I’ve read a number of books about wars: others about the First World War, the Second World War, Vietnam, the various Gulf wars (both ones involving outside forces such as the US and ones involving just inside forces such as the Taliban). In some ways, this is the best book of war stories I’ve read.
The writing style is clear and spare; often focused to the intensity of poetry. This is partly because of the author’s chosen limitation: 100 words. There’s little room for flowery writing or euphemistic phrases. The author does a great job of selecting words.
While most of the stories are set very much during the war, some stories ring down through time, like “Forget Never.” It’s not just ‘forget never’ the mates “blown to unidentifiable bits.” It’s also, as the narrator walks across the smoothed-over fields long years later: “And now, it’s as if we had never been.”
Some people are just doing their jobs, like “Postal Service,” where the narrator turns the fact that over 12 million letters and one million parcels were delivered to the Front each week (taking an average of two days for delivery!), into how he is delivering weapons “much more powerful” than rifles, hand grenades or knives.
There are families dealing with men killed, missing, or wounded in action. Like “Daddy’s Home,” narrated by a little girl. She tells us that Mummy cried every day while daddy was gone in the war. But now Daddy’s home; well, maybe: He looks older and thinner and is tired all day and can’t play anymore. “Sometimes I hear him shouting at night when he should be asleep.
“I thought Mummy would be happy when he came home but she still cries every day.”
Or “Still Alive,” in which one mother’s son came home missing an arm - and now she can’t bring herself to meet the eyes of mothers whose sons didn’t come back.
Other stories deal with those who chose to stay home (for good or bad reasons): In “My Conscience,” a conscientious objector who refuses to kill or maim faces the draft board that could send him to war, anyway. In “Take Him,” an abusive butcher is preparing to plead for exemption from conscription even as the narrator (his abused wife) is sitting down to write to them anonymously, saying “I run the shop while he drinks the profits. I will beg them to take him.”
One poignant one is “The Shame,” about a man who went to war and came blind in one eye and with limited vision in the other. He works in a munitions factory. But the White Feather Movement (a group founded to shame men into enlisting by publicly giving them a white feather, a symbol of cowardice) repeatedly give him a white feather while ignoring his explanation. “Each white feather is an arrow that pierces my heart.” (I would regard them on a par with anyone today who sees a veteran with crippling PTSD and says, “Just stop it, there’s nothing wrong with you.“)
Drawbacks of the book
One thing I missed in the ebook is a full table of contents on the Kindle app’s menu. The only entry in it is the cover. There is a table of contents in the book, with links, and jumping to the cover and paging over five pages gets to it. But it would be nice not have do do that paging.
Another item I would have enjoyed would be a thematic index: “Stories about: The Home Front” (list of page numbers or links to those stories), or “In The Trenches.” I wanted to be able to read through, for example, stories set before battle, about the different soldiers’ thoughts, feelings, anticipation, hopes.
I’ll finish this review with one story from the book: “Self-Inflicted Wound” (used by permission)
“Self-Inflicted Wound
As the enemy soldier thrust at me with his bayonet, I lunged at him with my knife.
My aim was truer.
I stabbed him in the chest, he struck my hand.
A shell, then caught both of us, flinging us into the air.
He was dead, but I crawled back to the trench.
It occurred to me then, that my war was over.
I gave thanks I was alive even if my fingers no longer worked.
At the hospital, the doctor claimed my hand wound was self-inflicted.
Surely my broken nose, cracked ribs and shrapnel wounds should tell him otherwise?”
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2016
- Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2018
- Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2019
Top reviews from other countries
- Mick AnnearReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2022
short moving and informative
- Wendy OgilvieReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2020
Short stories that will stay with you a long time.
- Mr P.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2016
Less is so much more with this book
