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The visual imagery in this work is of extraordinary clarity, some of it deliberately horrific, profoundly shocking. It is Koelz's passionate statement against the horror of war and its pitiless slaughter, and the dark and hypocritical human forces that he believed conspired, through church and state, to send young men to fight and die.
The triptych form concentrates the viewer on the message, as the two opposing forces face each other on the outer panels with, between them, the terrible results of their conflict.
On the left-hand panel, the
Germans; on the right, the countries allied against them. In both groups soldiers await an uncertain, probably terrible fate. Around and beside them, their families and loved ones pray, appealing almost blindly and with a dreadful stoicism to an invisible divine to keep their young men safe from harm. All ages are united in prayer and interwoven within the composition are jewel-like flowers, insects, animals - images of beauty and life. Above the groups loom the men of the church, blessing the weapons and means of warfare.
In the centre panel a dead German soldier, his identity lost behind a gas mask, is grotesquely crucified against a lifeless, desolate and blasted landscape of shell holes and craters. Below and to the
right, a second soldier, also frozen in death points his terrible fleshless face towards us, a worm emerging from the eye socket of his skull.
Koelz included a third slaughtered soldier, a Frenchman, and could well have completed it. The red
painted area towards the centre of the panel corresponds to the legs of this figure, below which is a bullet-holed water bottle of French design.
"Dad had a fixation about the way the ordinary man paid for the stupidity, nationalistic fervour and religious cynicism in every system. He showed the bishops blessing the weapons. The dead, sacrificed on that centre panel, are hemmed in by mothers praying, soldiers preparing to be cannon-fodder while their blind obedience is sought and praised. It was the centre of his beliefs, his life's work:" Recollections of the 1930s by Koelz's son Siegfried (Fred) in 1993.
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