In Memoriam (Winn)
Apr. 8th, 2026 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn5/5. I am having SO many feelings about this book that I am not sure I can actually articulate them all. But also I am very aware that my feelings are entangled partially in, uh, currently being obsessed with a fanon ship that maps super easily on to this one, so you know, as usual, I am not to be trusted about my feelings and I'm very willing to believe that it might not hit quite right if one doesn't happen to be exactly in that situation? Anyway... it's about these two eighteen-year-old boys who start the book at boarding school together in 1914. Sidney Ellwood is half-Jewish, social, charismatic, demonstrative, loves and writes poetry. Henry Gaunt is half-German, intense, introverted, anxious, loves ancient Greek. (...I also have Feelings about characters who quote poetry. And, as it turns out, ancient Greek.) The two of them have strong and more-or-less repressed feelings for each other. (Gaunt's feelings are particularly repressed.)
But. It being 1914, it rapidly starts being about something else than boarding school.
I should probably also mention a huge, extremely gigantic content note for trench warfare and historical levels of wounds and death.
Okay, so. I knew a bit about trench warfare and how awful it was, I've read Sassoon and Owen, once upon a time I did read a few novels set in the years of WWI, I knew a lot of soldiers died -- but I haven't read a lot of WWI fiction as an adult, and as an adult it all hit me very hard, the devastation of the war itself, foremost, but also about the soldiers coming back home and everyone having to deal with the cracks in the society because of all these young men dying...
Winn does a remarkable job of showing us through Ellwood's and Gaunt's eyes how awful and heartbreaking it was in the trenches. And also at the same time there's this relentless beat of letters and newsletters, and because the book started at the boarding school, we knew a little of the web of friends and rivals and acquaintances -- and. They. Keep. Dying. And you start scanning the lists, looking for people you know, wondering if that character's died yet, knowing there's basically no chance that other character's made it and will you see his name now or later... And there are a lot of names. A lot. And you know that all those other names that you don't know, there's a story there too even if this book isn't telling it. (Winn says in the afterword that they were modeled on actual school newsletter lists.) Near the end of the book, Gaunt's sister Maud mentions her headmistress saying that one in ten of the girls at her school will end up getting married, because that's how many men of their social class are left. (Although apparently the quote is actually real, the number appears to be a major exaggeration. But I'm probably going to read another (nonfiction) book about that now, which is cited in the afterword: Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First World War. It tells me, so far, that the number is more like one in four British women who remained single, though higher in the upper middle class. But for a society where those women expected and planned to marry, that's still... Anyway, I'll get back to you once I've read that.)
Also -- these kids going off to war -- are literal teenagers -- which I guess I knew, in principle -- but I read WWI fiction when I was younger than 18, so at the time 18- and 19-year-olds seemed very old to me. But now that I have a teenager myself... They're teenagers, they should be angsting about puppy love (except not angsting about homosexuality being illegal, as Gaunt is, if not Ellwood), not about killing people!
I also wondered while reading, and even more after reading the afterword, if this is Siegfried Sassoon AU fic, but all that I know about Sassoon is from reading his wikipedia page. I'm gonna have to go find his novels/lightly-fictionalized-autobiography now, aren't I?
(But also one thing that I really liked about the book that I want to mention before I get into spoilers was that every so often you get these small flashes of kindness between characters, both inside and outside of the war, when they didn't have to be kind to one other and it would have been understandable if they weren't, but they were anyway, and it just undid me every time.)
I was so sure that one or both of Elly and Gaunt would die because it struck me as That Kind of heartbreaking book plus which I guess I've been socialized to understand that Teh Gays Always Die (and Carruthers and Sandys died so early on!! :( :( ), and I really REALLY wanted them to have a happy ending, I can't actually think of the last time I've wanted that so much for a couple, and when they got together I felt like, okay, at least they got one happy time before one of them died! All I wanted was for someone somewhere to get some happiness in the end.
The only thing that surprised me was that Gaunt died when the book was only half over. (BURGOYNE.) I was sure then that the next half would be Ellwood writing poetry about him, like Tennyson, or like Sassoon. I was SO surprised when he turned out to have survived! And then my reaction was that the book was now going to find new and exciting ways to break me (true, but not in the way I thought), and I spent most of the second half of the book worried Gaunt would die in some other way, and expressed that I was never going to forgive Winn if Gaunt died, or Ellwood did, without Ellwood finding out that Gaunt was still alive.
