The Wild Bunch

Groups of deserters during the Great War, caught in no man's land or in the mountains, forests and deserts of various fronts - rejected their previous loyalties and, indulging in their madness, plunged into robbery and cannibalism. Completely freeing themselves from the constraints of national affiliation, religious instructions and good manners, fanatically united in their evil - members of different armies fraternized on two grounds.

The first was that typical deserter story where frightened and disappointed young men decided to try to survive without much fuss, hiding together with yesterday's enemies whom they knew through the sight, optical or mechanical. And the second... that was the above-described group of rabid deranged freaks, determined to take revenge on all of humanity, to tear off all fig leaves, to trample on all norms, to kill all that tragic naivety that had put them there, in holes covered with a thin layer of yellowish Sarin. Through the clouds of Chlorine, among the corpses whose eyeholes were being gnawed by rats - it was not difficult to achieve a radical change in perception.

Spiritually destroyed by suffering, perhaps more prone to madness than the rest, or just as a sublimation of general madness in its purest form, these former soldiers butchered wounded ex-colleagues and made simple culinary specialties out of them. Before that, they were thoroughly deprived of all possible material possessions, no matter how modest.

They did not limit themselves to that, but also attacked civilians, farms and oases, shepherds and goatherds, travelers and vagabonds. On the edges of all fronts, small but impressive groups of Wild People thrived, shadows in the fog, panic in the eyes of the recruit who had just arrived at the front who heard nervous whispers among the older soldiers about how the painful screams of the wounded Guillaume or Gary or Gennady or Gunther were interrupted by a few dull blows in the distance, and the stench of roasted human flesh occupied a place in the soldier's mind that nothing could drive out, until judgment day.

(Roger Mortis, 149)