1915. World War I. Charlotte Armstrong-Barnes takes a nursing certificate in her efforts to contribute towards the war effort while her beau John Malcolm Dundas joins up. John Malcolm’s sister Maggie takes a job at the munitions factory and his younger brother Alex is just raring to grow up and fight in the army himself. Frances, Charlotte’s older brother, is the opposite and tries to avoid joining up for as long as possible.
Through the lives of these five youths, Theresa Breslin showcases the huge and irrevocable changes that the War wrought upon the Western world. In remarkably few words — this is a book for young adults, after all — we are exposed to life at home in a Scottish village, working in hospitals in Scotland and in France, and the fighting on the Western Front.
Breslin treats her subject with profound compassion and understanding; although she makes clear the devastating loss and deprivation soldiers had to endure, we also see the camaraderie and excitement that characters like John Malcolm feel when setting off to war and making sure the enemy does not get an inch of “our” soil, the courage and commitment that soldiers put into fighting for the homes and families and friends they love. Even Frances, the most anti-war of them all, admits the genuine, “swelling, overwhelming pride of handing over your position intact, of being able to say that you had held the line in your sector”. As terrible as the war was, there was an acknowledged nobility in defending one’s home, a nobility that tinges the edges of war with shades of grey.
Because of the war, there were also immense advancements made in women’s rights and in medicine. In Maggie and Charlotte we see young women working in positions that were never open to them — working, instead of waiting to be married off in Charlotte’s case. Medicine was pushed to expand itself in order to cope with the overwhelming number of injuries sustained by soldiers. Without the war, these changes could not have occurred as rapidly as they did.
Without the war, of course, people also would not have died in the droves that they did.
No matter how often I reread this book, the initial conversations always feel a little jarring to me; the characters’ speaking style seems too constructed and artificial, as if the author is trying (too) hard to recreate speech in the 1910s. (”Err” doesn’t seem to fit in with someone who usually says, “was not”, “I am not”, “does not”, and so on.) The loss felt by the characters when death comes knocking is real, however — and death comes knocking so often.
“How can we bear it?” she wailed. “What are we going to do?”
[She] felt her own tears begin. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” And she sat down in the road and began to cry.
But we, like they, keep going. We — as humans — are very good at managing, if only because “we have to”.
It’s seeing people continue to give their best to their lives after losing someone they love dearly that leaves me in tears. This book has never failed to move me in the times I’ve read and reread it, and last weekend was no exception — when I was done, I was left bawling for a while.
Sometimes I wonder what the world will be like when my children’s generation come into being: that generation who knows nothing about the World Wars. For the people of my generation, we still have grandparents we care about who tell us about the things that happened then; at least we comprehend the human impact that war has on an individual level. Who will our children have to tell these stories to them? No one they know personally who has been through a World War. If these wars no longer live in human memory, does that mean we will forget and fight each other on a world-scale again? As if we don’t already fight enough.
Or will we look at literature like this and remember? Can stories like these stretch our imaginative and empathic abilities and remind us why we must not engage in war like this again?
I hope so.
Remembrance is an honest, moving novel that lives up to its name, a tribute to the people who fought (not just the Allies), and to the people left behind. It is an answer to the challenge that Siegfried Sassoon poses in his poem ‘Aftermath’, quoted at the very end:
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
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