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The Death Guard
When a near-invincible army of artificially created soldiers - the flesh guard - falls into the hands of an untrustworthy power, continental Europe forms an alliance and invades Britain. The resulting carnage reduces whole cities and towns in Britain to smoking rubble.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1939
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 4, 2010
Grim and depressing, The Death Guard is one of those books which originated between the world wars of the 20th century. The author was a prominent Fabian Socialist who was active on the lecture circuit. There is even a rumor that it was one of H. G. Wells favourite books. The edition I was able to obtain was the 1992 ROC reprint. More rumors surround the books scarcity until the reprint: some say it was banned by the British government; others claim the publisher was bombed during a German air raid. There's even a notion the author died in combat during WWII, but my edition of the book claimed he lived till 1955.
Death Guard is the story of a renegade biochemist who hits on the idea of artificial life. A discharged soldier after the end of WWI, he hooks up with a large manufacturer and begins experimenting. His goal is to create the perfect soldier: a being who lives to kill the enemy. Such a creature would make any nation invincible, so goes his reasoning, because no one would dare attack. Thus, Britain will be safe from any future wars.
The book is told from the viewpoint of Gregory Beldite, the grandson of the industrialist who has sponsored the development of the Death Guard. He relates the first experiments by Gobel, the scientist who creates the life-form, to the eventual near destruction of Britain. Since Beldite opts to work in the production end of the process, he is able to recount the human cost of creating these things. We see the "Brothers", as they are known, start in fermentation trays, born as "pugs" and finally nursed into 7 ft. killing machines. The Guard is designed to fight with a metal spear and kill any moving object other than it's own kind. It's not quite an animal, although it resembles a biped, which has disastrous consequences in the latter half of the novel.
The main criticism of the book is the racism on display in the first third. Needing a private facility to create his perfect soldier, Gobel has the Beldite company build a compound in the Belgian Congo. The warm weather is perfect for his research. He's also provided with an endless supply of uneducated locals who know better than to ask questions about what they are doing. But rather than attack the exploitation of the African workers, Chadwick depicts them in the most vile, bigoted manner imaginable. The "N" word is constantly being used to depict these people and great lengths are taken to show them as a superstitious lot easily manipulated. Granted this book was written in the 1930's when such attitudes were routine in the West, but that doesn't excuse it. Even the 1992 introduction to the book, by British SF writer Brian Aldiss, describes this as "the most damaging aspect of the novel".
Death Guard heats up when a training cadre of the Brothers accidentally slaughter a village in the Congo. The world suddenly discovers the British government paying for the production of a super soldier in clear violation of disarmament pacts (which seem to be in force). The combined Continental European powers send a detachment of soldiers to shut down the research facility in the Congo, but the force is wiped out. By this stage, the company responsible for the creation of the Brothers has already relocated most of it's spawn to Britain. Threats begin flowing across the channel and war is imminent.
A lot of next section of the novel is given over to Beldite's observations as a supervisor in his grandfather's factory where the Brothers are being processed. There's a particular gruesome scene where an office worker is gutted by one of the creatures when, for sport, the plant decides to turn a Brother named "Bloody Omega" loose on a cow. The author may have shown his own sympathies by making a pacifist one of the major characters in this section.
When war comes, it shrieks down on Britain from the sky. Chadwick did have a bit of foresight in showing how air warfare would change the nature of combat. Although the Death Guard repels the Continentals' landing, the landscape is devastated by dive bombers, which the author terms "bomb-pluggers". Chadwick envisioned small bombers attacking the ground from a flying mother ship.
Across Britain, workers are in revolt and the country continues to be blasted from the air. Famine is everywhere. The Brothers are a lethal force against the enemy, but they have to be destroyed immediately after deployment. They cannot distinguish human friend from foe, so the army has to deploy tanks in the rear of every Guard detachment. The Brothers who survive the engagement are blasted apart from the rear. And starvation brings about the worst thing imaginable: spores. Since the Brothers are more plant than animal, they reproduce as they decompose. Soon, the battlefields are covered with tiny Death Guards, who will grow up to be stunted, but still deadly, adults.
And then Beldite learns of the British government's plans to launch Death Guard into Europe.....
The Death Guard is not a short book; my copy runs close to 400 pages. It's frighting and not easy to put down. If not for it's incidental racism, the book would probably have a larger following.
