In Memoriam

In April of 1916, Ellwood goes on leave. He has lunch with Maud, who is upset that he hasn’t been answering her letters. He tries to be civil with her but finds it difficult to act normal in civilian life for the first time in years. He also is constantly reminded of Gaunt when he is with Maud. When Maud talks about leaving the nurses to find a husband, Ellwood offers to marry her, but she acts “unhappy” about the idea.

After Ellwood leaves Maud, he is confronted by a woman giving him a feather and calling him a coward because he is in civilian clothes. In response, Ellwood “snarls” at her and scares her away before continuing to glare at everyone on the train. He realizes that he is being irrational but doesn’t care.

He then goes to Preshute to see Roseveare. As the two walk through the cemetery, Roseveare tells him that Burgoyne died, but the news has little effect on Ellwood, who can’t bring himself to hate Burgoyne—or anyone else in the war, for that matter. Instead, he feels his anger drifting back to the woman with the feather and the people on the train. He expresses his desire to bury Gaunt there in the cemetery.

Ellwood spends the next few days with his mother. He finds himself growing irrationally angry at her as she sits and tries to talk to him. She seems unable to talk about the war, while Ellwood is unwilling to describe it to her. Instead, she invites friends over for dinner. Ellwood does his best to behave normally. After just a few days of leave, he returns to the trenches.

Gaunt dreams of fighting Sandys in a boxing ring. With each punch, he struggles to breathe. When he is pulled from sleep, a German man is standing over him telling him to “breathe.” Gaunt tries to talk but is overwhelmed by pain. The man assures him not to be “frightened” because he’s “going to live” (183).

One night, Ellwood lies in the bunker, overwhelmed by “rage.” He tells Hayes that he and Gaunt were having sex. Hayes dismisses him, telling him to stop talking. Ellwood asks Hayes why he does not like him and why he never uses his first name. He admits that Gaunt also never called him by his first name because he didn’t feel “close” enough to Ellwood to use it.

In the village, Ellwood and Hayes share a bedroom. Hayes comes to Ellwood with something of Gaunt’s that he found. It is the beginning of a letter, with only the words “My dearest, darling Sidney” written on it (189). Ellwood desperately starts asking Hayes questions about where the rest of the letter is, what the words mean, and why he didn’t finish writing, but Hayes responds to each that he doesn’t know. Ellwood admits that if Gaunt had been a woman, he would have married him.

Back in the trenches, Ellwood goes scouting. He crawls out into No Man’s Land and lies there for half an hour, listening to the German soldiers. When he tries to return to his own trench, he realizes that his compass is broken. He tries to find his way back but becomes confused as to where he is and which trench is his own. He is forced to stay there until nightfall, as each movement in the daylight attracts sniper bullets.

Just after nightfall, when an explosion goes off, Ellwood manages to scan the area and find a marker for his own trench. He crawls back and alerts the men putting out barbed wire.

When Hayes and Ellwood return to the village for rest, Hayes calls Ellwood’s name in the middle of the night until he wakes up. He admits to Ellwood that he is afraid he is becoming irrational. He is terrified of the idea and the two options that seem to lie before him: “unravel” or be killed. He admits how horrible it is to see increasingly more soldiers “show up bright and young and hopeful” and then watch as their “mind[s] spool out of them” (200). Ellwood repeatedly assures him that he will be “fine” until Hayes apologizes and returns to bed.

In June of 1916, Ellwood’s platoon is told that they are leaving Ypres to head to Somme. They are instructed to prepare for the next “Big Push.”

The story flashes back to September 1915 in Loos, when Gaunt was first wounded. He wakes up in a makeshift German hospital behind their lines, still in excruciating pain from his lung wound. The German soldier who helped him introduces himself to Gaunt as Lukas Hohenheimer. Hohenheimer asks about Gaunt’s ability to speak German, and Gaunt explains that his mother is from Munich. He tells Hohenheimer about his cousins Ernst and Otto Grisar, who fight for the German army. Hohenheimer excitedly tells him that he knows Otto.

Over the next several weeks, Hohenheimer ensures that Gaunt is given morphine and cared for among the German soldiers instead of being sent to a prisoner camp. Hohenheimer tells him that the man who died during Gaunt’s effort to kidnap a German soldier was a private, which gives Gaunt hope that Ellwood survived.

