F. Britten Austin (1885–1941)

Originally copyrighted in 1917, thus written while the War had another year to go. Yet when you reach the last chapter entitled "Peace", you find the Germans have lost the War and when the demustered troops arrive home, they find the citizens rioting against the government because of the lack of work and lack of food. Austin appears to have been a prophet.
Apparently, he concludes a number of his books by prophesying the future in the last chapter.
The novel is not a novel in the tradition sense. Each chapter describes how the war is impacting German soldiers. The soldiers in each chapter are different and we never meet them in a subsequent chapter. One reason for this is that many of them die. By using this method, Austin is able to illustrate the affects of different aspects of the war on the German troops. One example is the the day the Germans see their first British tank. One chapter describes conditions in a submarine. Another what it was like to be in a Zeppelin on a raid over London.
The chapter entitled "The Iron Cross" tells us of an incident on the Russian front where the German soldiers discover they are fighting Russian women. I know Russian women fought on the front lines in WW II particularly in the air force but I had not heard of this in WW I. However research has confirmed several battalions of women were formed to shame the despondent male soldiers into fighting again. The first one was called the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death and this Battalion is the one we meet in Austin's account.
For the most part, this is very readable if one overlooks the jingoism of a British writer writing about a war that is endangering his country as he writes.… (mais)