On the Western Front: The Great War in Print

The 11th day of the 11th month marks the 91st anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War. The “war to end all wars” certainly qualifies as wishful thinking now, as we look back over nearly a century of conflict. The now familiar images of World War I—trenches, barbed wire, sandbags, and mud—are pervasive in the following stories, as are the shattered men and ravaged landscapes.

A Century of November by W.D. Wetherell (Univ. of Michigan. 2004. ISBN 978-0-472-11431-3. $24) quietly relates the pilgrimage of widower Charles Marden from western Canada to the poisoned mud of western Belgium, where his son Billy has been killed. The armistice is signed during Marden's journey, but any joy or celebration is muted by a wintry grayness, out near the trenches and barbed wire where other grieving families also search for loved ones.

In the sweeping Birdsong (Vintage: Random. 1997. ISBN 978-0-679-77681-9. pap. $15.95), Sebastian Faulks weaves a tapestry of adultery, war, friendship, and survival. The early chapters relate the illicit love affair between Isabelle Azaire, an unhappily married woman, and Stephen Wraysford, a young executive with a textile firm. Their affair surprises them both. Six years later, Stephen is mired in war. Faulks writes with a visceral explicitness when narrating Stephen's battle experiences as a young officer leading men in the trenches. Parallel to his story, readers journey with his granddaughter as she explores Stephen's diaries in an effort to understand her own yearnings and history.

Deafening by Frances Itani (Grove. 2004. ISBN 978-0-8021-4165-1. pap. $14) begins in 1902 with young Grania, left deaf from scarlet fever, and ends in 1919 after the war and flu epidemic have decimated entire Canadian communities. Itani writes of Grania's early childhood, learning to cope with her deafness and her eventual placement in a deaf school, with great grace. She also writes of Grania's husband, Jim, serving in the medical corps in Europe. As readers see the war from Jim's point of view, deepened by his relationship with Grania, they experience the terror and horror of battle through the eyes of a man trained to notice small things.

It's 1929, and the very bright and perceptive Miss Dobbs is opening her own private investigation agency in Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (Penguin. 2004. ISBN 978-0-14-200433-3. pap. $15). Forced into service upon the death of her mother, Maisie was fortunate to work for a woman who knew the power of education. A stint at Cambridge was interrupted by the war as Maisie served as a nurse in France. The experience helped her become even more intuitive and responsive to the needs of others, and although the war has been over for a decade, the physical and emotional effects linger strongly. Her first case leads to a home for war veterans, and Maisie must finally confront her wartime experience.

Edith Wharton's classic 1922 war novel, A Son at the Front (Northern Illinois Univ. 1995. ISBN 978-0-87580-568-9. pap. $16), brilliantly conveys the initial excitement of war and the subsequent boredom and manipulation that occurred away from the front lines. George Campton, the son of a painter and the stepson of a well-to-do banker, is called to serve in the French army. His mother tries to keep him safely behind the lines, but George signs up for the infantry. Using George's father as a pivot, Wharton explores the effects of war on those left behind with a tightly restrained narrative and vividly powerful prose.

Travis Lee Stanhope leaves his abusive childhood in Texas and his scholarship to Harvard for the bloody fields of France in Patricia Anthony's haunting Flanders (out of print, but widely available). A talented sharpshooter, he is quickly caught in the mire of war, described in exquisitely wrenching detail. Soon Travis begins to have visions of a graveyard, where his fallen comrades and enemies find peace, watched over by a lovely visage of death.

Historical figures populate Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (Plume. 1996. ISBN 978-0-452-27672-7. pap. $15), the final novel in her acclaimed World War I trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door). The story centers on psychologist/anthropologist William Rivers, whose family were friends with Lewis Carroll, and the main fictional character, Lt. Billy Prior, a conflicted and complicated man who is being treated for shell shock by Rivers before being returned to the front. Barker also explores the psychologist's character more deeply. As Rivers reconciles himself to his work, preparing the wounded and traumatized for further battle, he has many flashbacks to his time in Melanesia where he learned about the rituals of death in that culture.

This column was contributed by Sharon Kirkes, a Reference Librarian in the Jacksonville Public Library system, FL