I absolutely absolutely adored Hayes and his friendship with Gaunt and his more prickly friendship with Ellwood and the contrast between him and the public schoolboys (who always get promoted over him, the poor guy), and him looking after Ellwood (both physically and e.g. warning him away from Watts) even though he thought Ellwood was looking down on him. I was also convinced he was going to die because I loved him so much (I actually said that I thought he would make it to the end of the war and then die, just to spite me. I actually said this!) And he didn't die but he ended up with BOTH LEGS (or at least 1 1/2) gone! I was like. Winn. Could you not have left him ONE leg?! COME ON. I would rather Gaunt or Ellwood had lost their legs. HAYES.
(Also Hayes panicking to Ellwood and Ellwood trying very very badly to reassure him (no wonder Hayes doesn't want to write him), then Ellwood having that exact panic after he's invalided out, omg)
I absolutely loved that Elly was into poetry and used poetry to basically articulate his emotions (I do the same kind of thing -- a lot of how I understand the world is made up of quotations from novels and poems and songs; my head has been full of Sassoon and Owen writing this post) and that moment when he declaimed Keats at Gaunt and Gaunt had to accept that he was in love with him, except that was when Gaunt knew he was going to die, auuuuugh. And also when Elly lost his poetry and then -- that little glimpse of how he might be getting it back at the end -- auuuuuugh
And also Gaunt and his ancient Greek and how sometimes he just quotes in Greek and I love it
And also I love that Winn doesn't just give us the one side, when Gaunt gets captured by the Germans it's a very stark reminder that although we've been POV English, the English aren't the only ones dying in this war and that even if it's easy for the English soldiers not to see the German soldiers as people and vice versa, they both are. And Gaunt being half-German of course knew this from the beginning, which adds another layer. This line, augh: Had it not been for his khaki uniform, no one should have known he was the enemy.
(And that shattering German POV, for just a minute.)
And also the prisoner-of-war scenes which are almost comic, we needed some of that at that point in the book, and ALSO Pritchard and Devi totally being like oh, yeah, no big deal at all about Gaunt being an "invert," and making ordinary jokes about it like they would about anything else and being totally accepting, instead of all the rejection and awfulness Gaunt's been fearing (and might have gotten from someone else), and that healing something in Gaunt so that he can face his love for Elly and actually tell him that, and be okay with it even if Ellwood can't love him back, I LOVE THIS and I know it's absolutely wish-fulfillment, but we already saw the part where Caruthers basically committed suicide so he didn't have to deal with the terrible consequences of being homosexual (augh!), so yeeeeeah I didn't need that to happen again, that was quite all right.
And then I read the bit where Maud says she's not going to marry Elly and I was cheering for her and also thinking that okay, even if everyone else's life is messed up (I still worried that Ellwood and Gaunt wouldn't find each other again, at this point) maybe Maud is the one character things will work out for, because it would be awful if she married Ellwood
AND THEN THEY DID MEET AGAIN
And they were both so damaged! Except that Gaunt, having been in the POW camp instead of fighting for a while, had recovered a bit mentally if not physically, and Ellwood was completely broken, augh. I had not thought that they would have to deal with shell shock instead of death, but of course they did
And Maud and Gaunt making up, and Maud being supportive and Gaunt apologizing (he really has been awful to her) and them speaking in Greek to each other <3
This bit: "Sometimes I think the War is harder on parents than on soldiers," said Pritchard. Gaunt could tell he was lying, but Gaunt would have lied too, if he had thought of it. And then, having learned from Pritchard, he says it to Mrs. Ellwood AUUUUUGH
(I said this before, but, now that I have the spoilers to back me up: all the little moments of kindness between characters that didn't have to happen, but did anyway, are I think what make me so hopelessly a fan of this book)
I think as we get close to the ending my thoughts just get more and more incoherent as Winn breaks my heart over and over again and I hadn't at all thought it would be because things were more-or-less going to be okay except that they can't exactly be okay but they can be as okay as possible:
Devi being ALIVE
CYRIL ROSEVEARE giving them the Brazil out!
Also: KEATS
Gaunt giving Hayes a JOB (and not a job as his freaking valet, either, not that I don't love Lord Peter but... like, let's let Hayes have a little class mobility here, that's the LEAST we can do)
"I'm not playing, either."
