The Cyborg Soldier of the First World War

Created from the bodies of war-wounded soldiers for an unnamed emperor, the first modern cyborg, Soldier 241, appears in a one-act play, Blood and Iron, published in the Strand Magazine in October 1917. Like the invention of the robot three years later in 1920, the cyborg was a product of modern warfare. It was also a rare anti-war statement, challenging British law as, to prevent war from continuing, Soldier 241 kills his commanding officer at the end. This remarkable work has been available to casual browsers through back issues of the Strand for nearly a century, and it is listed on at least two collectors’ websites and John Clute’s online SF Encyclopaedia. Coincidentally, this issue of the Strand is available for open access viewing on a website of digitised newspapers and magazines, which also contains the first publication of works by Joseph Conrad (conradfirst.net), yet it has never been properly studied before. New research reveals that its remarkable anti-war message, delivered just after the entry of the United States into the First World War, is a reflection of public anguish. Huge numbers of men were returning from the Western Front with permanent, debilitating injuries, and the public were getting nervous about the speed of unstoppable wartime scientific advances: chlorine gas in 1915, the tank in 1916 and unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917.

Soldier 241 is ‘fifty per cent human, fifty per cent machine’, with enhanced physical capabilities. He was made using ‘a million cripples’, who are now ‘transformed into a million fighting units’. He has artificial body parts, super-strength hands, telescopic eyes and gold teeth, all the better to bite barbed wire with. He was a nightmare vision of how war-damaged soldiers could be restored to complete fighting capability: ‘From a shattered bleeding wreck of no value to humanity I have made him into an efficient man’, says his creator, the Scientist. His repellent attitudes to disabled servicemen nonetheless produce a sympathetic character, the first cyborg in modern culture, whose lineage would reappear in the Terminator films by James Cameron from 1984 and Imperator Furiosa, from the 2015 film, Mad Max: Fury Road.

The term ‘cybernetic organism’, abbreviated soon after to ‘cyborg’, was invented by the scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960. A cyborg is not an automated, mechanical figure but a human who has been enhanced with artificial mechanisms to be stronger and faster. The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman were a 1970s’ television vision of cyborgs as militarised secret agents. In Blood and Iron, Soldier 241 is much more crudely and explicitly mechanised, moving awkwardly, yet he, too, is under military orders. He is also no longer simply human. Like an automaton, ‘his speech is laboured’, yet Soldier 241 is an intelligent, reasoning individual, using biblical quotations to show the Emperor the immorality of war. He is also a humanitarian: he tells the Emperor that women are lonely due to the absence of their husbands and sons at the front and that the people are starving.

The human appeal of Soldier 241 contrasts with horrific images of industrial dehumanisation. The Scientist who created him speaks callously of soldiers lying on battlegrounds: ‘Our problem was to eliminate the waste represented by the wounded.’ The Scientist disregards human suffering when assessing military capacity: ‘I estimate the restoration of five army corps now immobilised because of missing arms and legs, deafened ears and blinded eyes.’ These details of damaged bodies and phrases like ‘shattered bleeding wreck’ and ‘the fragment of a soldier’ are highly emotive, repelling the reader from the Scientist’s perspective. This is a ghoulish melodrama with a message, but how did it manage to make it into print during the war, when censorship crushed most opportunities for pacifist propaganda?

Blood and Iron had two authors: Robert H. Davis, about whom little is known, and Perley Poore Sheehan, a California journalist who began publishing short stories in pulp and adventure magazines in 1911 and went on to write novels and screenplays for silent movies. He had a number of scripts produced before the publication of Blood and Iron, and his biggest success would be the screenplay for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the 1923 film starring Lon Chaney. In both this film and Blood and Iron, we see Sheehan’s fascination with the monstrous and with the moral courage of the persecuted and misunderstood.

Blood and Iron was first published in August 1917 in the US fiction periodical McClure’s Magazine under the title ‘Efficiency’. It is probable that Sheehan and Davis sold the play to the Strand Magazine in the UK after (and possibly because) it had been bought for US publication in McClure’s. The title of the play was undoubtedly changed for copyright purposes, but the texts of both are near-identical. It was reprinted in 1917 as a chapbook containing ‘An Appreciation’ by former US President Theodore Roosevelt, a fervent supporter of America’s entry into the war.

We do not know when the play was written, but the timing of its publication must be linked to the US declaration of war. Historian Jonathan Arnold writes that, ‘on just one day, Tuesday 5 June 1917, 9,660,000 young men presented themselves for registration. On 20 July, a national lottery was held to select from these registrants the first batch of 687,000 who would actually join the army’. The willingness of McClure’s and the Strand to print this play when so many young US citizens were going to war suggests that they felt the public mood would accept it and that it would do their sales no harm.

