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    The Return Of The Soldier
    The Return Of The Soldier
    The Return Of The Soldier
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    The Return Of The Soldier

    By Rebecca West

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    About this ebook

    After fighting in the trenches during the First World War, Captain Chris Baldry returns home a different man. Shell-shocked and finding it difficult to cope, Captain Baldry’s mental trauma takes a toll on both himself and the family who anxiously awaited his safe return.

    The Return of the Soldier was author Rebecca West’s first novel, but it was not until recent decades that literary critics and scholars recognized the work as a complex and important piece of literature depicting the First World War era. The book was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1982.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781443431996
    Author

    Rebecca West

    Dame Rebecca West was a British writer, journalist, and literary critic. West initially trained as an actress, but soon found her calling as a writer after having several essays and editorial pieces on politics and women’s suffrage published in prominent magazines such as The Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald Tribune. As a journalist, West covered important political and social topics like the Nuremburg Trials and the aftermath of the Second World War, and also published such notable books as A Train of Powder, The Meaning of Treason, and The New Meaning of Treason. She also wrote works of fiction, including the acclaimed The Return of the Soldier, and the autobiographical Aubrey trilogy, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. A respected journalist and intellectual figure, West died in 1983 at the age of 90.

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    Reviews for The Return Of The Soldier

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    • 4/5
      With her usual exquisite prose marred a bit by her usual tendency to show it off, Rebecca West tells what might be the ultimate 1st world problem story about a mature man who when wounded in the Great War, loses memory of the last 15 years of devotion to his father's business and providing more than comfortable lives for his wife and female relatives. Told from the viewpoint of his besotted cousin, a childhood friend, who despairs both over his re-connection with the now dumpy love of his youth and the need for him to forgo the comfort she gives to return to an adult live.
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderfully written story that belongs to WWI, but can also be considered as a microcosmic story. [[Rebecca West]] emotionally describes the return of an officer during WWI suffering from a memory disorder he has due to the detonation of a bomb. He believes that he is still young (20 years old). Everything he does with his wife, with whom he has been married for ten years, seems to have been wiped out. He only remembers his old love of youth, which is now already married.I highly recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      A lovely, heartbreaking novella about love that transcends time and the value of truth.A well-to-do British officer returns mid-WWI with no memory of anything for the last 15 years. His beautiful, cold and unimaginative wife is appalled to find that all he cares about is spending time with his teen sweetheart, now a kindly village woman of limited means and broken physical appearance. Narrated by a cousin, the tale asks whether the truth of our reality is more important than our happiness. A perfect little story.
    • 3/5
      Rebecca West's story is important historically to understand the dated attitudes towards trauma victims, but that also means the tale has not stood the test of time like some of its contemporary works.
    • 4/5
      Interesting
    • 3/5
      3 starsA wealthy Englishman returns from war shell-shocked as an amnesiac. He doesn't remember his wife but desperately wants to find the woman he was in love with some 15 years before. His devoted cousin, who wants him well and happy, tries to make sure it happens. They all come together but suffer in various ways. Good ending but left to the readers interpretation. I'd recommend it.
    • 5/5
      The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; (5*)The Return of the Soldier is the first WW I novel to be written by a woman and is written in lovely prose. Chris Baldry, a wealthy soldier, returns from the front suffering from amnesia and having forgotten the past fifteen years of his life. He has forgotten his marriage to Kitty along with the birth and subsequent death of their son, Oliver. He believes himself to be yet romantically involved with the daughter of an innkeeper, Margaret, who is now married to William Grey.Jenny, our narrator, is Chris's unmarried cousin and childhood playmate who now lives with Chris and Kitty. It appears that she feels romantically inclined toward Chris. Chris asks to see Margaret and Kitty agrees that would be the best thing as Margaret is who he remembers being close to. Margaret whose love for Chris coexists with her tenderness toward her husband, then begins to visit Baldry Court regularly to spend time with the amnesiac.The novel traces the reactions of Jenny and Kitty to Chris's forgetting them and to his undiminished love for Margaret. They grieve, they are filled with anger, but Jenny cultivates a bond with Margaret in order to rekindle her relationship with Chris. They call in doctors to attempt to cure him. Finally a Dr. Anderson arrives. He talks to Kitty and Margaret and learns of the death of Chris and Kitty's son. Margaret suggests that giving Chris some objects loved by his son might shock Chris back to his memory of the last fifteen years. This proposal is put forward. Margaret goes to Chris on the grounds of Baldry Court with the child's ball and jersey. Kitty and Jenny wait watching from the window as Margaret sacrifices her own happiness and Chris' in order to bring him back to a sane and current reality.In spite of portraying this cure as a sacrifice of Chris and Margaret's happiness and at a risk to Chris's life, for he will now have to return to the front, the doctor moves ahead with what he sees as a possible cure for the young soldier. Chris is repeatedly described as ill, a term which helps make curing him seem the only sensible thing to do. I find this to be a wonderful book. It is written beautifully and I highly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Christopher Baldry's wife Kitty and his cousin Jenny wait for him at his home in Harrow Weald and imagine the dangers facing him in the trenches. Memories of Christopher are everywhere in the house and on the grounds of the estate that he loves so well. However, when Christopher unexpectedly returns to them, he has left those memories behind. A concussion has left him with amnesia and no memory of the last 15 years of his life, or of his wife, Kitty. In his mind, he is a young man still in the throes of his first love. No matter what happens next, nothing will ever be the same for Christopher or for the three women who love him.This novel retains the immediacy of the emotional burden borne by the women on the home front during World War I. Women were not physically present in the trenches, yet the trenches left an imprint in their souls. While some women had to deal with the death of their husbands, lovers, or sons on the battlefield, others, like the women in this short novel, had to adapt to men who had been physically or psychologically wounded. 21st century novelists like Jacqueline Winspear and Charles Todd attempt to recreate the social context of WWI. Rebecca West lived through it, and her novel allows 21st century readers to briefly inhabit that world.
    • 4/5
      Serious drama of privileged family and what lies beneath the surface of relationships. Recommend it.
    • 4/5
      An elegant, deceptive slip of a novel, written during and about World War I.

