og hot take, , In short, war is bad. Also gay.longer review I sat down to read this ahead of Word on the Water book club, and then just…didn’t stand up from the sofa until I finished. To say I liked this book would be an understatement (to say I loved it would also be a bit hyperbolic, though). I think it’s interesting to go through a few of the concerns/complaints that were mentioned during the actual book club meeting, which includes a number of attendees with much different backgrounds and therefore contexts:
– another book about public school (for americans: private school) boys and [war]
– unrealistic in its depiction of war because they all end up in the same regiment/series of unbelievable consequences
– not unsparing enough in depiction of war/war is seen as a lighthearted event
– unrealistic ending, too pat with its “oh look how poetry changed”
So to address them in turn:
1. I can’t really speak to the exhaustion for stories about rich boys facing the world, I love these sorts of tales and always have. Probably because I myself am a public school girl but a first generation attendee on financial aid, so always on the outside looking in? But that’s just me, when it comes to the Etons of the world I, like many Americans, find the entire system fascinating because it doesn’t have the same connotations of spoiled nepotism elite infiltration of government and austerity and so forth. I can understand why attendees were sick of hearing about these types of characters, but I loved it.
2 – 4. I’ll just lump these together, because as it turns out this book is decently well researched and there’s an author’s note at the back where she talks about where she got her various pieces. Yes, whole groups of public school boys would end up in the same regiment because that’s how war was for them, a jolly good way to hang with your chums (and then very quickly lose your marbles). The most interesting, actually, is how language did change post-WW1, after which it was felt that the whimsy of Romanticism was insufficiently able to rise to the horrors of modern trench warfare. So while Ellwood’s constant use of poetic references might annoy you, it is period accurate.
End of day, I thought this was a beautiful reminder of what the cost of war was for that first generation, who were fighting for ill defined reasons and ill defined gains. WW1 might not have the pizzaz of Nazis, but it represented a drastic shift in how we think about war and the costs–not in the least because we forgot all the lessons a few years later and did the whole thing over again. Which is to say we didn’t learn much, which makes the whole endeavor all the more tragic.