I mean, the rational part of my brain knows that the book is doing a few backflips to give them an ending where they can be alive and togetherand not be Alan Turing (although hi I found while writing this post that Robert Graves actually had the experience of almost dying of a lung wound and being reported dead, like Gaunt, though not because he was a pow, so it's not like she's completely making UP backflips, either) but the rest of my brain does not really care -- I think because we saw all the ways in which things could go wrong, it's a little like Carruthers and Sandys ( :(((((( ) and Aldworth and the Roseveare brothers and Lantham and -- and everyone else -- are the other stories that didn't work, that ended tragically, so in a sense my brain thinks of it like survivor bias; not everyone did die in WWI, or even most of everyone; someone had to survive; it might as well be them.
And also because they didn't survive unscathed. At all. Either physically or mentally. Which also seems -- reasonable, statistically speaking.
Also because no one should be Alan Turing (including especially Alan Turing) and I don't at all mind a universe where my characters ARE NOT (now, can I have a fix-it AU for Turing)
Physically speaking: Sassoon (who admittedly did not get his face shot off) lived until age 81 and Graves lived until age 90 after getting shot in the lung, so my headcanon is that Ellwood and Gaunt lived a very long time together :P
And then that last, awful twist of the knife. OH COME ON, the book was DONE and we were all going to live happily (or at least hopefully) EVER AFTER and now the third Roseveare brother is dead (as he dreamed back in the beginning, that was a shoe I had been bracing to drop for forever and when I finally let my guard down...). (While I was reading about WWII poets... I guess this happened to Wilfred Owen. Augh!)
And the LAST PARAGRAPH which didn't even register for me the first time -- I might not have actually read it properly then, because I was too busy trying not to throw the book across the room because Cyril was dead: Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.
:(
Well, I'm thinking about that a lot this week.
The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'
'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.'
And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'
-Siegfried Sassoon
And I suppose reading this book, now, is: well: I think this should be required reading for anyone who tells the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
But. It being 1914, it rapidly starts being about something else than boarding school.
I should probably also mention a huge, extremely gigantic content note for trench warfare and historical levels of wounds and death.
Okay, so. I knew a bit about trench warfare and how awful it was, I've read Sassoon and Owen, once upon a time I did read a few novels set in the years of WWI, I knew a lot of soldiers died -- but I haven't read a lot of WWI fiction as an adult, and as an adult it all hit me very hard, the devastation of the war itself, foremost, but also about the soldiers coming back home and everyone having to deal with the cracks in the society because of all these young men dying...
Winn does a remarkable job of showing us through Ellwood's and Gaunt's eyes how awful and heartbreaking it was in the trenches. And also at the same time there's this relentless beat of letters and newsletters, and because the book started at the boarding school, we knew a little of the web of friends and rivals and acquaintances -- and. They. Keep. Dying. And you start scanning the lists, looking for people you know, wondering if that character's died yet, knowing there's basically no chance that other character's made it and will you see his name now or later... And there are a lot of names. A lot. And you know that all those other names that you don't know, there's a story there too even if this book isn't telling it. (Winn says in the afterword that they were modeled on actual school newsletter lists.) Near the end of the book, Gaunt's sister Maud mentions her headmistress saying that one in ten of the girls at her school will end up getting married, because that's how many men of their social class are left. (Although apparently the quote is actually real, the number appears to be a major exaggeration. But I'm probably going to read another (nonfiction) book about that now, which is cited in the afterword: Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First World War. It tells me, so far, that the number is more like one in four British women who remained single, though higher in the upper middle class. But for a society where those women expected and planned to marry, that's still... Anyway, I'll get back to you once I've read that.)
Also -- these kids going off to war -- are literal teenagers -- which I guess I knew, in principle -- but I read WWI fiction when I was younger than 18, so at the time 18- and 19-year-olds seemed very old to me. But now that I have a teenager myself... They're teenagers, they should be angsting about puppy love (except not angsting about homosexuality being illegal, as Gaunt is, if not Ellwood), not about killing people!
I also wondered while reading, and even more after reading the afterword, if this is Siegfried Sassoon AU fic, but all that I know about Sassoon is from reading his wikipedia page. I'm gonna have to go find his novels/lightly-fictionalized-autobiography now, aren't I?
(But also one thing that I really liked about the book that I want to mention before I get into spoilers was that every so often you get these small flashes of kindness between characters, both inside and outside of the war, when they didn't have to be kind to one other and it would have been understandable if they weren't, but they were anyway, and it just undid me every time.)
Major spoilers, starts reasonably coherent but rapidly devolves into word-vomiting
I was so sure that one or both of Elly and Gaunt would die because it struck me as That Kind of heartbreaking book plus which I guess I've been socialized to understand that Teh Gays Always Die (and Carruthers and Sandys died so early on!! :( :( ), and I really REALLY wanted them to have a happy ending, I can't actually think of the last time I've wanted that so much for a couple, and when they got together I felt like, okay, at least they got one happy time before one of them died! All I wanted was for someone somewhere to get some happiness in the end.