The Strand commissioned the British war artist Steven Spurrier to illustrate the play with anti-German propaganda. Spurrier and T.D. Skidmore, who was working a few weeks ahead of him on the McClure’s illustrations, slanted the anti-war message of the play against Kaiser Wilhelm by reproducing the familiar image of the German emperor. The original description of the Kaiser in the play sends up the elaborate imperial costume worn in European courts but makes no allusion to Wilhelm’s distinctive characteristics – his short stature, his moustaches, his impaired arm – which were well-known from contemporary photographs and wartime cartoons. In contrast, Spurrier’s illustration shows the moustachioed Emperor enthroned in a military cloak and feathered parade helmet. It is clear which European royal this illustration suggests: only the Kaiser wore a moustache with the distinctive turned-up Prussian ends. His cousins Tsar Nicholas and George V wore naval beards with a less exuberant moustache.

British publishing was tightly controlled by legislation during the First World War. The Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA) of August and November 1914 prevented the publication of anything in mass-market print that might damage morale. DORA gave the government unlimited power to control what was published and how it was transmitted. ‘Likely to cause disaffection’ was the key phrase in the Act, which could be applied to anything written or expressed.

Under the influence of the Act, the Press Bureau exercised censorship in Britain, suppressing information as well as propagating misleading or false information. It issued 700 sets of instructions to editors. The historian of the Home Front, Cate Haste, reports that the Bureau ‘was asked to admonish individual editors for indiscreet publications as often as three times a week’. Fiction magazines also had to avoid non-compliance with the Acts by paying close attention to the content and illustrations of the stories they published. In the case of Blood and Iron, it would seem that the Strand actively encouraged an anti-German presentation of this play – a common line to take in wartime – to avoid a legal charge of the play’s anti-war message causing ‘disaffection’. In the British wartime periodicals market, of which fiction magazines constituted approximately one-fifth, titles were closing down every month, and in 1917, this process was accelerated by paper shortages. The Strand’s editor would not publish anything that might risk sales or the eye of the law.

Stories published in British fiction magazines directly addressing the situation of the war-impaired serviceman reached a peak in 1916 that was maintained into the following year. In Blood and Iron, Sheehan and Davis manipulate the reader against the play’s repellent scientist to produce a positive effect. Instead of agreeing that war-damaged servicemen ‘would today be rotting on the field – a source of pestilence – a worthless thing’, the reader reacts against this ghastly vision to feel that there must be more done for servicemen impaired by war. To call a war-damaged soldier a ‘shattered bleeding wreck’ or ‘the fragment of a soldier’ is not only inhuman, but also unpatriotic. This message counters the possibility that the drama’s anti-war message might ‘cause disaffection’ with the conflict. The praise and support of wounded servicemen redirected the readers’ attention away from whether the war should continue – a controversial pacifist message – to what could be done for the men returning from war with serious permanent impairments.

In Blood and Iron Soldier 241 has an artificial left leg, two artificial hands, an artificial right forearm and elbow, an artificial left eye converted into a telescope, an artificial left ear and replacement gold teeth. Missing legs and arms were the most frequently deployed impairments in fiction during the war; the 1918 report of Colonel Sir Robert Jones, Inspector of Military Orthopaedics for the Army Medical Service, shows that 50 per cent of the surgical work done for servicemen was for limb damage or loss. Sheehan and Davis were reflecting medical fact as well as a cultural norm. Were they also reflecting a popular fear of science?

There is a powerful conflict between humanitarian concerns and the utilitarian use of technology in this play: they cannot co-exist. What underlies this fear and mistrust of science? Before the war, the most well-known British novelist to write about science and its influence on the modern world was H.G. Wells. His novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) creates post-human people and animals through surgery and cross-breeding in a story designed to shock. It was to prove a major influence on the science fiction genre. The last novel in C.S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength (1945), and Lindsay Anderson’s film O Lucky Man (1973), both use animal-human hybrids to horrible effect. In 1903, Wells’ influential short story ‘The Land Ironclads’ anticipates the First World War tank: unstoppable and aggressive, impossible to harm or damage unless countered by similar weaponry. He was articulating an arms race that was already 20 years old as the First World War began.

Sheehan and Davis produced an early imaginative leap forward in the history of science fiction to explore how the human body could itself become a weapon rather than relying on the weapons it carried. Yet there is something deeply repellent in the utilitarian thinking of Blood and Iron that posits a mechanised soldier made out of body parts, not least because of the damaged soldiers within the story who have been ‘harvested’, and abandoned, presumably dead. Was such thinking widespread during the First World War? Or was it artistic hyperbole?

The influence of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) is clear in Blood and Iron, but Shelley’s Creature was completely human, albeit constructed of many human parts. The eponymous character of Edgar Allen Poe’s darkly comic story ‘The Man Who Was Used Up’ (1839), like Soldier 241, is also six feet tall, a military veteran who consists almost entirely of prosthetics rather than mechanical enhancement. He is essentially a humorous creation, in the spirit of Mrs Skewton and Captain Cuttle in Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1846-8). The Tin Man of Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is technically a cyborg, since he is composed of human and metal parts, but there is nothing of the machine about him, nor are his capacities artificially enhanced: they are merely replaced.

After the First World War, two further plays brought the idea of machines and the human closer together. Karl Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) invented the word ‘robot’. The art historian Christine Poggi claims that Ruggero Vasari’s Angoscia delle Macchine (The Anguish of the Machines, 1923) ‘exemplifies the growing ambivalence towards the machine in the 1920s’. The appearance of a cyborg and two robots in three plays within six years of each other, all emerging from the Great War, is too closely connected to be coincidence. Their authors clearly shared a need to prove their conceptions visually and the shock of the new needed to be experienced by a paying audience to be believed.

A decade later, the idea of the cyborg as a man enhanced by technology appeared in Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men (1930), which is usually held to be its first appearance in classic science fiction. C.L. Moore was the first author to write in 1944 about a female cyborg. Many subsequent novels, stories, TV series and films have featured cyborgs, epitomised in its military application by the Terminator. Soldier 241 is important in this lineage, not just because he is the earliest true cyborg, but because he is a product of the political, ethical and technological crucible of the First World War, truly the first conflict of modernity in all its industrial and technological aspects. It is generally accepted that the Second World War prompted the first advances in cybernetics, yet Sheehan and Davis’ Soldier 241 pulls the birth of the cyborg back by 25 years. Soldier 241’s revolutionary physical enhancement is not only in bodily strength and function, but in moral strength as well. What was it about the First World War that saw the evolution of the cyborg out of industrial-scale mechanised warfare?

According to the historian Jennifer Gonzalez:

The image of the cyborg has historically recurred at moments of radical social and historical change … imaginary representations of cyborgs take over when traditional bodies fail … The cyborg body thus becomes the historical record of changes in human perception. 

This new way of thinking about the modern cyborg stops us classifying the cyborg as a machine that has somehow acquired humanity. Instead, we recognise the cyborg as a human being with enhanced power and capabilities. It is also capable of imagining our future for us. From 1917 it would be sent into fiction to act out new ideologies, tell new stories and sort out ethical dilemmas. The cyborg makes a space for us to imagine the impossible.

Professor Elana Gomel of Tel Aviv University argues that scientific development always requires:

A new conceptual map for ethical judgment. The contours of this map may be seen to emerge in works of science fiction, which not only vividly dramatise the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries but also exert a powerful influence on culture, creating a feedback loop of images and ideas. 

Going back to my suggestion that Blood and Iron is an anti-war parable, we can consider it as a direct response to war: not just to the appalling waste of human life and bodies in war, but also to the technologies that were proliferating to keep the war going. Blood and Iron dramatises the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries for the reader to feel the consequences in ethical human terms, separate from politics and military strategy.

We should also ask whether the cyborg was created as a servant or a toy and whether it is an autonomous social agent. In the context of war, whose side is the cyborg on? Is it on the side of humans or that of the machines? It seems clear that Soldier 241 has many metaphorical uses. He is a nightmare, a hope, the future, the present and the past. As a cyborg, he embraces all future possibilities. He holds up a moral standard to say ‘thus far and no further’: he is the policeman holding up the stop sign. But is he the law?

Donna Haraway, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the first person to study cyborgs as an alternate to animals and humans, shows that the cyborg is a representative of the oppressed. Feminist science fiction has long used the cyborg to explore issues of difference, since super-powerful cyborgs in science fiction make the condition of simply being a weak human rather inadequate. None of these challenging ideas could have been conceivable in the culture of 1917. But the readers of McClure’s and the Strand could readily accept a cyborg in a vision of a possible future, given the remarkable scientific leaps forward that were already becoming normalised by the technological requirements of the war machine, in both surgery and weaponry.

Blood and Iron, this short and forgotten piece of propagandist entertainment, asks its readers to imagine a super-enhanced military weapon that can also feel empathy and refuse to engage in warfare. Soldier 241 has been made into what the Scientist calls ‘an efficient man’, displaying more humanity than his creators because he is humanity, made of the war-impaired bodies of men who could do no more. He reflects a pacifist political zeitgeist that the authorities did not want to acknowledge and for whose suppression the Defence of the Realm Act was first passed in August 1914. As for the play’s representation of disabled servicemen, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that, in his powerful wholeness and his resolution to prevent the continuation of war, this cyborg embodies what the masses of magazine fiction readers might have felt and want: to end the war now. He exemplifies both a major change in human perception and an acknowledgement of anti-war impulses during one of the most catastrophic wars in history.

Kate Macdonald is Visiting Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading.