To tie in with Remembrance Day / Veterans Day, I’m highlighting a lesser-known classic that my library recently acquired to supplement an “Echoes of War” display.

When this debut novella was published in 1918, Rebecca West (the pen name of Cicily Isabel Fairfield, 1892–1983) was just 24 yet already a seasoned journalist, and would go on to be known for her fiction, feminist activism, and travel writing.

The title soldier, Captain Chris Baldry, is being sent home from France with shellshock and amnesia. He doesn’t remember his life of comfort at Baldry Court, his wife Kitty, or Oliver, their little boy who died five years ago. The narrator, Chris’s cousin Jenny, is familiar to him – but his picture of her is from 15 years ago. The main consequence of his mind being stuck in a previous time is that he’s still enraptured with his teenage sweetheart, Margaret Allington (now Mrs Grey), whose family kept an inn on Monkey Island at Bray. When hospitalized in Boulogne, Chris sent word to her rather than to his own wife.

When Margaret comes to break the news, Kitty initially suspects fraud, while Jenny expresses knee-jerk prejudice against the lower classes: “I … hated her as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home, and introduce ugliness to the light of day.” Relief at Chris’s injuries not being physical or permanent soon gives way to grief at emotional rejection. Kitty and Jenny reluctantly agree to indulge Chris’s delusion until he can see a doctor, so introduce him to the household but allow him to spend all the time he wants with Margaret.

Disgust and gratitude trade off in Jenny’s depictions of Margaret. “She was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children.” As painful as it is for her and Kitty to have to cede place to a stranger, Jenny is also aware that they owe Margaret a debt: “While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war.” And as Jenny observes Margaret’s compassionate care, she sees the woman’s “personality … sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room. … This wonderful kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul.” Margaret’s selfless tenderness is in stark contrast with Kitty’s petty jealousy and Jenny’s obvious, futile desire for her cousin.

I’d not read West before, and while I’m not sure I’d pick up one of her long novels, I found her prose gorgeous, e.g., “There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth.” The last two pages, in particular, are heartbreaking. The plot turns on whether to leave Chris in happy ignorance or remind him of all that he has lost. He’s made a good trade: a soldier’s stoicism for a boy’s enthusiasm. When reality is the hell of war, who can blame him for making a psychic escape, and who could wish to disabuse him of his innocent fancies?

West plays up the irony of what recovery would look like in this case. She makes effective use of dichotomies and doubling throughout, and her small cast perfectly illustrates English society – with Jenny one of the ‘surplus women’ created by WWI. Somehow, war’s cruelty is all the clearer for its temporary absence here. I imagine this made an excellent stage play and film, too.

(Public library)

[140 pages]