If we are seeking an end to war, we need to begin seeking the true peace that passeth all understanding. This is the peace of Christ.

Those “progressives” who put their faith in the perfectibility of Man are invariably made to look stupid by the very future that they idealize and idolize. Take, for instance, H. G. Wells, whose monumental Outline of History was rooted in a naïve optimism about the nature of man and the power of science to usher in a future golden age. It was Wells who wrote The War That Will End War, which was published in 1914, at the beginning of World War One. Twenty-five years later a second World War began in which the power of science was unleashed on civilian populations in blitzkrieg, carpet bombing and atomic bombing. It was no wonder that Wells’ final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in the year in which the power of science destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showed a mind utterly disillusioned with humanity and its future.

These thoughts come to mind as the 105th anniversary of the Armistice approaches, which is still commemorated as Remembrance Day in the UK and as Veterans’ Day in the USA. They were also on my mind several years ago when I wrote my verse drama, Death Comes for the War Poets, which enjoyed a brief but surprisingly successful run off-Broadway in 2017. And the same thoughts surfaced as I read We’ll Never Tell Them, a novel by Fiorella de Maria which is overshadowed by the deadly backdrop of both World Wars and by the intertextual ghostly presence of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sasson, the two poets on which my verse drama had focused.

Fiorella de Maria has become one of my favourite contemporary novelists. I’ve enjoyed her series of murder mysteries featuring the priest detective Father Gabriel and I’ve especially enjoyed This Thing of Darkness, a neo-gothic novel co-authored with K. V. Turley, which uses the weird life and times of Bela Lugosi as its inspiration and subplot. It was, therefore, with a degree of excited expectation that I picked up We’ll Never Tell Them.

The war-laden scene is set with the author’s dedication of the book “to the generation of women who lost their sweethearts and then their sons in two of the bloodiest conflicts in human history”. As for the raw material with which the fictional narrative is woven, the author tells us that she had “drawn closely upon the written accounts of those who witnessed events that are now passing out of living memory”. For those of my generation who are growing old but are nonetheless too young to remember either of the two world wars, these words have the power to raise the spirits of the dead from their graves. The Second World War ended almost eighty years ago, which means that it is indeed “passing out of living memory”. As for the First World War, it has long since passed beyond the memory of any living man which adds to the creepiness of the memory of past Remembrance Days, when I watched thousands of veterans from World War One marching to the Cenotaph in London, wearing their faded medals as mementos of their fading memories. That was back in the 1960s. Every year there were fewer until, eventually, there were only a handful, and then none.

This melancholy spirit pervades the pages of the novel, most of which is told by an old man dying of cancer in a hospital in contemporary Jerusalem. The bulk of the narrative tells of his mother’s strife-torn life, from her troubled childhood in Malta at the turn of the twentieth century to boarding school in England and then a return to Malta after the outbreak of the First World War to minister to wounded soldiers as a nurse. It is here that she meets the narrator’s father, a severely wounded soldier.

The author’s handling of the horrors of trench warfare are presumably informed by her knowledge of the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, especially perhaps Owen’s “Disabled” and Sassoon’s “One-Legged Man”, and it is significant that the sardonic lines of a First World War soldier song are selected to serve as the novel’s epigraph.

We are not surprised to discover that the author received an undergraduate degree in English Literature and a graduate degree in Renaissance Literature from Cambridge University. This is evident from the array of intertextual references that are encrusted like literary gems throughout the story. In the Prologue, there are allusions to classic fairy stories, to the classical epics of Homer, to the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy and to lines from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”. There is even perhaps a reference to the repetition of the word “nothing” in Eliot’s “Waste Land”: Nothing again nothing. Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing? This spirit of desolate disorientation overshadows Kristjana, the young girl to whom the old man tells his story, when we first meet her. She quits her job in London and quits London itself because of such desolation:

That was how it started, far away in London, the city she called home, when she had looked into the future and seen nothing. Nothing, the sum of all human hearts. She had convinced herself that she had no future, that there was nothing to look forward to, nothing to work for, and it was in that bleak, bewildered frame of mind that she had committed the craziest act of her entire life.

Leaving the emptiness of life in London, she seeks escape in the faraway city of Jerusalem, where she becomes a nurse caring for the dying man. It is at his bedside that she hears the story of the man’s own mother and her nursing of his own wounded father almost a century earlier. That story, which straddles both world wars, from the trenches to the Blitz, is told to a young girl who doesn’t think she has a future by an old man who knows that he has no future except hopefully in heaven. As the old man learns how to die the young lady learns how to live. As for how each of them learns these priceless lessons, that would be telling more than a reviewer has the right to tell. And thus does the reviewer make a pact of silence with the author to avoid spoiling the reader’s experience of the work. If the prospective reader wants to follow the twists and turns of the lives of the characters in this moving novel, if he wants to solve its many mysteries, he will have to read it for himself. As for the reviewer and the author, speaking as one in the words of the novel’s title, “we’ll never tell them”.

What this novel does tell us is that there will never be a war to end war. It shows us that man is always at war with himself and therefore at war with his neighbour, who often becomes his enemy. If we are seeking an end to war, we need to begin seeking the true peace that passeth all understanding. This is the peace of Christ. Without such peace there will never be a war to end war but only war without end. Our only hope is to end with the hope with which the old man ends. This is the hope of the resurrection. Perhaps the happiest ending is only to be found after death. Perhaps the happiest ending to any story, including the story of life itself, is not that we live happily ever after but that we rest in peace.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.