      "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."
    • 4/5
      Astonishing. Painful, intense, lyrical, mystical, disturbing. I'll write more about it on the blog as soon as I can.
    • 4/5
      This short novel is a minor and rather early work by an author I really need to read more of. On the face of it, it's a "home-front" war novel, in which three women find themselves caring for a man who has come back from the trenches psychologically scarred. But it struck me as much more general than that. West uses the war as the clearest possible topical expression of the dreadful arbitrariness of life, and the story really seems to be about the irreversibility of time, and the need to face up to where we are because we aren't able to go back to where we were. Which is perhaps just the tiniest bit trite, but it provides a very useful framework on which to hang some really magnificently acute observations of the way relations between men and women and between people of different social classes and degrees of wealth function. It's especially interesting to see the way she implicates the reader in her narrator's shockingly physical disgust for the poverty of Margaret (a person she comes to admire and even love) to make us see how deeply class-prejudice is ingrained in the dominant ideology, and at the same time how false it is.If you know something about West's biography, it's also amusing to notice how she uses the very Mister-Pollyish location of an inn on an island in the Thames to represent the idyllic past, and how the story centres on a man who is loved simultaneously and complacently by an absurd number of women (although probably not quite as many at once as Mr Wells...).
    • 4/5
      Rebecca West (nee Cicely Isabel Fairfield 1892-1983) began her distinguished career in the second decade of the 20th Century, a period of exciting international literary contributions. The publication of the British writer’s first novel, The Return of the Soldier, established her immediately as one of a group of very talented women authors. The short, modernist novel is filled with indications of West’s brilliance and clear insight that make the reader sit up and take notice while reading the simple and direct narrative.The story involves a shell-shocked soldier sent home from combat in the trenches in France during World War I. He is unfit to continue his mission because of retrograde amnesia that causes him to believe he is living in an earlier period of his life, a time long before his army service. Returning home to England, he tries to take up his life as it was before even though people who were important to him have aged 15 years. He feels as young as he did in those days and receives support during his delusion of youth by his current wife and his former lover. The structure and psychological content of this novel remind me of Virginia Woolf’s early work, The Voyage Out. I enjoyed the surprising, illuminating flashes of insight of the characters that made me realize the depth of talent shown right out of the literary gate of this young, 21 year old writer. The novel is a bit long on description of flora even though the environment is important in the story. The content of the story is relevant today due to the new diagnosis of shell-shock, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder applied to soldiers in increasing numbers. I pushed the buttons on my Kindle and went to the Kindle Store to buy her second novel, The Judge. I am looking forward to reading the complete work of Rebecca West (fiction and non-fiction), now considered a leading intellectual woman of the 20th Century.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the Elizabeth Klett recording available at LibriVox - she is an excellent narrator! The descriptions are beautifully written. The story itself was sad, rather than tragic, and the horrors of WW1 are very much in the background. One reason that this didn't get a higher rating from me is that the class-conscious snobbery exhibited by Kitty and Jenny rasped on my nerves. I have read other books that have this same attitude that didn't bother me so I don't know what it was -- maybe the way it was phrased?
    • 5/5
      Modern classic about a man returning from WWI with 'shell shock' and no memory of the past decade. Interesting psychology.
    • 3/5
      An interesting novella, looking at shellshock, as PTSD was then known. A little too easy and simple, but PTSD is not always the same--and we do not have the end to Chris' story, only the beginning and middle.———England, World War I. An upper-class woman, Kitty, finds out her husband has been injured when a middle-class woman comes to tell her so. How does this Margaret Allington Grey know Chris is hurt? Because he wrote her.He is coming home to recover (if possible) from battle-induced amnesia. He is not physically injured in any obvious way. But he does not remember Kitty, their late little son, or anything from the last 10 years. He remembers Jenny, Kitty's friend (his relative?) whom he has known his whole life. Margaret was his previous girlfriend, but her father had financial difficulties and it didn't work out.Home he comes, to a wife he doesn't know, a house that she has redecorated, and everyone looking old. Margaret comes daily to help with the transition.Margaret and a doctor think reminding him of their son Oliver is key--but she does not want to do it, as he will be sent back to the front. Jenny realizes that if they don't try, Chris will be doomed to being the "doddering old man" in town. Which he himself would never have chosen. So they try, and it falls to Margaret
    • 4/5
      The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly enclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.

