The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor

With some of the men, Lieutenant Pope had lost his authority; with others, his claim to their loyalty.  Among the N.C.O.s he had lost respect.  It had come about in small ways, with a word or an action, most of them forgotten until another came, reminding them.  No one disliked him; to be disliked, a man must have a character of a kind; in Pope, even that was lacking.

As followers of my twitter feed are aware, the wife and I go to many antique malls, flea markets and thrift shops.  At just such a place years ago I picked up a copy of Bantam A1835, The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor, who, wikipedia is telling me, was a prolific writer of mystery, espionage and children's books under various noms de plume.  One of my on-again-off-again interests is British military history, so the purported topic of the novel, British tank crewmen fighting in Northwest Europe, appealed to me.  It looks like Trevor served in the Second World War, but in the Royal Air Force, not the British Army, so does he know a lot about tank warfare and the Normandy campaign?  Who knows?  Let's check it out regardless as a break from the voodoo and space alien stories that make up so much of our diet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  If we like this thing, Trevor has plenty of books for us to read including what look like crime/horror stories about an evil brother and sister and an evil nun praised by Robert Bloch and a gothic romance lauded by Mary Higgins Clark.

The Killing Ground has nine unnumbered chapters; this novel is episodic, and each chapter is almost like a complete short story that can stand its own.  The first, The Sea, introduces us to the crews of two troops of C Squadron as they ride a landing craft to the beach at Normandy.  (Each troop consists of three Churchill Mark 7 tanks; the entire Squadron totals eighteen tanks.  Each tank has a crew of five.)  Each of the soldiers has his own particular character trait; this guy is religious and prays, that guy is thinking about his wife, this one is thinking about a system for betting on the horses, that one loves to play cards, this officer feels inadequate because he hasn't seen action yet and other members of his troop fought in the Mediterranean, etc.  This novel doesn't really have a central character, but rather a large ensemble cast, and depicts human relationships but little--each character seems very self-contained.  War stories are often about camaraderie (the relationships of fighting men to each other) and/or the weight of command (the relationship between an officer and his subordinates) but the men in The Killing Ground are isolated, and we spend a lot of time in their heads examining their inner lives rather than observing conversations between them.  This is a result of, or symbolized by, how often the soldiers in the book are told to be quiet lest they reveal their positions to Jerry or clog up the radio network with pointless chatter, how often the sound of gunfire makes conversation impossible, and how often dust and smoke and the dark of night obscure vision.

A main theme of this first chapter is how rough the Channel is and how over half the tankers are sea sick.  I found the best part of the chapter to be the description of the bombardment by Royal Navy warships of the French coast as perceived by the tankers, the sound, the smoke; also good is the description of the fire from the German 88mm guns ashore and the fate of some of the smaller British craft, hit by mines or enemy fire, or stuck on obstacles.  Trevor is good at visual details, throughout the novel painting vivid pictures of the movement of dust and smoke and all the little detritus on the surface of the water and littering the battlefield.

In The Beach, our guys are on the shore exchanging fire with German anti-tank guns in concrete emplacements, with machine gun nests, with a lone M. E. 109; they even blast an enemy artillery observer in a ruined villa.  All around them MPs, sappers and infantry men are subject to a rain of bullets and mortar rounds.  The tank commanders keep jumping out of their vehicles to grenade an enemy position or retrieve some item, and we get lots of descriptions of wreckage and dead bodies and people trying to aid the wounded.

