The Return of the Soldier (1918)
Feminista 100 Greatest Works of 20th Century Fiction by Women Writers
This very fine short novel, like most of the rest of Rebecca West's work, is vastly underappreciated. It captures, as well as any of the books I've read, the desperate yearning of the Great War generation for a return to the world that the War had shattered. It is spare but thoughtful, and quite lovely.
It is March 1916 and the bloody stalemate continues in France. The soldier whose return is awaited is Captain Chris Baldry. Awaiting him are his wife Kitty and his cousin Jenny, both ensconced at Baldry Court, a Thames Valley manor house whose bucolic beauty is being encroached upon by the 'red suburban stain" of the neighboring town of Wealdstone, just as surely as the red stain of war has encroached upon the lives of Britons everywhere. Jenny, who narrates the story, sets the scene:
I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning
my forehead against the glass and staring
unobservantly at the view. You probably know the
beauty of that view; for when Chris rebuilt
Baldry Court after his marriage he handed it over
to architects who had not so much the wild eye of
the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist,
and between them they massaged the dear old place
into matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated
papers. The house lies on the crest of
Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops
to miles of emerald pasture-land lying wet and
brilliant under a westward line of sleek hills,
blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it
range the suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon
cedar, the branches of which are like darkness
made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the
topmost pines in the wood that breaks
downward, its bare boughs a close texture of browns
and purples, from the pond on the edge of the
hill.
That day its beauty was an affront to me, because,
like most Englishwomen of my time, I was
wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding
the national interest and everything else except the
keen prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him,
I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from
the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness
his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had
bad dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris running
across the brown rottenness of
No Man's Land, starting back here because he trod
upon a hand, not even looking there because of
the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till
my dream was packed full of horror did I see him
pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety,
if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men
slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and
none but the grimmer philosophers could say that
they had reached safety by their fall. And when
I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff
and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice,
that rings indomitable yet has most of its gay
notes flattened, of the modern subaltern.
"We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell
came along. My pal sang out, 'Help me, old man;
I 've got no legs !' and I had to answer,
'I
can't, old man; I've got no hands!'"
Well, such are the dreams of Englishwomen today.
I could not complain, but I wished for the
return of our soldier.
Then a woman turns up at the door to tell them that Chris has been wounded. And how would she know, this daughter of a local publican? It turns out that Chris has shell shock induced amnesia and remembers nothing after the year 1901, when he and the woman, Margaret Grey, were lovers. He has been writing to her as if the intervening 15 years never happened.
So Chris does return, but not as a soldier. Instead, he believes himself still to be the naive young man of 1901, not coincidentally the final year of Queen Victoria's reign. He remembers nothing of his wife and begins a chaste courtship of the willing, though married, Margaret. Jenny happens upon them one day and they seem to embody something special, which is in danger of being lost:
It was not utter dullness not to have anticipated
the beauty that I saw. No one could have told. They
had taken the mackintosh rug out of the dinghy and
spread it on this little space of clear grass, I
think so that they could look at a scattering of
early primroses in a pool of white anemones at an
oak-tree's foot. She had run her hands over the
rug so that it lay quite smooth and comfortable under
him when at last he felt drowsy and turned on his
side to sleep. He lay there in the confiding
relaxation of a sleeping child, his hands unclenched,
and his head thrown back so that the bare throat
showed defenselessly. Now he was asleep and his
face undarkened by thought, one saw how very
fair he really was. And she, her mournfully vigilant
face pinkened by the cold river of air sent by
the advancing evening through the screen of rusted-gold
bracken behind her, was sitting by him, just
watching.
I have often seen people grouped like that on the
common outside our gates on Bank holidays. Most
often the man has a handkerchief over his face to
shade him from the sun, and the woman squats
beside him and peers through the undergrowth to
see that the children come to no harm as they play.
It has sometimes seemed to me that there was a significance
about it. You know when one goes into
the damp, odorous coolness of a church in a Catholic
country and sees the kneeling worshipers, their
bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with
abandonment as though to represent the inevitable
bending of the will to a purpose outside the individual
person, or when under any sky one sees a
mother with her child in her arms, something turns
in one's heart like a sword, and one says to
oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes there
is an end to the world." But people like me, who
are not artists, are never sure about people they
don't know. So it was not until now, when it
happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris
and my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed in
peace as in a crystal sphere, that I knew it was
the most significant, as it was the loveliest, attitude in
the world. It means that the woman has gathered
the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it
warm in love and peace so that his body can rest
quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a
woman to do. I know there are things at least as
great for those women whose independent spirits
can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the
home park of their personal relationships, but
independence is not the occupation of most of us.
What we desire is greatness such as this, which
had given sleep to the beloved. I had known that
he was having bad nights at Baldry Court in that
new room with the jade-green painted walls and the
lapis-lazuli fireplace, which he found with
surprise to be his instead of the remembered little
room with the fishing-rods; but I had not been
able to do anything about it.
But inevitably this brief pre-War idyll in the midst of War must come to an end. The soldier in Chris Baldry must return and with his return Chris will return to the War. And, as we well understand, the men who return from the War, and many will not or will not return whole, will indeed be soldiers and not the young men of 1901, a melancholy fact which West captures perfectly in the novel's final scene, after Margaret has shocked him back to reality:
There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness
of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly
saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost
had she dissolved into the shadows; in
another moment the night would have her. With his
back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris
walked across the lawn. He was looking up under
his brows at the over-arching house as though it
were a hated place to which, against all his hopes,
business had forced him to return. He
stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast
by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our
house were worse than darkness, affection worse
than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent
smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift
in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a
boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with
the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to
me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst
circumstance of his return. When we had lifted
the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would
go back to that flooded trench in Flanders,
under that sky more full of flying death than clouds,
to that No Man's Land where bullets fall like
rain on the rotting faces of the dead. . . .
"Jenny, aren't they there?" Kitty asked again.
"They 're both there."
"Is he coming back ?"
"He 's coming back."
"Jenny ! Jenny ! How does he look?"
"Oh. . . ." How could I say it? "Every inch a soldier."
She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction.
"He 's cured!" she whispered slowly. "He 's
cured!"
The power of the novel lies in that final notion, that Chris is "cured," is returned to normal, when he is once again a soldier, who has experienced the War. For his suffering wife, this sentiment is understandable. To the reader, the situation is much more ambiguous : the truth may be preferable to the illusion he was living, but Chris (Europe) was surely happier in that pre-War state.
This is the best novel of WWI that I've read. Where most of the
Literature to emerge from the War treated it as an exceptional kind of
warfare and dwelt on it's effect on the men fighting it, West understood
that the real tragedy of the War was the changes that it was wrought throughout
society. The story she tells is profoundly conservative, lamenting
the wholesale change that had destroyed the pre-War way of life and hoping
to retrieve the best of what has been lost.
(Reviewed:23-Aug-00)
Grade: (A+)
