Mars in Aries

The novel draws its disturbing quality from an intimate interlacing of precisely described authentic combat episodes with a concept of a pervasive Otherworld that merges with our reality in a way that makes it difficult to determine whether one has already transgressed its borders.

As Count Wallmoden,[2] an Austrian World War I veteran and lieutenant of the reserve, readies himself for a four-week military exercise which is scheduled to start on August 15, 1939, he experiences the first of several derealization episodes.

Later, during an idle evening spent in talk with his fellow officers, as the discussion touches on the topic of spiritism, his regimental commander half-jokingly promises Wallmoden that whenever they meet he would indicate whether he is still alive or already dead because that might not be immediately apparent to a living person.

Motorized night marches take them through Jedenspeigen (where Walmoden has a lucid dream of two young women bathing in the room he is sleeping in) and across Slovakia (at this time, a Nazi puppet state) to Trstená at the Slovak-Polish border.

As the regiment prepares to attack Jabłonka at first morning light he witnesses an eastward migration of thousands of crabs, a phenomenon apparently not perceived or ignored by his comrades—and clearly a symbol for the German war machine.

However, the Nazi Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda frowned upon the story (which lacks all celebration of "Germanic heroism" in spite of its extensive illustrations of the total Polish defeat, and hints at anti-Nazi resistance) and refused the publishing permit.