In Memoriam
When war begins in 1914, Ellwood and Gaunt are seventeen, in their last year at their British boarding school. Almost immediately, their school newspaper begins to list the deaths of its alumni. Pressured by family, patriotism, girls handing out white feathers, and his own internal demons, Gaunt enlists, and Ellwood follows him. The enlistment age is nineteen, but they and boys even younger are commissioned as lieutenants and sent to the front in France, to command men older than they are in an endless battle with the German troops across No Man’s Land, where bones protrude from the ground and a particular decaying body is a landmark.
In Memoriam is both a war novel and a love story of men who are not allowed to love each other; marriage to “nice women” is what society demands, a path as clearly laid out as the one to the front. But the war demolishes all assumptions, and the lives of everyone in it, including the survivors who come home reeling from shell shock that would now be called PTSD.
In Memoriam is a shattering novel written with an assurance even more impressive because it is the author’s debut book. The narrative moves between the time when Ellwood and Gaunt were boys in school rather than boys mangled by war, and the grisly realities of the front, where buried bodies surface through the endless mud and the average British officer lasts three months before he’s killed or wounded. There are flashes of dark humor and deeply thought-out characterization to keep the love story at the heart of the novel and ground us amid the bleak horror of the war. Highly recommended.
