At first it could seem a rollicking good yarn. A recent Russian novel, PMC Chersonesus, by Andrei Belyanin, is about a former marine on a mission to gather stolen treasure, aided by figures from Greek mythology. But the book is an example of so-called ‘Z’ literature, named for the letter that denotes support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and part of a best-selling genre of fiction with storylines that inculcate young readers into the ideology of Putin’s regime.

The books have recently inspired coverage describing their jingoism, their enthusiasm for war, and their characterisation of the ‘enemy’ as subhuman, or racially inferior, foreigners. Ukrainians appear as Nazis from whom, readers are told, Russia alone once saved the world. The heroes are members of the army or secret agents, part of a Russian master race for whom military glory awaits. The target readership is teenage and male: the men who, in not too long, will reach the age of 18 and so be automatically enlisted into the Russian military. The hideous day-glo covers and the whiff of Boys-Own derring-do could make such literature risible; like all self-consciously butch virility, the illustrations are sheer kitsch. The aims and philosophy are sinister, and the prospective outcome is dangerous.

Z Literature reflects a genre of British writing that became popular in the long lead-up to the First World War. In 1870, a British Army general called George Tomkyns Chesney published The Battle of Dorking, an account of the Germans invading England; it was the first of many, either revelling in British triumph or, more often, castigating British unpreparedness and lassitude. In 1903 came Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, which, beneath its still highly readable adventure story, put forward the argument that England could be invaded by Germany. A popular thriller writer, William Le Queux, made a similar warning in The Invasion of 1910 and Guy du Maurier had a hit with An Englishman’s Home, a play on a similar theme.

On another stage in the West End, meanwhile, a teenage child actor played a little boy who saves the country from foreign attack, a vast aeroplane flying out from the stage and over the heads of the audience, on those days when it didn’t tangle itself in the lighting rig. Nobody recognised the name of the young performer, Noël Coward.

A novel such as H.G. Wells’ War in the Air (his first in which the invaders came not from space but from Germany) was an oddity in its socialist and anti-imperialist outlook. Most ‘invasion literature’ had a Tory slant, warning of a general decay in British life, usually caused by socialists. Any German characters were invariably efficient, brutal, sausage-eating and mad for power. The most political is by Hector Hugh Munro, who used the pen name ‘Saki’. He has gone down in literary history as the archetypal Edwardian dandy, often confused with the effete young men – Reginald, Clovis – who populate his exhilaratingly witty short stories. But he cast off his once-decadent outlook to write, in 1913, a dismaying book called When William Came. William is Kaiser Wilhelm, and the novel imagines an unprepared Britain buckling quickly to German annexation.

In parallel to Russia’s Z Literature, Saki’s sense of invasion meant capitulating to foreigners, who are cast as racially inferior. He despairs when the ‘purity’ of the Saxon race is diluted by a London become ‘cosmopolitan’, a word most Edwardians used pejoratively, and interchangeably with ‘Jewish’. Above all, When William Came was a call to arms, exhorting the youth of England to come to the rescue of its apathetic elders, and advocating nationwide conscription. In 1902, the National Service League had been formed, campaigning for the introduction of compulsory military training as protection against invasion. Britain was one of the few European states not to have an army of conscripts.

Initially unpopular, the League was transformed by the support and presidency of Lord Roberts, who grew membership to tens of thousands. (Rudyard Kipling was another prominent supporter; his story ‘The Army of a Dream’ depicts a militia of English citizens.) Roberts was the country’s great military hero, a Boer veteran, defender of the Empire, commander of the Army – and co-writer of Le Queux’s Invasion of 1910. Saki argued for ‘the discipline of a military training’ as essential to the strengthening of national character, which many thought lost either to the degeneracy unleashed by Oscar Wilde and his followers, or by the clangorous modernism – Stravinsky, Schönberg, Picasso – that had already begun to cross the Channel, its own type of invading fleet.

The novels published in Russia over the last few years are described by the academic Colin Alexander as ‘normalising the idea that to be a good citizen, a good patriot, a good man, you go and fight in the war’. This was precisely Saki’s aim in 1913. Hence, at the end of When William Came, his sincere faith in the Boy Scouts, who, patriotic citizens all, refuse en masse to attend a parade of reconciliation between the English and the Germans. When, in 1907, Robert Baden-Powell had formed the Boy Scouts movement, he had done so with the motive of saving Britain from decline (Lord Roberts, too, had set up a Lads’ Rifle Brigade). The Scouts were intended to be the next generation of British soldiers, real men, preparing for the defence of the British Empire. Their handbook told them to ‘be prepared to die for your country if need be’. Baden-Powell would draw on Kipling’s writing and assistance when allotting to his young recruits the language of the wolf pack.

Most pertinently to its contemporary Russian equivalents, invasion literature worked. Stories mattered. War was the thrill and heroism of adventure. Saki had worried needlessly as to the absence in Britain of military conscription. When, in 1914, it declared war on Germany, over 750,000 men enlisted within eight weeks, and were taught at training camps to plunge their bayonets into hay bales representing an enemy that had swiftly become subhuman. The Boy Scouts cycled to London to warn of Zeppelin raids or were sent to guard railway and telegraph lines. Saki, over-age, insisted on fighting and would be killed in 1916, during the Battle of the Ancre; to the last, he advocated the glory and comradeship, even the ‘romance’, of war. He was not alone in his crusade to persuade the British to participate in the conflict. G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle were among the signatories to a letter in The Times saying that ‘Great Britain could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war’. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was not yet the old lie.

As so often, humour can best puncture tub-thumping. In When William Came, Saki’s wit is submerged by a flame-eyed crusade. But in 1909, responding to another entry in the ‘Germans-are-coming’ books, James Blyth’s The Swoop of the Vulture, P.G. Wodehouse wrote The Swoop, or how Clarence Saved England. England is invaded simultaneously by nine invaders at once. Germany lands in Essex, the Russians at Yarmouth, even as the Swiss are bombarding Lyme Regis. China has conquered ‘that picturesque little Welsh watering-place, Lllgtxpll’, while Monaco sets its sights on the Firth of Clyde and Young Turks seize Scarborough. The British public is more interested in cricket (the headline ‘Surrey doing badly’ appears above ‘German army lands in england’). Grateful Londoners rejoice in the bombing of the Albert Hall. Clarence Chugwater, leader of the Boy Scouts, manages to save the day.

Parody punctured preposterousness and deflated militaristic heroism. The realities of the First World War revealed invasion literature to have been the literature of evasion; its writers, like the Russian authors of today, had sidestepped the deprivation and slaughter of conflict. But it is hard, a century later, to imagine the Russian regime permitting satire or truth, as it spoonfeeds young readers with a new type of invasion literature: an encouragement to invade, pro patria mori.