of casualties. The poets of World War I captured some of its horror, particularly the poem by Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum"; Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon also chronicled the horror. Robert Graves' memoir, Good-Bye to All That, is a must-read for anyone wanting to know just how terrible it was to have been in that war. 

Does death and destruction attract evil creatures? My story, "The Lorelei of the Trenches," suggests it does indeed. Supernatural creatures who live and feed on fear, sorrow, and death would have been right at home in the mist of World War I's mayhem. The desperate emotions of those around them would have been food for their souls. And they would have encouraged the violence and exacerbated it to gain more nourishment.

Tilda Pennington, a British nurse stationed in a field hospital right on the front lines. Enduring the sights of men wounded and maimed is difficult to take. She has seen nurses sent back home because they simply could not cope with what they daily encountered in the hospital. More then one, she knew, had begun to take morphine so they could cope with conditions there. One night when she goes outside to be alone and to smoke, she sees a tall woman in a white dress standing near one of the salient in the trench.  She is startled.

You never saw women in the trenches except for the occasional nurse. Now and then wilted-looking clusters of French whores would trudge toward their rides home after servicing hundreds of men. This woman was not a nurse nor did she look like exactly like a prostitute. She stood tall, taller than many men, and wore a long, starkly white dress. She had a pale face that contrasted with her abundant black hair. The nails on her white fingers were long. From where Tilda stood, they looked like talons.

The figure raises its arms. Tilda feels buffeted with energy, entranced, and then sees the woman smile and vanish. She dismisses it as a hallucination and turns to go through the door to the hospital. A shot rings out. A bullet hits the doorpost only inches from her head. She hurries inside, gets in bed, and sleeps.

Eventually she shares what happened with Richard Taylor, the ranking doctor in the unit and also her lover. She tells him about the vision and the sounds of singing she sometimes hears—high, eerie but beautiful female singing. He tells her her vision came from thirty-six hours with no sleep; and suggests someone on the German side owns and gramophone and was playing opera.

Tilda agrees. Then she finds out two other nurses have also seen the mysterious woman. One of them, though experienced and battle-wise, eventually walks up a set of wooden steps into no-man's land and is shot is killed. Tilda puzzles over why she would have done anything so stupid; but she remembers hearing the odd song just before her friend was shot. Another woman, learning of her death commits suicide the next day. Tilda had heard the song again, just at the moment she thought the second nurse must have been fitting the rope around her neck.

When she sees the strange female the next day, she rushes at her and accuses her of treachery (she assumes the woman is a prostitute). Suddenly a beautiful song fills her head, a song of longing for her homeland and contrasting the beauty of it to what mayhem, death, and pain all around her. The loveliness of it—the strange woman seems to be singing the song, though Tilda only hears it in her mind—made her long for safety, childhood, and repose; for all she had given up by coming to the battlefield. She could go to that land, the woman sang, with just a step, a few steps up the wooden stairs into the open.

Tilda almost succumbs to the temptation, but thoughts of her love for Richard come to mind.

Death takes the Lorelei

When thoughts of love fills Tilda, the woman winces—as if the vision had rebounded upon her. Tilda watches the metamorphose of the strange woman with horror: Her hair fell off in long, black tails. The outline of her skull appeared as her cheeks, lips, eyes, and scalp dissolved and ran over the bones of her face in a sluggish stream. The bloody flux pooled at her feet, the loss of her flesh transforming her to a skeleton. She collapsed then, a heap of bones and a loathsome mass of liquid flesh. Tilda faints. Richard and some others find her and take her the hospital. She tries to explain what she has seen. They think it only an hallucination from fatigue and stress. They give her a sedative. When she wakes up, the war, she is is told, is over.

She marries Richard and settles down to domestic happiness. When helping her daughter with a test on The Odyssey, she comes across references to the sirens; female creatures who used a song to lure men to their death. Further research informs her of a range of such ghouls: succubae, lamia, lorelei. Lorelei were a European version of the Greek harpy and siren. She realizes she had encountered one and overcome it. Richard returns home. It's their night to be intimate. She invites him into the bedroom for a celebration of love.

The story appeared in an anthology titled History and Horror (Oh My).Get a copy here.

Happy reading.