Did this really happen?

When the Great War began in August 1914, many predicted the fighting would end by Christmas. But antiquated military tactics combined with modern weapons like machine guns, high explosives, and poison gas produced a quagmire with massive death tolls few had anticipated. Quite simply, the warring nations were completely unprepared to cope with the huge numbers of dead bodies strewn across the vast battlefields of Europe.

On the Eastern Front, the winter of 1916-1917 was one of the coldest on record. In many places, the ground was frozen too hard to bury the dead. Often the corpses were merely covered with snow until the spring thaw. At other times, the dead simply lay for months on the ground where they had fallen.

Coincidentally, much of this same front ran through remote regions of modern Lithuania and Belarus that were covered with dense forests and teeming with wolves. With their natural prey hunted out, wolf packs were lured by the acrid odor of thousands of dead soldiers, horses, and mules decaying on the battlefields.

The stage was set for conflict between soldiers and wolves.

War Wolves is a work of fiction based on events widely reported in newspapers around the globe in 1917. Below is a sample of newspaper articles detailing wolf attacks on soldiers on the Eastern Front. (click to enlarge)