      This was a wonderful first novel, one written before the Armistice and yet it exhibited some carelessness. This otherwise ebullient story of a shell shocked story unable to remember his wife or the last fifteen years instead longs for an earlier entanglement -- with a prole. How much description is applied (read wasted) to working class woman, her lack of fashion, her dingy home, her inability to maintain a youthful freshness. How ghastly!. Why do such people have to spoil everything? Can't they stay in their tenements?
    • 4/5
      I found The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West an incredibly sad story. As related by his cousin, Jenny, this story tells of the return of the shell shocked Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War. Far from the happy reunion his wife and cousin expected, they find themselves welcoming back a complete stranger. His mental anguish has caused him to forget the last fifteen years of his life. Instead of his wife, the beautiful, vivacious Kitty, he yearns to see his old girlfriend, Margret.My heart was touched by all these characters. The shallow Kitty who only wanted her superficial life with her husband back, the cousin Jenny who obviously loved Chris and was willing to spend her life as part of his background, Margaret, from a different class, who cares for Chris and recaptures her youth through him, and, of course, Christopher himself, so filled with the pain and horror of the war that he went back to a happier time in his life.In this one quite short story, the author has captured a generation as class snobbery, the horrors of trench warfare in World War I and the budding science of psychoanalysis are all touched upon. While the conditions he faced in the war were obviously the trigger for Chris’ regression, there were other factors that affected his trauma that needed to be addressed. Although the book ends with a relieved Kitty declaring her husband “cured”, I suspect that this was just a beginning and that Chris would always be a changed man so in actuality the future is still undetermined. The Return of the Soldier was a haunting and emotional read.
    • 5/5
      Christopher Baldry is at war, in the trenches of WWI France. At his elegant English estate, two women wait for his return. Kitty Baldry is his beautiful but superficial wife. Jenny Baldry is a cousin who loves him dearly and understands him deeply. And then one day a third woman, Margaret West appears at the door. She is a judged to be a very common type; both the Baldry’s are rather appalled at her appearance and manner. But Margaret has a strange story – Christopher Baldry has been wounded and has written to Margaret whom he loved in his youth instead of writing to his wife or family. On investigation her story is true. Christopher Baldry has lost his memory of the last fifteen years due to shell shock. He returns home and can be comforted by no one but his previous love, Margaret. He has no memory of his wife and is dismayed by the aging and changes of his cousin and others he knows. What will be the key to unlocking his memory? And what will be the price? This is a wonderful gem of a story. It’s very short and available on Project Gutenberg. One could read it in a few hours. But it’s by no means short on impact. It will definitely be appearing on my list of favorite reads for this year.
    • 5/5
      Before I read this, I had known of Rebecca West only through her famous book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Born in London in 1892, she had little formal education, her family being in genteel poverty. She trained as an actress, but seems to have acted little, becoming a sufragette and then the lover of H.G. Wells. She turned to writing and had a distinguished career in serious journalism. She also wrote a number of novels, but it seems unlikely that most are widely read now. The Return of the Soldier, however, has never quite been forgotten and was filmed, with a stellar cast, in 1982. Her first book, it was published in 1918.

      As the book opens, two women are in a country house just outside London on a bright day in the early spring of 1916. They are well-to-do; Kitty is the attractive wife of Baldry, the master of the house, and Jenny, less pretty, is his cousin. Jenny has started to worry that they have heard nothing of Baldry, a serving soldier, for several weeks. Kitty assures her that the War Office would have informed her if there were anything amiss. They are interrupted by the arrival of Margaret, a dowdy woman of limited means from a bleak suburb nearby. She informs them that Baldry is, in fact, in hospital in Boulogne, that he has lost his memory after an explosion, and that he has regressed some 15 years to the time when, as a young man, he loved her. That is why the War Office has not been in touch; it is Margaret to whom Baldry has written, and it is her that he wishes to see.