A wounded soldier named Pfahler is put next to Gaunt. He is severely wounded, so he and Gaunt spend hours lying on their sides, facing each other and blinking messages, developing a code. Pfahler expresses his desire to go back to Munich, while Gaunt repeatedly blinks that he hopes Ellwood is alive.

One day in October, while Hohenheimer is in battle, a senior officer named Oberst comes to inspect the hospital. He is angry that Gaunt is being treated there, despite the nurse’s insistence that Gaunt is German and Hohenheimer requested it. Oberst commands her to send Gaunt on the next train to Offizierslager, a prisoner camp.

When Gaunt arrives at Offizierslager, he is still largely unable to move due to his lung. He has dreams that he is at Preshute and repeatedly asks people about Ellwood before overcoming his pain and the morphine enough to remember where he is.

Eventually, he is approached by one of his classmates, Gideon Devi, from his primary school, Grinstead. Devi tells him that they are not allowed letters or books, despite what the Hague Convention rules state, so he will not be hearing from Ellwood. He introduces him to Oliver MacCorkindale, who comments on Gaunt’s size, his ability to speak German, and how “useful” he could be. When Gaunt asks if anyone has ever escaped, MacCorkindale smiles and replies, “Not yet” (212).

Gaunt wakes up frequently with nightmares from the day he killed Harkins. He is comforted by Devi, who insists that his nightmares are nothing to be embarrassed about. Gaunt insists that they move his cot into the corridor so that he stops waking up the other prisoners.

Over the next several months, Gaunt befriends a German officer, Lüneburg, due to his ability to speak German. Lüneburg comes to his bunk for roll call instead of making Gaunt suffer from his injury, while Gaunt shares his meals with him due to the prisoners being better fed by the Red Cross than the guards.

In April, after Gaunt is mostly healed, Devi and MacCorkindale show him their escape plan. They are digging a tunnel under the ground and the moat surrounding the camp. Gaunt eagerly goes into the small space to help dig—doing so faster than all the other men—but he becomes overwhelmed by the fear that the tunnel will collapse or he will get stuck.

The men are joined at the tunnel by Archie Pritchard—the older brother of Ellwood and Gaunt’s friend at Preshute. Gaunt reassures him that Pritchard was still safe at school the last he heard from him in September.

The next day, Gaunt goes again to help dig in the tunnel. This time, however, his mind convinces him that he smells gas. As he tries to get out, he struggles to move, and Devi is forced to come in after him. Devi and Pritchard decide that it is safer for Gaunt not to go back into the tunnel, especially with his bad lung.

A box of newspapers arrives from the Red Cross. Gaunt listens as the list of deceased soldiers is read from the “In Memoriam” pages. He does not hear Ellwood’s name but recognizes the writing style of a poem that another soldier reads aloud. The poem is titled In Memoriam: H.W.G—Gaunt’s initials—and Gaunt can tell that it is written by Ellwood. However, instead of Ellwood’s usual style, it is written with “restless, bristling rage” (231). He realizes that Ellwood thinks that he is dead.

With a renewed determination to get back to Ellwood, Gaunt goes to Pritchard and demands to help again with the tunnel. The men refuse to let him dig after he last panicked, but they agree to let him work the bellows—a pump system they designed to help clear out the air for the person inside the tunnel.

The men procure all the supplies they need for their escape except for identification papers. Gaunt decides to pursue a sexual relationship with Elisabeth, the Kommandant’s secretary, to get them. He realizes that he can kiss her and even have sex with her, but it makes him understand that he is not sexually attracted to women. He sees their relationship as a way to “accrue information” before deciding whether he could ever marry a woman (240). In the end, she agrees to get him the identification papers while still trying to convince him to stay in the camp.

When the tunnel is completed, Gaunt tells the other men that he will be able to get the papers. Pritchard and Devi meet him back at his bunk and make jokes about the “irony” of him being the one to seduce Elisabeth. Gaunt realizes, with “rising panic” (241), that the men know that he is in love with Ellwood. However, instead of responding with disgust or judgment, Pritchard and Devi make jokes about his sexuality. He realizes how much of a relief it is to have them treat his sexuality so “lightly” when it typically drives him to panic and shame.