The only thing that surprised me was that Gaunt died when the book was only half over. (BURGOYNE.) I was sure then that the next half would be Ellwood writing poetry about him, like Tennyson, or like Sassoon. I was SO surprised when he turned out to have survived! And then my reaction was that the book was now going to find new and exciting ways to break me (true, but not in the way I thought), and I spent most of the second half of the book worried Gaunt would die in some other way, and expressed that I was never going to forgive Winn if Gaunt died, or Ellwood did, without Ellwood finding out that Gaunt was still alive.
I absolutely absolutely adored Hayes and his friendship with Gaunt and his more prickly friendship with Ellwood and the contrast between him and the public schoolboys (who always get promoted over him, the poor guy), and him looking after Ellwood (both physically and e.g. warning him away from Watts) even though he thought Ellwood was looking down on him. I was also convinced he was going to die because I loved him so much (I actually said that I thought he would make it to the end of the war and then die, just to spite me. I actually said this!) And he didn't die but he ended up with BOTH LEGS (or at least 1 1/2) gone! I was like. Winn. Could you not have left him ONE leg?! COME ON. I would rather Gaunt or Ellwood had lost their legs. HAYES.
(Also Hayes panicking to Ellwood and Ellwood trying very very badly to reassure him (no wonder Hayes doesn't want to write him), then Ellwood having that exact panic after he's invalided out, omg)
I absolutely loved that Elly was into poetry and used poetry to basically articulate his emotions (I do the same kind of thing -- a lot of how I understand the world is made up of quotations from novels and poems and songs; my head has been full of Sassoon and Owen writing this post) and that moment when he declaimed Keats at Gaunt and Gaunt had to accept that he was in love with him, except that was when Gaunt knew he was going to die, auuuuugh. And also when Elly lost his poetry and then -- that little glimpse of how he might be getting it back at the end -- auuuuuugh
And also Gaunt and his ancient Greek and how sometimes he just quotes in Greek and I love it
And also I love that Winn doesn't just give us the one side, when Gaunt gets captured by the Germans it's a very stark reminder that although we've been POV English, the English aren't the only ones dying in this war and that even if it's easy for the English soldiers not to see the German soldiers as people and vice versa, they both are. And Gaunt being half-German of course knew this from the beginning, which adds another layer. This line, augh: Had it not been for his khaki uniform, no one should have known he was the enemy.
(And that shattering German POV, for just a minute.)
And also the prisoner-of-war scenes which are almost comic, we needed some of that at that point in the book, and ALSO Pritchard and Devi totally being like oh, yeah, no big deal at all about Gaunt being an "invert," and making ordinary jokes about it like they would about anything else and being totally accepting, instead of all the rejection and awfulness Gaunt's been fearing (and might have gotten from someone else), and that healing something in Gaunt so that he can face his love for Elly and actually tell him that, and be okay with it even if Ellwood can't love him back, I LOVE THIS and I know it's absolutely wish-fulfillment, but we already saw the part where Caruthers basically committed suicide so he didn't have to deal with the terrible consequences of being homosexual (augh!), so yeeeeeah I didn't need that to happen again, that was quite all right.
And then I read the bit where Maud says she's not going to marry Elly and I was cheering for her and also thinking that okay, even if everyone else's life is messed up (I still worried that Ellwood and Gaunt wouldn't find each other again, at this point) maybe Maud is the one character things will work out for, because it would be awful if she married Ellwood
AND THEN THEY DID MEET AGAIN
And they were both so damaged! Except that Gaunt, having been in the POW camp instead of fighting for a while, had recovered a bit mentally if not physically, and Ellwood was completely broken, augh. I had not thought that they would have to deal with shell shock instead of death, but of course they did
And Maud and Gaunt making up, and Maud being supportive and Gaunt apologizing (he really has been awful to her) and them speaking in Greek to each other <3
This bit: "Sometimes I think the War is harder on parents than on soldiers," said Pritchard. Gaunt could tell he was lying, but Gaunt would have lied too, if he had thought of it. And then, having learned from Pritchard, he says it to Mrs. Ellwood AUUUUUGH
(I said this before, but, now that I have the spoilers to back me up: all the little moments of kindness between characters that didn't have to happen, but did anyway, are I think what make me so hopelessly a fan of this book)
I think as we get close to the ending my thoughts just get more and more incoherent as Winn breaks my heart over and over again and I hadn't at all thought it would be because things were more-or-less going to be okay except that they can't exactly be okay but they can be as okay as possible:
Devi being ALIVE
CYRIL ROSEVEARE giving them the Brazil out!