The Land, our third chapter, has the tankers advancing through a little town, then trading shots with Germans who are deployed on a ridge, and then immobile and inactive as they endure an artillery barrage.  This chapter is the least satisfying in the novel, as I was skeptical about many details of the German artillery barrage.  For example, a German shell lands every six minutes, like clockwork, and the tank crewmen can not only predict when it will arrive by looking at their watches but hear it coming.  One round every six minutes seems like a pretty low rate of fire, especially if the gun firing on them is an 88mm as they suspect, and I had thought artillery shells (not mortar bombs, which move relatively slowly) traveled too fast for you to hear them before they got to you.  Also, the officers decide the men should leave their tanks and take cover nearby, even though they haven't dug any trenches--wouldn't you be safer from blast and from shell fragments if you were inside a heavily armored vehicle like the Churchill?  There's also a lot of business with the men griping that HQ won't let them move their tanks or shoot back, even though they were shooting back earlier, and anyway, how could they shoot back if this is indirect fire from behind the ridge?  Maybe they want to drive up the ridge?  The drama of this chapter works, but it is a little hard to tell what is going on and easy to doubt the chapter's realism.  

Singing Drunk takes place a week later, at night, as C squadron rests a half mile away from German positions.  The men hear someone, obviously drunk, singing loudly between them and the enemy.  Thinking the drunk one of their fellows, some of the British soldiers go out to try to rescue this guy, only to find he is a German willing to be taken prisoner.  The drunk German doesn't make it back to British lines alive, as a British lieutenant, Pope, mows him down with a Bren gun.  There isn't a lot of plot that carries over from episode to episode in The Killing Ground, but one plot strand is how Pope is changed by the experience of battle--his subordinates thought him a "right sort" back in Blighty, but here in France they lose respect for him as he grows corrupt and unsteady under stress.

The Start-line begins with a veteran noncom (in his own mind) assessing Pope, suggesting that the lieutenant killed the German prisoner in a panic and that courage is a finite resource and Lieutenant Pope is expending his and will soon suffer a total collapse.  It is a month since the landings and the British are going to launch a carefully prepared Corps-level assault on hardened German veterans; the first part of this chapter is a briefing given by a major to the tank commanders about the coming operation.  The second part is the start of the attack, a British artillery barrage followed by the advance of the British tanks into a German barrage.

Not Far to Where? picks up immediately after the previous chapter as C Squadron's Churchill tanks drive forward, negotiating mine fields, enduring fire from Nebelwerfers, and facing ambush by self-propelled guns.  Flail tanks and flamethrowing tanks of another squadron lead the way, blasting open a path for our characters to follow.  Our cast gets bogged down and here, half way through the book, we get some flashbacks to some of the characters' earlier lives that flesh out their personalities and help explain their behavior here on the battlefield.  For example, Pope had a distant relationship with his father and he feels he has no roots and so all through his academic and military careers he has been trying, without success, to build a stable identity for himself.  Pope, taking a walk outside his tank, encounters an injured man and helps him--this event has a remarkable, perhaps beneficial, effect on Pope's character.

Moonrise is a long chapter that focuses on one of the tank crews we've been following since the first chapter; these guys have gotten themselves lost behind enemy lines and now their tank has broken down.  Trevor does a good job describing their efforts to remain concealed at night and deal with the German armored vehicles that eventually show up.  An entertaining action chapter, more focused and less impressionistic than the earlier battle scenes and with a more traditional plot in which the characters face obstacles and strive to overcome them and in which Trevor provides a climax.

Three weeks later, in Peace, C squadron is resting some miles from the front lines, the men sleeping and banging French chicks.  One of the men who survived the against-overwhelming-odds engagement in Moonrise returns to the squadron from hospital--he survived because he ran away from the fight, and was in hospital for psychiatric reasons.  He lies about what he did in the fight--will he be found out?  A theme of this chapter is guilt, that felt by this liar and by the entire squadron as they rest, aware that their comrades in other units are fighting and dying while they are enjoying themselves, as well as the guilt felt by one of the tankers who has been having sex with a local teenaged girl--she has fallen in love with him and is heartbroken when the squadron has to return to the front line, and she makes him promise to return and take her away with him to England, something he has no intention of doing.

The final chapter is The Battering-ram.  C Squadron participates in the attack on the town of Falaise, taking part in the assault on a village that is a suburb of that town.  In the fighting between the British Churchills and the German armored vehicles and machine guns emplacements all of the squadron's tanks are knocked out but several of our characters survive, and live to hear that Falaise has fallen.  There is a measure of triumph in this chapter, as we see B Squadron and infantry exploit the opening made by the now devastated C Squadron and the surviving C Squadron tankers cheering them on and then participating in mopping up operations (in particular hunting snipers.)  The final paragraphs of the chapter and the book suggest Pope has learned how to be a good officer and has regained the respect of those of his subordinates who have survived and he will soon be issued a new tank and continue fighting the Germans.

But this final chapter also has lots of man's-inhumanity-to-man business.  There is a lot of talk of "taking no prisoners."  Some of the more fanatical Nazis refuse to surrender, and some wounded Germans even reject medical aid so the British leave them to die or even finish them off.  The British troops discover some Germans hanging from nooses--they obviously died by hanging and have not hanged themselves, so must have been murdered, hanged at gunpoint in an act of vengeance.  It is strongly implied that a Jewish member of C Squadron, a refugee from Germany, has committed these murders.

The Killing Ground is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, with many striking and memorable images, and some good action scenes.  As I have described, there are limitations when it comes to the plot and characters, but this seems like an artistic choice rather than a blunder, Trevor sacrificing the narrative tools of conventional entertainment in an effort to portray the haphazard nature and isolation of our real lives, characteristics of life more starkly evident in wartime.  If you are looking for a novel in which you get to care about a main character who appears on every page as he determines the curse of the plot and faces and overcomes obstacles you may be disappointed--several characters in The Killing Ground have little arcs in which they grow over time, but each of them only appears here and there, every so often, and their personalities are too flawed and their adventures are too distressing for you to really enjoy spending time with them.

The Killing Ground is good enough that I probably will read something else by Trevor; stay tuned.

Edmond Hamilton: "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror," and "The Invisible Master"

Though it feels like just yesterday, it was back in June that George of the popular GeorgeKelley.org blog provided us the table of contents of Armchair Fiction's Masters of Science Fiction Volume 17: Edmond Hamilton, Golden Age Wizard.  We've read quite a bit of Hamilton's vast body of work here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's look at the list of stories in this 2025 collection and see which of them we've already digested and then try to fill in some of the gaps!

"Under the White Star"

"When the World Slept"

"Liline, The Moon Girl"

"The Moon Menace"

"The Free-Lance of Space"

"Short-Wave Madness"

"The Man Who Lived Twice"

"The Might-Have-Been"

"The Conqueror's Voice"

"Intelligence Undying"

"The Dimension Terror"

"The Man Who Solved Death"

"No-Man's-Land of Time"

"The Invisible Master"

Wow, of these 14 stories, I think I have only read three, "When the World Slept," "The Man Who Lived Twice" and "The Might-Have-Been"!  (Links to my posts about them above in the list.)  It looks like Armchair Fiction was going for the deep cuts!  Well, let's get started filling in those gaps by reading three of the earlier Hamilton stories represented in Golden Age Wizard, "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror," and "The Invisible Master."

"The Moon Menace" (1927)

Here we have a story from our beloved Weird Tales, printed during a period not yet covered by our ambitious Weird Tales project.  This issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine includes a story by August Derleth that I will perhaps read some day, "The Turret Room," and a note in the letters column from Derleth praising illustrator Hugh Rankin.  Rankin is no Virgil Finlay or Hannes Bok, but, you know, tastes differ.    

"The Moon Menace" is one of Hamilton's disaster stories that feels like a popular history article from a book or magazine of the future.  Other examples include "A Conquest of Two Worlds," "The Polar Doom," and "The Life-Masters."  Our tale begins with a description of the world famous scientist and inventor Gilbert, a recluse who has kept out of academia and based his career on developing marketable products, thereby amassing huge profits, and sinking those profits into further private research.  In mid-career, he claims from his Adirondack lab to have, in the course of developing television, accidentally made contact with people on the Moon!  Gilbert schedules a dramatic presentation of his astonishing discoveries at a New York City forum, but when the date rolls around Gilbert does not appear and the world denounces the scientist as a fraud.

Soon after, a weird and terrible disaster strikes our world!  The entire planet Earth goes dark--nobody can see anything but blackness, even though the heat from the sun's rays or from a fire can still be felt, and such devices as radios still operate normally.  Hamilton proffers us a catalog of disasters that result from universal blindness, car crashes and lootings and so forth, and a solid adventure/horror sequence about a man who walks several blocks in Manhattan, feeling his way home to his apartment.

We learn the answer to the mystery of why the inventor ghosted the public and why Earth is shrouded in darkness via a scene of expository dialogue featuring Gilbert and his friend Manning, who was on his way to see the great man and just miles away when fell the black veil of endless night.  You see, via television, Gilbert made friends with the ugly people who live in caves under the lunar surface, members of an ancient race whose technology is far beyond ours.  The moon men taught him how to build a teleportation receiver.  When he had achieved this feat, the loonies teleported over and took over the lab, murdering the scientist's servants and assistant with ray guns.  When Gilbert opened a door to escape, one of the moon men was killed by sunlight.  The scientist has been hiding in the woods, observing the loonies as, clad in anti-sun armor, they built a big machine and finally activated it, dampening all light in the spectrum we humans can see.  (The moon bastards can see via ultra-violet light the machine does not smother.)  Now the moon men are constructing a deluxe teleportation receiver so they can import undocumented migrants wholesale and conquer this big blue marble we call home!

  

Gilbert has two pairs of spectacles that confer on the human wearer the ability to see in the ultraviolet spectrum, so he and Manning are able to approach the machinery with the aim of sabotaging it.  Here's an example of Hamilton's fun adventure/horror story writing.

They were the moon men, as Gilbert had described them, dark, plump, like overripe fungi near to bursting, monstrous flipper-people whose appearance was rendered even more ghastly by the thin violet light by which he saw them.

The human sneak attack does not work out; Manning gets captured and tied up, though Gilbert manages to flee.  Manning watches as millions of the flipper-people teleport in and build pre-fab aircraft and walking tanks with which to take over a defenseless Earth.  But then Gilbert launches a second attempt and gets in a fire fight with the guards of the light-dampener machine.  Gilbert's legs are disintegrated by a ray gun, but, as he lies on the ground dying, with his last breath he shoots the light-neutralizing machine, wrecking it.  All the millions of loonies are killed by sunlight (should have kept that armor on, dummies) and the Earth is saved. 

A fun story with the science lectures we expect from old timey science fiction and the mayhem we expect from Weird Tales.  In 1967 Robert Lowndes reprinted "The Moon Menace" in his magazine Famous Science Fiction, and you can also find it in Haffner Press' 2009 The Metal Giants and Others, the first volume of their Collected Edmond Hamilton series.

"The Dimension Terror" (1928)

Numerous times in his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft complained that Hamilton used the same plots again and again, and we find that "The Dimension Terror" is quite like "The Moon Menace" in structure, form and content; I do think, however, that this summer '28 take is slightly better than the earlier story.

As "The Dimension Terror" begins we are introduced to a sort of renegade scientist who abandons academia, a man brilliant but afflicted with a temper and a tendency to make extravagant claims; this guy, Graham, is like a variation on the Gilbert of "The Moon Menace."  Graham posits that other worlds or universes must coexist with ours, in much the same space as ours but separated from ours across a fifth dimension.  This concept can be found in lots of SF stories, but I think Hamilton comes up with a better way of explaining the phenomena than we see in most of them.  Imagine a shelf or a pedestal; you put Item A on it, then take it off, and put on the shelf Item B.  These two items occupy the same space three dimensionally, but are separated by a fourth dimension, time.  Graham not only theorizes that other worlds occupy the same first four dimensions as ours and are only distinct from ours across a fifth dimension, but claims that he knows how to get to one of them!  Then he disappears.

