(Goodreads description)
Writing her first novel during World War I, West examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering from shell-shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England’s class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This short story was written in 1918, when the dust of the Great War had not settled yet. It’s the story of a shellshocked soldier. He has lost memory of a couple of decades. When he’s sent home to recover, he can’t remember his wife, but only his sweetheart of when he was a boy.
Although the depiction of shellshock is quite unlikely, I found the core idea really interesting. Imagine a grown man who can’t remember having been married. Or having gone to war. And now he wants to see his sweetheart, who’s now a married woman herself.
But what was most interesting and touching to me was the portrayal of the three women: soldier Chirs’s cousin Jenny (the narrator), Kitty, his wife and Margaret, his once-sweetheart.
It’s a very emotional story that tells of time passing and lost chances. Of incomprehension and of how time doesn’t necessarily cure all wounds.
I was touched by Margaret more than anyone. Her kind heart, her humbleness, and her nobleness. She who is the one that has the most to lose from giving Chris back to himself, is also the one who shows more compassion and care.
No, this is not a faithful description of the condition so many soldiers suffered during and after the Great War. Yet, it is a very real description of the inability and fear society showed and often couldn’t handle towards them.
It’s a great, heartfelt story.
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (Book Review) – A touching story about what war can do to men and the healing a gentle heart can achieve #WWI #Literature Share on XThe Return of the Soldier
Excerpt
Kitty’s bright eyes met mine, and we obeyed that mysterious human impulse to smile triumphantly at the spectacle of a fellow-creature occupied in baseness. For this news was not true. It could not possibly be true. The War Office would have wired to us immediately if Chris had been wounded. This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, “Heartless Fraud on Soldier’s Wife.” Presently she would say that she had gone to some expense to come here with her news and that she was poor, and at the first generous look on our faces there would come some tale of trouble that would disgust the imagination by pictures of yellow-wood furniture that a landlord oddly desired to seize and a pallid child with bandages round its throat. I cast down my eyes and shivered at the horror. Yet there was something about the physical quality of the woman, unlovely though she was, which preserved the occasion from utter baseness. I felt sure that had it not been for the tyrannous emptiness of that evil, shiny pigskin purse that jerked about on her trembling knees the poor driven creature would have chosen ways of candor and gentleness. It was, strangely enough, only when I looked at Kitty and marked how her brightly colored prettiness arched over this plain criminal as though she were a splendid bird of prey and this her sluggish insect food that I felt the moment degrading.
Kitty was, I felt, being a little too clever over it.
“How is he wounded?” she asked.
The caller traced a pattern on the carpet with her blunt toe.
“I don’t know how to put it; he’s not exactly wounded. A shell burst—”
“Concussion?” suggested Kitty.
She answered with an odd glibness and humility, as though tendering us a term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension, and hoping that our superior intelligences would make something of it:
“Shell-shock.” Our faces did not illumine, so she dragged on lamely, “Anyway, he’s not well.” Again she played with her purse. Her face was visibly damp.
“Not well? Is he dangerously ill?”
“Oh, no.” She was too kind to harrow us. “Not dangerously ill.”
Kitty brutally permitted a silence to fall. Our caller could not bear it, and broke it in a voice that nervousness had turned to a funny, diffident croak.
“He’s in the Queen Mary Hospital at Boulogne.” We did not speak, and she began to flush and wriggle on her seat, and stooped forward to fumble under the legs of her chair for her umbrella. The sight of its green seams and unveracious tortoiseshell handle disgusted Kitty into speech.
“How do you know all this?”
Our visitor met her eyes. This was evidently a moment for which she had steeled herself, and she rose to it with a catch of her breath. “A man who used to be a clerk along with my husband is in Mr. Baldry’s regiment.” Her voice croaked even more piteously, and her eyes begged: “Leave it at that! Leave it at that! If you only knew—”
The Thursday Quotables was originally a weekly post created by Lisa Wolf for her book blog Bookshelf Fantasy . It isn’t a weekly post anymore, not even for Lisa, but just like her, I still love to share my favourite reads on Thursdays and I still use the original template which included an excerpt.
