It took me far too long to read it but I have finally finished "The Soldier's Return" by Melvyn Bragg. It is a novel laced with autobiographical elements and as the title might suggest, it's about a soldier who has returned from war. Specifically, Sam Richardson has come back to Cumberland in the northwest of England from wartime in Burma where he witnessed unspeakable things.
He tries to settle back into his old life with his young wife Ellen and their little son Joe who was but a baby when World War II was declared. Sam is restless and bad-tempered, finding it hard to pick up where he left off. He comes close to running away to Australia but abandons that plan at the very last minute, clearing the way for a sequel.
I could go into detail about the plot but I won't bore you with that. Suffice it to say that I found the book all rather slow-moving and frustrating. I wanted to slap the writer and say, "Come on! Let's move on!" The language was well-chosen and there were some well-crafted passages but I didn't think that the novel convincingly peeled away the layers of the soldier's psychology nor did it really bring out Ellen's internal struggles.
It was as if Melvyn Bragg didn't quite know where he was going with it nor how he was going to get there.
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It made me think of an earlier war - World War One and two young soldiers who came back to Yorkshire from The Battle of the Somme. They were my paternal and maternal grandfathers - Philip and Wilfred. They did not know each other but they were on the same hellish battlefield and as I say, they both survived. I have often wondered what they brought home with them - after the terrible things they had witnessed.
Surely it would have been nigh on impossible to close that chapter of their lives and simply move on. Between July and November 1916 over 300,000 men were killed at The Somme and a further million suffered significant injuries. The number who suffered severe mental traumas is not recorded.
there are many stories that have never been told about the struggles of returning forces. Most just kept quiet. An old friend always opened up around Remembrance day and it was always the same story. I have a feeling that I was the only one who heard this story.
ReplyDeleteSo many men kept quiet. Maybe they were trying to keep the horrors buried.
DeleteI suppose some people have the ability to compartmentalise the horror they did, saw and experienced. But so many did not, especially from WWI.
ReplyDeleteThey were just ordinary people. How could they process something like that?
DeleteI wonder if Melvyn Bragg also went to war and came home again. From your description of his words I would think not. Those who send the young men to fight never think of the mental anguish they might come home with, and I bet they never send their own sons.
ReplyDeleteNo he did not go to war. He was born in 1939.
DeleteIt sounds a somewhat disappointing read. I know Melvyn Bragg mostly as the host of "In Our Time" on BBC Radio 4, something I like to listen to sometimes when ironing, and I quite like him, but had not known that he is also an author.
ReplyDeleteI dare say that no man, woman or child who has ever lived through a war, either as a civilian or soldier, comes out the other end unharmed; mentally, physically or both. It is just something so inhumane that we can't really get our head round it. And yet it persists, and keeps going on all over the planet, through all of our history and present time. Terrible.
My maternal grandfather very rarely spoke about the war he unwillingly took part in, but my grandmother sometimes did. They had married in 1933, had a little boy in 1935 and then in 1940 or so the young husband and father, like countless others, had to leave his job and go fighting. My grandma says they wrote each other "glowing love letters", and during on of his few and short leaves, their little daughter (my Mum) was conceived. But once he returned after having been POW in Russia, it was impossible to pick up their lives as the happy young family they were before. My granddad was never violent, but he became an alcoholic, and could make life rather difficult for his wife at times. He was a diligent and hard worker and took good care of his wife and children, as well as providing for his own elderly parents and his physically handicapped brother, who all lived in their house, but he was a difficult man and didn't make friends easily.
To me and my sister, he was the best granddad any child could wish for; he never showed the scars and dark marks the war had left on his soul.
I expect that the childish love he received from you and your sister was the best medicine he could have ever received. Being a POW in Russia must have been dreadful.
DeleteHe spoke about that only once, as far as I remember, and scratched only the surface of those horrors in our presence. But we knew that he'd walked home all the long way from behind the Ural mountains, along with a handful of others from the Stuttgart area, occasionally hitching a ride on a farmer's horse cart, and instead of shoes he had wrapped rags around his feet against the cold.
DeleteMy uncle, now in his nineties, often recounts how his beloved father came back from the war an utterly changed man. My grandfather was apparently never the same after his experiences.
ReplyDeleteSo many stories of war were voluntarily smothered.
DeleteJRR Tolkien went to the Somme and saw Hell on Earth yet he never lost his belief in God.
ReplyDeleteMany soldiers could not believe that a loving God could preside over something as dreadful as The Battle of the Somme.
DeleteMy grandfather was in WW1 - awarded the Military Medal. He never talked about it.
ReplyDeleteMy maternal grandfather was also awarded The Military Medal. I never met either of my grandfathers. My paternal grandfather died the month before I was born.
DeleteBefore he died, my father-in-law took his son, my husband, aside and for the first time opened up about his experiences fighting in WWII. He had held these horrible memories buried deep in his soul for all those years. My husband thinks of this often. His father was a most loving and kind and hard-working man and the thought of him carrying these memories is hard to fathom.
ReplyDeleteI think I'll skip that book!
ReplyDeleteThe war changed my father, it turned him into an angry, depressed man for the rest of his life. He lived with a lot of anxiety and fear, and most of that fear was about us. He wanted us to be safe but he didn't know how to tell us that. War destroys people and families, for generations.
ReplyDeleteI do not know if I would have survived fighting in a war. I really don't. When I taught, there was always a unit on World War I. We spent some time learning about the different battles, and we'd cover the Battle of the Somme. The students were always shocked to hear how many died in that battle.
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