G.R. Yeates's Blog, page 13

The Dead in June 09: Reading of The Mouthless Dead by Charles Sorley

The Mouthless Dead by Charles Sorley

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The Dead in June 08: Voluntary Aid Detachment

In The Eyes of the Dead, the role women played in the war effort on the Western Front is addressed as it also will be in the next Vetala Cycle novel, The Shapes in the Mist.

At home and on the Western Front, hospitals and nursing posts were often manned by VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment). This organisation was founded in 1909 with the assistance of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John. By 1914, there were 2,500 Voluntary Aid Detachments in Britain – each individual being referred to as a detachment or, more commonly, a VAD.

There was initial reluctance to accept the services of these volunteers at home and abroad because the majority were women of middle and upper-class backgrounds, unused to hardship and the traditions of hospital discipline. This did become a source of friction between VADs and qualified nurses as the latter felt that their presence undermined the authority necessary for keeping a hospital in order as well as being a burden because of their lack of training.

However, there was a shortage of trained staff and, as the war went on, the rules were changed in favour of the volunteers. For overseas service, female volunteers over the age of twenty-three with more than three months hospital experience were also accepted. The VADs became invaluable and often acquitted themselves well in emergency situations such as German air raids on the base hospitals and transporting the wounded whilst under fire. VADs eventually served at Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and the Eastern Front as they became more skilled and efficient during the four years of war and many were decorated for distinguished service.

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Dead in June 07: Sample from The Eyes of the Dead

Private Wilson breathed in, choking as he did. He rolled over onto his back. Watery-brown muck ran from his mouth. He sat up and spat the rest of it out. Wiping the back of his hand across his lips, he looked around.

It stretched away from him in all directions.

A wasteland, gouged through with abandoned trench-works. His uniform was soaked. The colour no longer discernible through its thick coating of filth. Icy bullets of rain fell, striking his face. Shivering, he clambered to his feet, sinking into the soft ground. He heaved his way through the mud.  The going was slow.

He didn't know where he was going.

He knew he had to keep moving.

As he slogged on, he felt his head aching. Then throbbing. Scalding force was gathering behind his eyes. Bringing tears. Sending lines of fire racing through his brain. He could feel movement inside his skull. The pain was a restless animal, scratching away the inside of its bone prison. Its furious cacophony clouding his mind, making his eyes water. The scratching was cutting deep too. It was working its way into the matter of his mind, re-opening scars. Wilson could feel the memories bleeding out.

With a cry, he fell to his knees, suddenly remembering everything.

© G.R. Yeates 2011

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The Dead in June 06: Reading of Colwyn Philipps

untitled poem by Colwyn Philipps

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The Thing Behind the Door

Well, hello all.

This blog entry is coming to you completely unplanned and very late at night. The reason I'm writing it is to get down on record what the next book will be following the first trilogy of novels in the Vetala Cycle.

It was Death Fog, which I renamed as The House of Flies, but something else crept up on me this evening that I did not expect. What crept up was this. The House of Flies will be written but not just yet. There is another tale I will be telling in its place, already partially-drafted back in 2009. The title of my fourth novel will therefore be The Thing Behind the Door. It is a story I tried to put down as a failure, partly because I didn't get it right the first time and, more importantly, because it was a story that was genuinely painful to write, even in its initial abortive form.

Now, I'm not talking about the usual writerly griping here of writing late into the night, getting no sleep, getting blocked ecetera. It was painful because it meant tapping into my past, a certain part of it, that is deeply unpleasant to visit, even for a short time. So I tried to bury it but, like one of the undead, it has crawled out of its grave, shaken off the salts of the quicklime that I doused it with, found its way back into my brain and wound itself around my cerebellum.

I've been feeling it there for the last few weeks telling me that I may want to write The House of Flies but actually I need to write The Thing Behind the Door. I need to get it right this time, go back to the bad place and get it out of my system for good.

If this all sounds rather pretentious then you'll have to forgive me.

Admittedly, this also reveals another advantage of self-publishing. I get to choose the project and shunt the order if I need to. So yes, my first release in 2012 will be The Thing Behind the Door and here is the blurb to whet your appetites:

Broken, the old school stands, abandoned and alone, on the edge of town. Decrepit and hated, without purpose. Its windows made blind, warty wood nailed across the flaking panes of glass. Tightly-closed doors thrive with the muttering of worms and a spreading white rot. You can smell the rot, soft, wet and doughy, if you stand near enough to its grounds, but few do. At night, children swear they can hear the old school drawing breath, as if it means to suck them in, swallow them whole, eat them up.

Tonight, he stands alone on its doorstep. He has come home. He was called back here, not by a presence, by an absence. It is waiting for him inside. And it is dark inside the old school, very, very dark, and that darkness is insane.

© G.R. Yeates 2011

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The Dead in June 05: Flammenwerfer

In today's article, I'm going to be talking about another weapon used in World War One and this one has significance in the narrative of The Eyes of the Dead. I'll say no more than that though because otherwise that would spoil things.

The First World War saw the introduction of the flamethrower onto the battlefield by the German army. The name, flamethrower, deriving from the German, flammenwerfer. It was invented in 1901 by Richard Fiedler. It consisted of a vertical single cylinder that was four feet in length and then horizontally divided in two. Pressurized gas was stored in the lower compartment of the device and the flammable oil in the upper compartment. By depressing a lever on the device, the gas acted a propellant, driving the oil through the attached hose. Once it reached the steel nozzle at the end of hose, the wick would be activated and the stream of oil would be ignited. The fire and smoke produced would spread over an area of twenty yards. Though a devastating weapon, in psychological and real terms, it was only capable of firing once before the ignition wick in the nozzle needed replacing.

A regiment was created, the Flammenwerferapparaten, but it was not deployed until in 1915. The first deployment, in teams of six, was against the French outside Verdun in February and the first concerted action involving the flamethrower was against the British at the Hooge Crater in July.

The flamethrower was however cumbersome and difficult to operate, which meant that the Flammenwerferapparaten would often have to operate it from the relative security of their own trenches. With the range of the flamethrower being limited to twenty yards, it could not therefore be used in places where the enemy lines were at a greater distance than this. Additionally, the fuel would only last for two minutes before being spent.

The British attempted to employ fire by using the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, which was fifty-six feet in length and weighed in at two and a half tons. A carrying party of three hundred men was required to transport all of the components to the front line where it was assembled and operated by a team of eight. As it was constructed, it was placed in a shallow tunnel cut into the boggy earth of no man's land. The long chamber containing the fuel was below ground whilst a fourteen inch pipe and nozzle were on the surface. At the rear of the device was a piston that drove compressed gas into the chamber and then the fuel was pushed out through the pipe in a similar manner to the flammenwerfer and then directed towards the target by the operators.

Four Livens Projectors were deployed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Two were destroyed before they could be used but the two that survived have been credited with reducing British casualties in their respective areas. Considering the heavy losses that were otherwise experienced during this notorious offensive, the projectors must have seemed like a blessing to those who survived.

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