6/30/2023 0 Comments The Cross of Carl by Walter Owen![]() ![]() He is treading on bodies on which his feet slip and blunder. "Might as well be Hell 50." Although Owen's prose, especially at its most allegorical, is occasionally somewhat convoluted, it can also be inventively poetic, and the advance on the hill is a tour de force of horror: Carl, an overweight rookie whose nationality is never specified, goes over the top in a dawn attack on Hill 50: "you'll never get there," his sergeant says laconically. The story's four sections are titled after stages in the passion and resurrection of Christ. Under the drug's influence, in July 1917 he had a form of out-of-body experience in which he simultaneously experienced and observed the events described in the story. According to his own prefatory note, Owen was prevented from taking part in the Great War by a painful illness, the symptoms of which he attempted to alleviate with opium. The translator was born in Glasgow, and the book refers at one point to a "Balclutha of the soul", Balclutha being derived from the Scots Gaelic for "town on the Clyde". ![]() ![]() The author is described in General Ian Hamilton's preface as "a man of business in the Argentine", so presumably he was the Scots translator and stockbroker who "transvernacularised" the South American epics into English. A self-avowed allegory published in 1931, The Cross of Carl was written by one Walter Owen. ![]()
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