The Outlaws

Description

It is November 1918. Germany has just surrendered after four years of the most savage warfare in history. It is teetering on the brink of total social and economic collapse, and the German people now lie at the mercy of new liberal politicians who despise everything Germany once stood for.

The Communists are rioting in the streets, threatening to topple the new government in Weimar and bring about their own revolution. The frontline soldiers are returning from the hell of the war to find an unrecognizable land, the principles and traditions they had sacrificed so much to defend now the stuff of mockery.

The narrator of The Outlaws, a 16-year-old military cadet, is too young to have served in the trenches, but feels the sting of this betrayal no less than them. Since Germany’s armies have been all but disbanded, he joins the paramilitary Freikorps – groups of veterans who refuse to lay down their arms, and who have pledged to stop the Communists – and begins fighting, first in the streets of Germany’s cities, and then in the Baltic states, defending Germany’s eastern frontiers from Communist subversion, while ignoring the calls to disengage by the meek politicians at home.

After months of intense fighting abroad, the Freikorps soldiers return to settle scores with their enemies in Germany, dreaming of a nationalist counterrevolution, and, their trigger fingers still itchy, fix their sights on bringing down the hated new government, once and for all.

The Outlaws is a chronicle of the experiences of the men who fought in the Freikorps, but it is also an adventure and a war story about an entire generation of soldiers who loved their homeland more than peace and comfort, and who refused to accept defeat at any price.