Death Guard is the story of a renegade biochemist who hits on the idea of artificial life. A discharged soldier after the end of WWI, he hooks up with a large manufacturer and begins experimenting. His goal is to create the perfect soldier: a being who lives to kill the enemy. Such a creature would make any nation invincible, so goes his reasoning, because no one would dare attack. Thus, Britain will be safe from any future wars.
The book is told from the viewpoint of Gregory Beldite, the grandson of the industrialist who has sponsored the development of the Death Guard. He relates the first experiments by Gobel, the scientist who creates the life-form, to the eventual near destruction of Britain. Since Beldite opts to work in the production end of the process, he is able to recount the human cost of creating these things. We see the "Brothers", as they are known, start in fermentation trays, born as "pugs" and finally nursed into 7 ft. killing machines. The Guard is designed to fight with a metal spear and kill any moving object other than it's own kind. It's not quite an animal, although it resembles a biped, which has disastrous consequences in the latter half of the novel.
The main criticism of the book is the racism on display in the first third. Needing a private facility to create his perfect soldier, Gobel has the Beldite company build a compound in the Belgian Congo. The warm weather is perfect for his research. He's also provided with an endless supply of uneducated locals who know better than to ask questions about what they are doing. But rather than attack the exploitation of the African workers, Chadwick depicts them in the most vile, bigoted manner imaginable. The "N" word is constantly being used to depict these people and great lengths are taken to show them as a superstitious lot easily manipulated. Granted this book was written in the 1930's when such attitudes were routine in the West, but that doesn't excuse it. Even the 1992 introduction to the book, by British SF writer Brian Aldiss, describes this as "the most damaging aspect of the novel".
Death Guard heats up when a training cadre of the Brothers accidentally slaughter a village in the Congo. The world suddenly discovers the British government paying for the production of a super soldier in clear violation of disarmament pacts (which seem to be in force). The combined Continental European powers send a detachment of soldiers to shut down the research facility in the Congo, but the force is wiped out. By this stage, the company responsible for the creation of the Brothers has already relocated most of it's spawn to Britain. Threats begin flowing across the channel and war is imminent.
A lot of next section of the novel is given over to Beldite's observations as a supervisor in his grandfather's factory where the Brothers are being processed. There's a particular gruesome scene where an office worker is gutted by one of the creatures when, for sport, the plant decides to turn a Brother named "Bloody Omega" loose on a cow. The author may have shown his own sympathies by making a pacifist one of the major characters in this section.
When war comes, it shrieks down on Britain from the sky. Chadwick did have a bit of foresight in showing how air warfare would change the nature of combat. Although the Death Guard repels the Continentals' landing, the landscape is devastated by dive bombers, which the author terms "bomb-pluggers". Chadwick envisioned small bombers attacking the ground from a flying mother ship.
Across Britain, workers are in revolt and the country continues to be blasted from the air. Famine is everywhere. The Brothers are a lethal force against the enemy, but they have to be destroyed immediately after deployment. They cannot distinguish human friend from foe, so the army has to deploy tanks in the rear of every Guard detachment. The Brothers who survive the engagement are blasted apart from the rear. And starvation brings about the worst thing imaginable: spores. Since the Brothers are more plant than animal, they reproduce as they decompose. Soon, the battlefields are covered with tiny Death Guards, who will grow up to be stunted, but still deadly, adults.
And then Beldite learns of the British government's plans to launch Death Guard into Europe.....
The Death Guard is not a short book; my copy runs close to 400 pages. It's frighting and not easy to put down. If not for it's incidental racism, the book would probably have a larger following.
July 11, 2013
Politics: Like H.G. Wells, the author was a socialist, which is apparent in the attention given to the changes of social structure under the extreme conditions imagined. Sort of wishful for a disaster that would create the conditions for revolutionary social upheaval. The protagonist is an everyman embedded in the various stages of the material production of war: scientific research, manufacture, the trenches, parliamentary politics...
Closest kin: Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety."
Closest kin: Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety."
March 26, 2020
It's not often I give up on a book, but this one defeated me. Initially I liked the language and languid pace, however I began to struggle with the sentence construction and the weird language of the experts and other workers. By page 150 I began to wonder why I was torturing myself and reluctantly gave up. Even the events that might have been significant were so drawn out and dull, all tension and drama overwhelmed by the language and lack of pace. Disappointed in myself as I wanted to appreciate the books theme, but feeling that there are more pleasurable ways to spend my time!
July 2, 2017
_The Death Guard_ is an apocalyptic science-fiction story akin in style to H.G. Wells' _The War of the Worlds_ or John Wyndham's _The Day of the Triffids_ -- set in a Britain still considering itself the pinnacle of civilisation, but dealing with themes of invasion and downfall caused both by a superior external force and the internal corruption of society. In the case of _The Death Guard_, the theme is biological warfare of a kind quite different to what that phrase means today.
In Chadwick's imagination, the horrors of war lead one brilliant man to invent a way for no man to ever have to physically fight again, creating artificial life which can take the place of soldiers. A neat concept for the time, though my modern imagination is somewhat disappointed that early references to biological killing machines peter out into vaguely zombie-like humanoid blobs. Yet, as you can predict, it doesn't exactly go well for those who would employ these beasts.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the novel is the continued reference to internationally-based peace movements, whose political clout is significant enough to force the initial design and construction of these war machines underground. That political force, that war-weariness, means that a conspiracy of the first order is required to conjure up a war for the biological horrors to be employed in, and seems to reflect in a way the post-WWII ebb in warmongering.
_The Death Guard_ is considered something of a lost classic, and I'd certainly agree that it should take its place among the more famous tales I referenced before. Beyond the super-soldiers, the story delves into esoteric electrified gas, the politics of war and the environmental aftershocks of it. A science-fiction story with some depth.
April 5, 2018
Genuinely one the three best "catastrophic future war" novels that I've ever read, "The Death Guard" has languished in relative obscurity for the better part of eighty years.
Controversial in its time (it was originally published on the eve of WWII and has long been believed to be the victim of an official suppression order issued by a government that was afraid that its dystopian vision would prove detrimental to the morale of a country on an imminent war footing), and to this day (given the sheer gay abandon with which abhorrent racial epithets which were considered quite common in the thirties are thrown around), TDG is unerringly prophetic in some respects and horribly wide of the mark in others; but its insights into how countries are manipulated into wars by the unscrupulous, as well as those who ultimately and inadvertently end up serving the interests of the butcher's yard for the best possible reasons, remain both timeless and prescient. Its haunting vistas of a lugubrious, sectarian Britain broken and bastardized by war, industrialization and internecine politicking are easily the equal of anything conjured by HG Wells; and the vignettes of the Northern countryside succumbing to the brutal iron-shod hoof-prints of the relentless, eyeless "Death Guard" and their spawn (the polymorphous "neoblast"), recall the best of the likes of Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.
"The Death Guard" is an overlooked masterpiece that must surely be ripe for rediscovery and republishing by the likes of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series or another enterprising publisher.
Controversial in its time (it was originally published on the eve of WWII and has long been believed to be the victim of an official suppression order issued by a government that was afraid that its dystopian vision would prove detrimental to the morale of a country on an imminent war footing), and to this day (given the sheer gay abandon with which abhorrent racial epithets which were considered quite common in the thirties are thrown around), TDG is unerringly prophetic in some respects and horribly wide of the mark in others; but its insights into how countries are manipulated into wars by the unscrupulous, as well as those who ultimately and inadvertently end up serving the interests of the butcher's yard for the best possible reasons, remain both timeless and prescient. Its haunting vistas of a lugubrious, sectarian Britain broken and bastardized by war, industrialization and internecine politicking are easily the equal of anything conjured by HG Wells; and the vignettes of the Northern countryside succumbing to the brutal iron-shod hoof-prints of the relentless, eyeless "Death Guard" and their spawn (the polymorphous "neoblast"), recall the best of the likes of Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.
"The Death Guard" is an overlooked masterpiece that must surely be ripe for rediscovery and republishing by the likes of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series or another enterprising publisher.
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April 2, 2018This was the fourth or fifth time I've read the book since it was re-published in the 90s.
The message of this book is as chillingly poignant today as when it was written in the inter-war period, as long as you can see past the racial attitudes of the time.
The message of this book is as chillingly poignant today as when it was written in the inter-war period, as long as you can see past the racial attitudes of the time.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews