The year is 1917 and its World War One. In the midst of a harsh winter, “No Man’s Land” is exactly what the name implies. Bitter trench warfare is a meatgrinder for human flesh as casualties pile up and little progress is being made by either the Germans or the French and English forces. The bloody stalemate is briefly relieved during Christmas when troops from both sides declare an unofficial cease fire to observe the Christian holiday before hostilities continue once again after January first. However, something mysterious and deadly has emerged. Reports of animal mauling have been reported.

Even on the Russian front, German and Czarist forces are reporting a bizarre and dangerous situation has taken shape. The war has disrupted the natural balance of nature. All major predators have found their habitats destroyed causing unusual forms of adaptation. Corpses left after battles and not buried are being scavenged by unknown predators! Apparently, wolves have formed huge aggressive packs that have lost their natural fear of humans. Wounded soldiers have been overcome by vicious wolves driven mad by starvation and the destruction of their forested existence! Those soldiers immobilized with wounds seem to have the worst chances of being preyed upon as the smell of human blood in the air becomes a trigger!

In Russia several field hospital units for the wounded have been attacked by dozens of hungry wolves. In one case, a trailer full of Russian wounded soldiers falls under siege by packs of wolves who have become brazen enough to attack in full force. The entire outfit of the wounded are mauled and eaten mercilessly as if they were deer, the normal table food for these canine predators! Reports of these wild animal caused atrocities reach high command.

In the trenches of the western front, hungry wolves have begun storming the trenches where dead bodies remaining unburied is common place, and the wolves capitalize. Unfortunately for the soldiers who are wounded and left to be picked up by the medics, they soon become victims of the marauding wolf packs. It’s bad enough that men are being slaughtered by other humans, but now nature has thrown a bloody monkey wrench into the works and the battlefield has become even more threatening! Morale for both, Germans, Russians, the French, and British is at an all-time low with such fear now threatening along with manmade warfare. The wolves have emerged from deep in the forest to add to the savagery. There even reports of bears in the trenches eating the flesh of the dead!

At first, German and Russian higher-level officers dismiss these incidents as rare and isolated, but continued battle reports can no longer be ignored. Even Czar Nicholas is brought out to the forward Russian areas to bolster troop morale as the news of wolf attacks reaches his command. In an amazing twist of events, both the Germans, Russian, British, and French begin cooperation! Now they combine forces to combat the common threat in order to put an end to these predators who not only kill, but eat soldiers as they attack in large groups! Reconnaissance flights by the first-generation fighter aircraft begin to seek out where the packs of wolves are as they are extremely mobile and don’t remain in one place long after a killing! Pilots begin the job of spotting massed wolf packs for artillery bombardment targeting. All the stops are out now as heavy machine guns, poison, and even mustard gas, are deployed to kill off the huge numbers of wolves that have gone rogue and now consider human flesh on the menu!

One of the first attempts at trying to solve the problem was to hire or deploy snipers and seasoned hunters to pursue the problem, thinking that this was simply a limited problem to solve, but when these specialized riflemen ominously never returned, they knew they had a unique and terrifying problem!

Any park ranger or cattle or sheep rancher will tell you that there is nothing more destructive than large packs of wolves. They destroy the game hunting by killing or chasing off elk and deer herds, and exacting losses on sheep and cattle as well. For the longest time wolves in the US were hunted into small numbers in states like New Mexico, Idaho, and Yellowstone National Park, but at the advice of environmentalists and nature experts, wolves were reintroduced to kill off the sick and genetically undesirable of the herds so that only the fittest would survive and thrive, but still, this would mean the loss of Buffalo, Deer populations, and livestock animals.

Without such technology as infra-red heat detection or night vision in World War I, it would mean that tracking wolves at night would be nearly impossible unless the animals came to the well-armed units! At times, campfires might bring wolves in where they could be picked off, but the difficulty process would mostly be effective in broad daylight. Before the arrival of American forces, this hidden dirty secret was ignored for decades, until WWI veterans began to speak out. Eventually, the tactics of the combined forces began to take enough numbers of wolf kills and displace them further from regions of battle to finally control them. One famous German ace pilot flying his Fokker aerial combat Bi-plane admitted years later he had flown scouting missions to locate wolf packs and had heard horror stories from the ground troops. Eventually, human beings reverted back to killing each other again as the wolf threat was mitigated. History tells us that nature is well capable of conducting its own brand of warfare.