Zombie war stories are a staple of the horror genre. In the cinema, there are the Dead Snow movies, Overlord, and Frankenstein’s Army. In video games, the Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, and Sniper Elite series are wildly popular, and in comics the European Theater of the Damned anthology is prime undead action.
But did you know the Germans once actually fought zombies and fled in terror? Well, okay, not actual undead zombies, but close enough!
On August 6, 1915, World War 1 was in full swing and a fierce battle was raging in Poland between the Germans and Russians. The Russians were defending Osowiec Fortress and putting up stiff resistance, having already fended off two German attack waves.
The German command realized they couldn’t win a straight fight, so they decided to play dirty. Knowing the Russians didn’t have masks, they proceeded to bombard their positions with gas shells. Shell after shell was fired into the area, cloaking it in a poisonous eight-mile square pea-green cloud of chlorine and bromine.
Weapons and equipment rusted. Leaves fell from trees and burnt away. Birds plummeted from the sky. And the men? Three Russian companies were instantly annihilated, their skin sloughing away, their lungs dissolving, their uniforms melting onto their twitching bodies. Of the 800-strong garrison, only 100 men were left.
The Germans sensed victory, donned their gas masks, and advanced. They expected little resistance, the poison having done the dirty work of finishing off their adversaries. Perhaps they might have expected to expend a few bullets with “mercy” killings, but winning this battle should have been as simple as clearing away the bodies and seizing the territory.
The Russians took this personally
Then “they” came. Somehow, within the mist, movement! To the Germans’ horror someone… some-thing… had survived. In jerky, painful motions, what was left of the Russians was still somehow shambling towards them – men determined not to die without dragging a German to hell with them.
They advanced with uniforms soaked with blood, emitting ungodly wet moans, chunks of half-dissolved lung falling from their ruined lips with every exhalation, drooling hydrochloric acid. But, in defiance of God’s law and man’s science, they advanced!
The Germans promptly freaked out at the sight of these walking corpses still grimly clutching their corroded rifles. Mass panic broke out, and the Germans sprinted away. In their terror, they blundered into their own barbed wire traps, squealing helplessly as the monstrous half-dead Russians notched up one last kill before their deteriorating bodies collapsed.
Then, from behind the mutilated horde, the *kaboom* of artillery. The Russian cannons began bombarding the German positions, forcing them into full retreat. Spurred on, the grisly Russian survivors fixed bayonets and launched into one last desperate charge. Now practically blind, the wet squelch of their blades piercing German intestines would be the last thing many of them would hear.
The Germans were routed. The Russians victorious. It went down in history as “The Battle of the Dead Men”, won by a battalion too damn stubborn to let a little thing like death slow them down.