"You don't have to give me your answer now, of course," said Roseveare. "I've already written to my uncle about you, just in case--"
He didn't finish. They both knew what he meant: in case I'm killed before I can help you.
Also: KEATS
Gaunt giving Hayes a JOB (and not a job as his freaking valet, either, not that I don't love Lord Peter but... like, let's let Hayes have a little class mobility here, that's the LEAST we can do)
"I'm not playing, either."
I mean, the rational part of my brain knows that the book is doing a few backflips to give them an ending where they can be alive and together
And also because they didn't survive unscathed. At all. Either physically or mentally. Which also seems -- reasonable, statistically speaking.
Also because no one should be Alan Turing (including especially Alan Turing) and I don't at all mind a universe where my characters ARE NOT (now, can I have a fix-it AU for Turing)
Physically speaking: Sassoon (who admittedly did not get his face shot off) lived until age 81 and Graves lived until age 90 after getting shot in the lung, so my headcanon is that Ellwood and Gaunt lived a very long time together :P
And then that last, awful twist of the knife. OH COME ON, the book was DONE and we were all going to live happily (or at least hopefully) EVER AFTER and now the third Roseveare brother is dead (as he dreamed back in the beginning, that was a shoe I had been bracing to drop for forever and when I finally let my guard down...). (While I was reading about WWII poets... I guess this happened to Wilfred Owen. Augh!)
And the LAST PARAGRAPH which didn't even register for me the first time -- I might not have actually read it properly then, because I was too busy trying not to throw the book across the room because Cyril was dead: Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.
:(
Well, I'm thinking about that a lot this week.
The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'
'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.'
And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'
-Siegfried Sassoon
And I suppose reading this book, now, is: well: I think this should be required reading for anyone who tells the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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Date: 2026-04-09 06:10 am (UTC)If you find yourself on a WW1 kick, then Benediction, the last film from the late Terence Davies, is worth checking out. Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon during and after WW1, with Peter Capaldi playing him in later years. I caught it a few years ago on release -- it's a good character study, and largely leaves the horrors to the imagination. (Unlike say 1917 or for that matter some war photography).
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Date: 2026-04-09 07:55 pm (UTC)Ohhhh. I have trouble with movies these days for some reason... but I am not only on a WWI kick but also a Sassoon kick right now, and also horrors to the imagination sounds good... I might check this out, thank you!
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Date: 2026-04-09 07:57 pm (UTC)Yeah this is all hitting me very differently as an adult :/
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Date: 2026-04-09 03:34 pm (UTC)Seconding the reccommendation of Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth” for a female WWI memoir.
And if you do want to cover the German angle, then, of couse: “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque. It’s fiction, but he did serve, and there is a reason why it’s still one of the best known WWI books. Remarque himself unlike his main character survived (obviously, couldn’t have written the novel othrwise), and lived to become an enemy of the Nazis who in the late Weimar Republic singled him out for rants and (once the film version hit the cinemas) boycott and sabotage actions. (Goebbels ordered white mice released in a Berlin cinema showing the film, I kid you not). Remarque went into exile, had a long term affair with Marlene Dietrich and ended up married to Paulette Goddard after she divorced Charlie Chaplin.
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Date: 2026-04-09 08:11 pm (UTC)Ohhhhh you have got to be right about this. I clued in to Sassoon (I mean... the poetry was what made me go down that rabbit hole in the first place, but when I found Sassoon was half-Jewish, that clinched it) but not Graves, despite also (this is in the spoilers section) finding out afterwards that Graves had got a very similar wound to one that Gaunt receives in the book (though in different circumstances). And the Greek tracks too... Though, you know... I actually came to Graves first through The White Goddess, so, uh, in my head he's very much associated with "hot heterosexual mess in the 1940s-50s" and not so much earlier or gayer even though he should be :)
(In both cases, mind you, it's gone quite massively AU with both plot and character, as you already noted with the school-BFF thing. Gaunt in particular is... well, yeah, maybe he's a hot mess too, but in a different and more endearing way than I think Graves is :) )
And if you do want to cover the German angle, then, of couse: “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque.
Ha, I have actually managed to channel you ahead of time here, which I realize I forgot to mention in the post! This is one of the books I did read as a young person but only remembered vaguely as "life really sucked for these guys." (Which, like... I guess if I took one lesson from it as a young teenager, sure, that's reasonable.) And after reading In Memoriam I felt that I should reread it (especially, as you say, after reading about it from the British side), so I'm about 20% through at this point. It's really good and also really striking, again, how much I didn't understand as a young teenager -- I mean, I didn't understand a LOT, I was clearly too young to be reading it in general to really pick up a lot of things -- but in particular how absolutely appalling it was that all these kids were teenagers, which Remarque does mention pretty much constantly :/
Thank you for the biographical note, as well -- I hadn't looked Remarque up yet, and had been sort of vaguely assuming that he'd died in the war as well (I suppose I must have thought he was published posthumously, like Owen?)
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Date: 2026-04-10 07:25 am (UTC)Father began getting up in the middle of hte night and walking to the village. Lost, he would knock on the first door he recognized. Francisco Mosso opened his door: 'Don Roberto, you're out late tonight. Wait for me to get dressed and I'll take you home.' The villagers looked after him. (...) Perhaps the most horrible aspect of the now accelerating process was that Father's war neuroses and shell shock returned. It was tragic to see the terror in his eyes as he tried to run away, supported by his nurse and a walking stick, from the ghosts of the Somme. His lucid periods grew shorter and shorter. And still he tried to run.
If you want to read my review of another fictionalisation of Graves, there is a great play about him and T.E. Lawrence in the aftermath of WWI which I reviewed here. Also, when I was with my mother on Mallorca nearly two decades ago, among other things I visited his house and did a pic spam here (there is a photo of Siegfried Sassoon included, btw), and here is his tombstone:
Erich Maria Remarque hails from thhe same city as my paternal grandfather, Osnabrück, which my Granddad was always proud of. Granddad's own father had died in WWI when Granddad was a toddler, so he never knew him, and All Quiet on the Western Front had a deeply personal meaning for him as it was his way of trying to know his father and what his father went through before his death. If want to hear something more cheerful, here is a great anecdote about how his affair with Marlene started.
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Date: 2026-04-10 03:34 pm (UTC)as a final tragic note of his life he didn't really escape it, because when senility in his final years removed the barriers between past and present, his shell shock came back in full intensity.
:((((( Trauma SUCKS. As does senility.
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Date: 2026-04-09 10:47 pm (UTC)Selena's Graves theory seems solid but there's a more detailed discussion of the book's origin here -- she was first inspired by reading Graves''Good Bye to All That' which took her to Sassoon and then to the newspaper of a boys' school from the era. It's a really good use of research to build out the world and it's SO heartbreaking, especially those brothers.
I'm curious what ship this evoked for you -- I read this long enough ago that I remember the history more than the relationship.
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Date: 2026-04-10 03:55 pm (UTC)Hahahaha this is me still going strong in Operation Mincemeat (musical) fandom. The juggernaut ship is Ewen Montagu / Charles Cholmondeley (Monty/Charlie), where the musical characters are very different from their real-life counterparts (definitely not a ship in RL).
Anyway, in the musical, there's definitely this whole dynamic of the characters being steeped in public-schoolboy-mindset as well as the whole pairing (more or less implicit depending on the specific actors) between a extroverted-social-Jewish golden boy and his introverted-bullied-repressed-scholarly friend. (Monty in the musical isn't played as Jewish (presumably because the writers weren't Jewish), but RL Montagu was, and in fanon is often depicted as such.) Different war, of course, and (both in RL and in the musical) Montagu and Cholmondeley ended up in intelligence rather than in combat.
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Date: 2026-04-10 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 09:09 pm (UTC)here is a short post about the Ben Macintyre book about the history and the book Finding Hester about historical research the show's fans did, though it's not very detailed.
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Date: 2026-04-13 04:42 pm (UTC)I'm going to be obnoxious about books: I like Singled Out, although I find it occasionally sentimental and there are some places where I feel the author is forcing her own reading on texts that don't really say that. She has written several other books about women in 20th-c Britain which are all worth a read if you're interested in that kind of thing. You might also enjoy Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which is about her experience of WWI as a V.A.D. and the deaths of her brother, boyfriend, and several friends in the war (but surprisingly hopeful in the end).
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Date: 2026-04-14 12:29 am (UTC)I appreciate the reminder that the author of Singled Out may be forcing her own reading on texts -- always good for me to watch out for that sort of thing as I tend in general to be less skeptical than I should be. I do want to read Vera Brittain, thank you! <3