      Baldry is brought home, and is indifferent to his wife; a little less so to his cousin, who he does remember, albeit as a young woman – but he spends his time with Margaret. He is unconcerned that she is now a middle-aged, married, suburban dowd. It becomes clear that he still loves her. Meanwhile his wife, Kitty, desperately wants him restored to normality.

      There is an understated lyricism in West’s writing that makes the book poignant and vivid. The sequences in which Baldry remembers his early courtship of Margaret 15 years earlier are set on Monkey Island at Bray, in a curve of the Thames, where Margaret’s father is landlord of the Monkey Island Inn. The place is real enough; today it is an hotel and conference centre just a mile or so from the M4 motorway. West and Wells had frequented Monkey Island immediately before the First World War. In the book, it is a quiet country pub catering to the odd passing boatman. Baldry describes how it was reached:

      ...a private road... followed a line of noble poplars down to the ferry. Between two of them... there stood a white hawthorn. In front were the dark-green, glassy waters of an unvisited backwater, and beyond them a bright lawn set with many walnut-trees and a few great chestnuts, well lighted with their candles...

      To anyone who knows the countryside in the south of England, this is evocative. In April, May and June the sky turns a deeper blue and the trees and hedgerows come alive; the white and pink chestnut candles are a delight, as are the white patches of hawthorn.

      Underneath this lyricism, however, this book has some hard themes, some of which must have raised eyebrows at the time. Some have seen the book as a clinical description of combat trauma. Others will see a feminist message here – that the dependence of women on men distorts the behaviour of both, and is even a driver for war. There is plenty of evidence in the book for this interpretation and besides, West was a strong proponent of women’s rights. But perhaps we shouldn’t apply modern labels to people who pre-date them.

      Class is another theme. Margaret, the woman to whose affections Baldry has returned, is a woman of a lower station. Jenny and Kitty meet Margaret for the first time, when she first calls at the Baldry house: She wore a yellowish raincoat and a black hat with plumes. The sticky straw hat had only lately been renovated by something out of a little bottle bought at the chemist’s. ...Margaret starts to explain that Baldry is wounded, in Boulogne, and that it seems they do not know. Her words are not taken at face value: This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers ...Presently she would say that she had gone to some expense to come here with her news and that she was poor... These class tensions have still not been excised from British life.

      However, West makes an even more important point that is made much more explicitly, and in my view less well, by a more famous book, Heller’s Catch-22. That is the whole question of the logic of war. Kitty, the spurned wife, calls in a series of doctors to try to bring back his memory and restore him to normal. If she succeeds, he will of course return to the front. Cousin Jenny understands this, and feels growing sympathy for Margaret. It slowly becomes clear that, by trying to restore him to “normal” and send him back to war, Kitty is being monstrously selfish. The lover is right; the wife is wrong; restoration to “normal” means death. This was a brave message for 1918.

      An expensive specialist has arrived to “cure” Baldry – that is to say, restore his memory. Margaret, the working-class woman that he loves, protests to the doctor:

      “What’s the use of talking? You can’t cure him,” – she caught her lower lip with her teeth and fought back from the brink of tears, – “make him happy, I mean. All you can do is to make him ordinary.”

      “I grant you that’s all I do,” he said. ..”It’s my profession to bring people... to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it’s the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don’t see the urgency myself.”

      In Catch-22, the American airman, Yossarian, finds that there is a twisted logic: if you request relief from combat duty on the grounds of insanity, you must be wrong, because to do so is sane. West is subtler but the message is the same; by being “cured”, Baldry will be made to go back to the front, which is mad. Being restored to sanity would make Baldry do something insane. The Return of the Soldier is a beautiful book, but it is also a very subversive one; it questions not only the definition of normality, but, in so doing, the very nature and legitimacy of the authority of one human over another.
    • 4/5
      I'll tell you I think the Second World War was much more comfortable because in the First World War the position of women was so terrible, because there you were, not in danger. Men were going out and getting killed for you and you'd much prefer they weren't. […] There was a genuine humanitarian feeling of guilt about that in the first war. It was very curious, you see. There I sat on my balcony in Leigh-on-Sea and heard guns going in France. It was a most peculiar war. It was really better, in the Second World War, when the people at home got bombed. I found it a relief. You were taking your chance and you might be killed and you weren't in that pampered sort of unnatural state.

      —Rebecca West (in a 1981 interview with the Paris Review)

      I kept thinking of this quote when I was reading The Return of the Soldier, because I feel like it's a novel that comes out of that mixture of anger and guilt that Rebecca West is talking about – anger at the complacency of civilians, and guilt at the idea that you are one of them. This is at least one way to explain the intense unlikeability of the central characters.A slim parable set during the First World War, the book centres on two women in exactly that "pampered, unnatural state" that West complained about – passing their time in luxurious indolence at their country seat while they wait for the man of the house to return from the front. Against this background, West orchestrates a simple but diverting ethical dilemma: when Captain Chris Baldry does come back, he's shell-shocked and suffering from acute amnesia. He can't remember the last fifteen years of his life, he has no idea who his wife is, and he's demanding to see the woman he was in love with fifteen years ago.It should be the set-up for a melodrama, but West instead uses it – rather unexpectedly – to make a quick, vicious exploration of class relations and the nature of authenticity. Mrs Grey – our soldier's old flame, long since married to someone else – is a working-class lady, and our upper-class narrator finds her uncongenial to a degree that leaves a modern reader breathless. Mrs Grey is described as being ‘repulsively furred with neglect and poverty’, her face ‘sour with thrift’, ‘a cancerous blot on the fair world’ – ‘not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children’.What this class horror boils down to is an instinctive feeling that Mrs Grey, and those like her, are somehow not quite human – not fully real. Like her tortoise-shell umbrella, she is ‘unveracious’ (a word that crops up twice). And this unpleasant impulse is played out against the struggle over what to do with Chris, whom shell-shock has now delivered into his own unveracious world – where, to his wife's consternation, he's perfectly happy.Happiness may be important, but the argument made by this book is that truth is more important. It is ‘a draught that we must drink or not be fully human’. By the end of the novel the narrator has come to see that it's Chris's elegant wife, not his working-class ex, who is ‘the falsest thing on earth’, and she draws a sobering conclusion about her own cherished existence:The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming.This is what makes the war so effective as a backdrop: an unignorable reality that threatens to make all these interpersonal dramas seem false (‘pampered’, ‘unnatural’) in comparison.This is the sort of book that makes me really appreciate the discipline of reviewing, because it's only as I've tried try to get my thoughts down in words that I realise quite how much is going on here, considering the whole thing can be read in a couple of hours. It would make an excellent companion read to JL Carr's A Month in the Country, another English novel exploring the effects of shell-shock. This was actually Rebecca West's first novel, written when she was just 24 (she was 89 when she gave the interview at the top of this review, and as sharp as ever), and there is perhaps a certain immaturity to the set-up. But you still feel that you're communing with a uniquely incisive mind, and with so many ideas fizzing around here, it represents extraordinary bang for your buck for 140 pages.
    • 4/5
      Rebecca West (nee Cicely Isabel Fairfield 1892-1983) began her distinguished career in the second decade of the 20th Century, a period of exciting international literary contributions. The publication of the British writer’s first novel, The Return of the Soldier, established her immediately as one of a group of very talented women authors. The short, modernist novel is filled with indications of West’s brilliance and clear insight that make the reader sit up and take notice while reading the simple and direct narrative.The story involves a shell-shocked soldier sent home from combat in the trenches in France during World War I. He is unfit to continue his mission because of retrograde amnesia that causes him to believe he is living in an earlier period of his life, a time long before his army service. Returning home to England, he tries to take up his life as it was before even though people who were important to him have aged 15 years. He feels as young as he did in those days and receives support during his delusion of youth by his current wife and his former lover. The structure and psychological content of this novel remind me of Virginia Woolf’s early work, The Voyage Out. I enjoyed the surprising, illuminating flashes of insight of the characters that made me realize the depth of talent shown right out of the literary gate of this young, 21 year old writer. The novel is a bit long on description of flora even though the environment is important in the story. The content of the story is relevant today due to the new diagnosis of shell-shock, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder applied to soldiers in increasing numbers. I pushed the buttons on my Kindle and went to the Kindle Store to buy her second novel, The Judge. I am looking forward to reading the complete work of Rebecca West (fiction and non-fiction), now considered a leading intellectual woman of the 20th Century.
    • 5/5
      I've known of Rebecca West for quite a while due to her affair with H. G. Wells which has been the subject of books and plays. In 2016 I read her book Harriet Hume but I wasn't overly impressed so I hadn't picked up any more books by her until this book was recommended in the LibraryThing 1001 Books group as being excellent. And it was! Hard to believe this is a first novel as every sentence seems exquisite.The story is quite simple. Captain Chris Baldry has been injured while fighting for the British forces during World War I. He has lost the last 10 years from his memory which means that he does not remember his wife Kitty. He does remember Margaret who was the young woman he loved 10 years ago and it was Margaret who received the notification that Chris was injured. Margaret is now married herself and leaves not too far from the Baldry estate so she comes to the house to break the news to Kitty. When Chris is brought home from France he only wants to see Margaret who comes every afternoon to spend time with him. If Chris can be made to regain those 10 lost years he will probably be sent back to the fighting but if he continues with the memory loss he will be continually confused and unhappy. All this is narrated by his cousin Jenny who seems to have lived with her cousin and his wife for some years. She cares for all three of the people in this triangle and yet she hopes that Chris can be spared having to return to the Front.Here's one example of the writing at pp. 37 and 38 that is found throughout this gem of a book:In the liquefaction of colours which happens on a summer evening, when the green grass seemed like a precious fluid poured out on the earth and dripping over to the river, and the chestnut candles were no longer proud flowers, but just wet white lights in the humid mass of the tree, when the brown earth seemed just a little denser than the water, Margaret also participated.Can't you just picture that scene?
    • 5/5
      This review will contain spoilers so don't read it if you don't want to know anything. This is a short work, novella at most with about 99 pages widely spaced. It could be read in quick order but there is a lot packed into these pages. The story is set in WWI, and really centers on 3 women and how they relate to Chris, a young man who has returned from the war with amnesia. Rebecca West wrote this in 1918. It is a psychological novel, modernistic, as well as a work by a feminist. WWII changed life as it was previously known. In this war, the people in the home front were aware of the violence through films. The themes revolve around 1. the return of the soldier (starting pages and in the end). First it is reference to soldier returning to the home but it also the return of Chris from his transference/amnesia where he blocks out his life with Jenny and remembers a happier time that he spent with Margaret. 2. home, house, nature. Kitty has created a house that is perfect but false, it is separate and incongruent with Chris's memories and with nature. The author writes about these details beautifully. 3. The three women. Jenny the narrator is at best unreliable. She is Chris's cousin, secretly in love with Chris and at opposition to Jenny. She must be living with Jenny maybe as attendant as young women do sometimes. Maybe she was suppose to be the child's nurse. Kitty the wife he marries. We never know how or why he married Kitty. They've been married for awhile. Lost a child and we know there will never be another child but not why. Did this marriage grow apart even before the war. Kitty likes everything to be neat, she doesn't like or tolerate any disruption to perfection. Margaret was the young love of Chris. They broke up because of a misunderstanding that was never resolved because Chris had to leave to attend to a family affair and then they never connected to each other until the amnesia, when he writes to her again. Margaret agrees to see him and is the vehicle of returning the soldier to his previous life--life as a soldier who will return to the battle as well as to his marriage to Kitty. The story is not so much about trauma to the soldier but the impact of war on these three women. Kitty especially wishes to preserve the prewar life. Jenny and Kitty are closed into their prewar past as much as Chris is locked into his prewar past. Jenny sees Chris in the trenches and interestingly also describes her vision of his encounter with Margaret with the same visuals; “there he was, running across the lawn as night after night I had seen him run across No Man’s Land…" This debut novel is rich in details, rich in exploration of the changes occurring in the wake of WWI, and to the home and family.
    • 3/5
      First published in 1918 when Rebecca West was a mere 24, this book tells the story of a young English officer who returns home from the WWI trenches suffering from shell shock unable to remember anything from the last 15 years including his wife and the loss of his only child.Chris Baldry returns to his family’s estate to find his beautiful but cool wife Kitty and his cousin, Jenny, who have transformed his home in his absence. Chris can’t deal with the changes and wants to hide in a happier, more carefree part of his life. When Chris insists on seeing Margaret, his first love, Kitty becomes cold and withdrawn. All three women have a choice: to leave him as he is or to 'cure' him.The story is told from Jenny's viewpoint and it is quickly apparent that she loves Chris very deeply and always has but also knows that it will never be reciprocated which gives her an insight into what she will never have. It is this passion and lack of reciprocation which makes Jenny an excellent foil for what is to come.Despite being written at the end of WWI the war is hardly mentioned, no one knows what horrors Chris has seen because even he can't remember them. Yet there is a certain anger in the author's writing. What is far more important to this tale is the idea of what is absent and what is present, the presence of Chris and the absence of his memory, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehoods, money and the lack of it but perhaps the most important loss is that of a child which we learn about on the opening page. Chris has blocked this memory out but it is its remembrance that will bring back his sanity.Jenny acknowledges Kitty’s shallowness, but even she is guilty of class discrimination, constantly describing Margaret’s shabby appearance as “offensive” but she along with Margaret must struggle between helping Chris remember his wife and keeping him in his present emotional state, a choice that they ultimately reject.Despite being such a short book, my copy is only 148 pages, there are plenty of long depictions of the house and the estate. Beauty and good taste are initially seen as essential but as the story evolves this is seen as false and brittle. In this book the author tries to encapsulate many aspects of the day, the war, shell shock, women left at home and class differences to name a few, but I also felt that it wasn't without its faults. Despite its brevity some of the descriptions I found overly long with some paragraphs lasting a page or more, the fact that the story was told in the first person, from Jenny's point of view, meant that the other characters lacked a certain depth. This was particularly true of Chris who barely features. In particular I would have liked to have learnt a little more about him before the war began and after his father's death. Sometimes this made me feel that I had to put too much effort into reading between the lines. I also felt that the ending, with today's knowledge of mental illness, a little abrupt, simplistic and not terribly believable. In short I would have been happier if the book was longer (not something I often say).However, that said and done given that this was written when the author was at such a tender age and that this was her first published novel it is a remarkable piece of work and deserves to be more widely read.
    • 4/5
      This is a short novel about a soldier who comes back from WWI with amnesia. He can't remember the last 15 years of life which means that he does not remember his current wife and instead believes he is still courting another woman. The novel is told from the point of view of his cousin who lives with him and his wife. West packs a lot into this short novel and every word really counts. I also noticed while reading this that it was published DURING WWI. I felt that it was probably really emotional to read for a lot of people - no space there. It felt very modern to read and has a heart-breaking "happy" ending.
    • 4/5
      Perfectly conceived novella about the devastating effects of war on the heir of Baldry Court, an English country estate. Told from the first person perspective of a spinster whose entire life revolves around her cousin, his life and country mansion, it is the story of an English gentleman who goes off to World War I only to be returned with a severe case of amnesia. He does not recognize his pretty, socially correct wife; he has retreated to a hidden youthful romance with a poor woman. The woman, also married now, comes forward in the interest of helping him. The dance of manners takes place among the attendant Three Graces, who represent three kinds of love. A work of art to be read again and again.
    • 4/5
      This book, Rebecca West's first novel, was published in 1918 and has been called "the only book written by a woman about the war during the war". Given its interesting provenance and its status as at least a near classic, I had expected to enjoy it very much, but was a bit disappointed.The problem is not the story, which pulls the reader right along. Two women, the soldier's wife and his cousin, await his return from the war. Before the war he was a wealthy businessman; they are very comfortably established, and very much of the upper class. They learn from a distinctly non-upper class caller that the hero has been wounded, and has woken up in hospital with no memory of anything later than 1906 -- including his marriage. It turns out that in 1906 he and the non-upper class caller were deeply in love. He returns home, and events unfold. Nor is the writing an issue. Indeed, it is sometimes very beautiful. Ms. West's description of nature -- of changing light and moving water, of vegetation and the way it grows -- are precise, but also emotionally evocative. They made me think of Whistler's paintings, which are not at all precise, because they so strongly evoke moods as well as images. And the structure of the novel is complex but not confusing, involving multiple timelines, one principal narrator but several shifts in narration, and a point of view that shifts over time. I suppose that what bothered me about the novel is the characters; I did not at the end find them convincing enough to draw me in emotionally as well as aesthetically. To me, three of the four central characters seemed one dimensional -- the hero is innocent, the wife is shallow, the beloved woman is saintly. The fourth, the hero's cousin who is the main narrator, is more complex, but she too became unconvincing to me by the end of the book. There is a high romanticism about it all that, for me at least, says more about the time and place in which it was set than about the characters themselves. Clearly, my less than enthusiastic response is more a personal emotional judgement than an aesthetic evaluation. The book is well worth reading, and younger, less cynical readers might love it -- I probably would have, when I was a young woman.
    • 4/5
      The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West isn't a long read -- only about 70 pages or thereabouts, but on some levels it is a heartbreaking read. Set in one of the Great Houses of England, the story centers around a young soldier who is suffering from an unusual form of combat-induced amnesia. His particular form of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD) arises from the tensions created in the mind by fighting for survival when there is nothing to persuade one that life is worth fighting for because you've already lost the thing you love the most. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the soldier's family relation, Jenny, who views and understands the stress that has been created. How can one possibly bring about a cure in this instance? The edition I have is further amplified by other writings from the period. Rebecca West wrote this as her very first novel, framed in her mind in 1915 but not actually written until 1917 or published until 1918. It's heartbreaking in some respects; it is all about the essential thing in one's heart or soul -- the real self -- as opposed to the superficial self which is constantly putting on a good face for the neighbors. Again, truly heartbreaking.
    • 5/5
      "Return of the Soldier" is a literary powerhouse in a small package! It is the incredibly moving story of a soldier returning home from war with amnesia, only recalling the love of his youth. However, it is so much more than just a movng story. This is a story about the ravages of war, the ravages of adulthood, the ravages of grief, and the power and responsibility which accompany the gift of loving someone. It is a treatise on womanhood, on social class, on prejudice, and on wisdom. And....this was a debut novel! Read it!

    Book preview

    The Return Of The Soldier - Rebecca West

    Chapter I

    Ah, don’t begin to fuss! wailed Kitty. If a woman began to worry in these days because her husband hadn’t written to her for a fortnight! Besides, if he’d been anywhere interesting, anywhere where the fighting was really hot, he’d have found some way of telling me instead of just leaving it as ‘Somewhere in France.’ He’ll be all right.

    We were sitting in the nursery. I had not meant to enter it again, now that the child was dead; but I had come suddenly on Kitty as she slipped the key into the lock, and I had lingered to look in at the high room, so full of whiteness and clear colors, so unendurably gay and familiar, which is kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the house. It was the first lavish day of spring, and the sunlight was pouring through the tall, arched windows and the flowered curtains so brightly that in the old days a fat fist would certainly have been raised to point out the new, translucent glories of the rosebud. Sunlight was lying in great pools on the blue cork floor and the soft rugs, patterned with strange beasts, and threw dancing beams, which should have been gravely watched for hours, on the white paint and the blue distempered walls. It fell on the rocking horse, which had been Chris’s idea of an appropriate present for his year-old son, and showed what a fine fellow he was and how tremendously dappled; it picked out Mary and her little lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along the mantelpiece, under the loved print of the snarling tiger, in attitudes that were at once angular and relaxed, as though they were ready for play at their master’s pleasure, but found it hard to keep from drowsing in this warm weather, sat the Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the woolly white dog and the black cat with eyes that roll. Everything was there except Oliver. I turned away so that I might not spy on Kitty revisiting her dead. But she called after me:

    Come here, Jenny. I’m going to dry my hair. And when I looked again I saw that her golden hair was all about her shoulders and that she wore over her frock a little silken jacket trimmed with rosebuds. She looked so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large 15 cents somewhere attached to her person. She had taken Nanny’s big basket chair from its place by the highchair, and was pushing it over to the middle window. I always come in here when Emery has washed my hair. It’s the sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn’t have it kept as a nursery when there’s no chance— She sat down, swept her hair over the back of the chair into the sunlight, and held out to me her tortoiseshell hairbrush. Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul; but be careful. Tortoise snaps so!

    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 pastureland 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 of the modern subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes flattened: 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. So I said:

    I wish we could hear from Chris. It is a fortnight since he wrote.

    And then it was that Kitty wailed, Ah, don’t begin to fuss! and bent over her image in a hand-mirror as one might bend for refreshment over scented flowers.

    I tried to build about me such a little globe of ease as always ensphered her, and thought of all that remained good in our lives though Chris was gone. I was sure that we were preserved from the reproach of luxury, because we had made a fine place for Chris, one little part of the world that was, so far as surfaces could make it so, good enough for his amazing goodness. Here we had nourished that surpassing amiability which was so habitual that one took it as one of his physical characteristics, and regarded any lapse into bad temper as a calamity as startling as the breaking of a leg; here we had made happiness inevitable for him. I could shut my eyes and think of innumerable proofs of how well we had succeeded, for there never was so visibly contented a man. And I recalled all that he did one morning just a year ago when he went to the front.

    First he had sat in the morning room and talked and stared out on the lawns that already had the desolation of an empty stage, although he had not yet gone; then broke off suddenly and went about the house, looking into many rooms. He went to the stables and looked at the horses and had the dogs brought out; he refrained from touching them or speaking to them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being. Then he went to the edge of the wood and stood staring down into the clumps of dark-leaved rhododendrons and the yellow tangle of last year’s bracken and the cold winter black of the trees. (From this very window I had spied on him.) Then he moved broodingly back to the house to be with his wife until the moment of his going, when Kitty and I stood on the steps to see him motor off to Waterloo. He kissed us both. As he bent over me I noticed once again how his hair was of two colors, brown and gold. Then he got into the car, put on his Tommy air, and said: So long! I’ll write you from Berlin! and as he spoke his head dropped back, and he set a hard stare on the house. That meant, I knew, that he loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the dreary place of death and dirt the complete memory of everything about his home, on which his mind could brush when things were at their worst, as a man might finger an amulet through his shirt. This house, this life with us, was the core of his heart.

    If he could come back! I said. He was so happy here!

    And Kitty answered:

    He could not have been happier.

    It was important that he should have been happy, for,

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