Soon after his Gilbert's disappearance, a disaster strikes Earth that kills millions of people.  In "The Moon Menace," Hamilton introduced an ancillary character to serve as the protagonist during the description of the disaster, and then had Gilbert's friend Manning take over the main character role for the narrative of how the disaster was resolved.  In "The Dimension Terror," Hamilton has Graham's assistant and only friend, Harron, fulfill both roles.  This economy in use of characters is one reason that "The Dimension Terror" is superior to "The Moon Menace."

Harron is on the southern tip of Manhattan when all the steel and iron in the world abruptly vanishes!  All of Gotham's skyscrapers collapse, ships in the harbor sink, aircraft fall from the sky and automobiles fall apart.  Hamilton goes to town describing the piles of rubble that are all that is left of the greatest city in the world and how people go insane in response to the sudden unheralded cataclysm.  Harron decides to march north across Manhattan, a treacherous journey over hills of stones and bricks, and, by a remarkable coincidence, the one guy he runs into in the ruins of a city that was home to millions is Graham.

Graham describes how he caused the disaster which has destroyed our civilization.  Some weeks ago he discovered that our universe touches a neighboring universe at one point, like two spheres touching.  (Does this metaphor jive with the metaphor of the items on a shelf?  Um, I don't know.)  That point is in a remote swamp on Long Island.  Graham took a lot of apparatus there and tried to detect precisely where the two worlds met and see if he could send electrical signals or sound waves to the other world.  Amazingly, he made contact with people in that other universe! 

The aliens explained to Graham how to build a ray projector that would allow movement between the universes.  (To work, such a projector had to be activated on both sides of the contact point at the same time.  Plotwise, this is a lot like the teleporter system in "The Moon Menace," and of course thematically both remind us of the idea that a vampire cannot cross your threshold uninvited.)  Graham built and activated the projector at the time appointed and a dozen hideous insect-men marched onto Long Island, tying Graham up and immediately putting into action their plans to conquer our planet and colonize it, theirs being overpopulated.  The bugmen built the machine that would transform all iron on Earth into hydrogen; their occupation with this job provided Graham a chance to escape.

Graham and Harron make their way back to the contact point in the marshes of Long Island and manage to sabotage the ray projector, causing an explosion that shuts down all travel between the two worlds and also kills all the insect men and Graham.  Harron survives, and so does the machine that turned all of the iron in the world to hydrogen gas.  Reminding us 21st-century readers of Rahm Emmanuel, who told us to never let a serious crisis go to waste but use it to reshape society in ways people would resist in stable times, Graham told Harron that the machine used by the insect men to change iron to hydrogen could be used to create more iron or any other element and give man the ability to "build up a new and fairer world."  So you see, Graham's renegade meddling may have killed hundreds of millions of people, but we should thank him as we have less income inequality!  Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?

A variation on the themes of "The Moon Menace," but the beetle-like aliens are cooler, the scientist who causes the cataclysm and then dies in the process of saving the day has a little more personality--and then there is the questionable political angle--making this a meatier and more flavorful story.  

Like "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror" was reprinted in the Hafner volume The Metal Giants and Others.

"The Invisible Master" (1930)

We're taking our leave of Weird Tales for a little while to read a story from a Hugo Gernsback magazine, Scientific Detective Monthly.  It looks like "The Invisible Master"'s reappearance in Armchair Fiction's Edmond Hamilton, Golden Age Wizard--almost a century after its initial publication!--is its first ever reprint.

They say one should write what he knows, and I guess that is why so many of the stories we read have as their protagonists a writer.  The main character of "The Invisible Master"'s third-person narrative is Carston, a reporter with a New York newspaper, who is sent by his editor to a university in Manhattan to meet a physicist, Grantham, who claims to have achieved invisibility.  Carston himself doesn't do a hell of a lot, mostly just observes.  "The Invisible Master," as we might have guessed considering the venue it debuted in, is structured like a detective mystery story, with lots of suspects and victims and crimes and a final scene in which a police detective explains how he figured out whodunit.  There is also a bunch of science lectures (as I've told you a hundred times, old timey science fiction editors and writers really wanted to use fiction as a tool for teaching people science and getting people excited about how science could improve the life of the individual and of society, though you should feel free to object that half the stories we read seem to be about how science is going to kill everybody), and an ambitious and (to me at least) surprising twist ending.     

Grantham the scientist and his assistant Gray demonstrate to Carston and other assembled journalos  their invisibility device by making a paperweight invisible and then visible again.  That evening the reporters and the university president and the police assemble because Grantham was knocked out by some person unknown and both Gray and a backpack-sized invisibility device that can render a man invisible have disappeared!  A note is found, addressed to the recovering Grantham--it seems to be in Gray's handwriting and is signed "The Invisible Master" and its text suggests the person who stole the invisibility device is going to use it to terrorize New York City.  

Hamilton describes the three sensational crimes that follow in some detail--a bank and two different businesses suffer robberies, and several people are murdered with firearms.  We learn about these crimes from the point of view of Carston; they are not "on screen."  Physicist Grantham, police dick Wade (who chews gum) and the university president all get screen time; unfortunately, none of these characters is very interesting.  It is theorized that Gray is the Invisible Master and is trying to collect money to conduct research, he being, apparently, some kind of technocrat leftist who thinks the money society spends on luxuries should instead be devoted to the kind of life-improving scientific research he himself wants to perform.  Sure enough, after the third murderous robbery a letter from the Invisible Master arrives at the mayor's office, demanding five million dollars be left in a specific spot in Long Island.  

In fiction, private citizens always end up being at the center of police operations and Grantham and Carston are there out on the Island when the money is dropped off on top of a boulder near a tree near a mile marker.  Elaborate efforts to catch the Invisible Master fail and the money is lost.

Then Wade solves the case and we find Hamilton has sprung upon us an audacious surprise ending and that "The Invisible Master" is not only a science fiction story that speculates about optics and sight, but about human psychology!  You see, there is no Invisible Master, and there is no invisibility device!  Grantham and Gray hoaxed the entire thing!  Those three robberies were committed by unscrupulous people who then blamed them on the Invisible Master, in whom they, like everybody else, believed!  Grantham and Gray knew enough psychology to know people would believe them because of their credentials, and knew evil people would take advantage of the Invisible Master scare to commit crimes that would, in a vicious cycle, generate more fear, and that that fear would lead the government and business leaders to knuckle under to threats and demands for money.  (Gray didn't know Grantham well enough to predict the physicist would murder his assistant and dissolve his body in acid.)  

This is a pretty cynical story, portraying both elites and the masses as evil or cowardly (though recent events around coronavirus, George Floyd mania and transsexual mania seem to bear out this bleak assessment) but has a sort of soft spot for the police and delivers a message about the value of systematic routine.  Though he was facing extraordinary circumstances, Wade followed the routine procedures used in ordinary police work, and this mundane practice produced the facts that cracked the case and brought the villain to justice and liberated the Big Apple from a reign of terror.  I guess it is in the spirit of old-fashioned science fiction and detective fiction to remind readers that you achieve success by plodding away, dotting all the "i"s and crossing all the "t"s, methodically following all the rules and best practices.  

While reading this story I mostly found it kind of dull, but the twist ending is so surprising I have to admire it, and the story's ideology is sort of interesting if not romantic or life-affirming.  We'll call "The Invisible Master" mildly recommendable.

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Three stories on the theme of scientific breakthroughs causing disasters, though the third story's breakthrough is a hoax and the scientist in question is not unwittingly putting the populace in danger but deliberately doing so.  While about science, and trying to teach you science, the story encourages skepticism of actual scientists and suggests that scientific advances can come at a terrible cost.

Lots more Edmond Hamilton and Weird Tales lie in the future for MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be taking a break from speculative fiction for our next blog post.