The Return of the Soldier

Rebecca West was 25 when, 100 years ago, her first novel The Return of the Soldier was published. The First World War wasn't to conclude until November 11, but to speculate that the war's last battles, claiming its last dead or disfigured, were a tragic waste of life would be an admission that the dead millions in the three previous years of the war had died for something.

The novel is narrated by Jenny Baldry, the 30-something unmarried cousin of Chris Baldry. Chris is at the front, and Jenny lives with his wife, Kitty in a glorious house called Baldry Court, made even more glorious by renovations made since the death of Chris and Kitty's 2-year-old son five years ago. The scenes at Baldry Court make it seem as if the way of country life that the Great War brought to such an abrupt end was breathing its last in its own marbled mausoleum.

There has been no word from Chris in two weeks, and Jenny's concern is exacerbated by troubling dreams:

"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 English-women to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for the return of our soldier."

Out of the blue, a middle-aged woman pays a visit to the house, and immediately we are subjected to the most horrific class snobbery, from Kitty and from Jenny herself. The woman is Margaret Grey, formerly Allington, who abruptly informs Kitty and Jenny that "Mr. Baldry" (she doesn't know his rank in the army), has sent her a telegram to a 15-year-old address, along with letters that convince her that he is ill. Kitty and Jenny at first don't believe her and think she is perpetrating a fraud in order to get money out of them. But the telegram is authentic. Having endured their insults and incredulity, Mrs. Grey leaves convinced that she should never have come.

Frank, Chris's cousin, who is "in the church," goes to France and discovers him in a hospital in Boulogne. He has suffered an unusual form of shell shock that has affected his memory and he believes that he is not married to a woman named Kitty with whom he had a deceased child, but that he is 15 years younger and is in love with Margaret Allington and that she, too, is as she was 15 years before and is in love with him. The letters he wrote to her are passionate love letters written by a man she hasn't seen since they parted company when she was a girl of 20. She, too, has married and (we only learn in the last chapter) lost a 2-year-old child five years ago.

Chris is told the truth about his wife (but not about the lost child) and he is invalided home to Baldry Court. He is happy to be home, though he doesn't recognize the house's renovations, and he demands that he see Margaret at once. Jenny fears he won't recognize the middle-aged Margaret, but she finds that "to lovers innumerable things do not matter."

While Chris and Margaret cavort like children in the house's gardens and woods, Kitty calls on the expertise of several doctors, who study Chris's case and examine him without knowing what should be done to bring him back to normalcy. But one doctor, a psychiatrist (a newfangled profession in 1918) named Gilbert Anderson arrives, confesses to the three women, "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind 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." But Margaret, who goes upstairs with Jenny to make herself more presentable to the good doctor, discovers a photo of Chris's dead boy in Jenny's room. Realizing that both Chris's child and hers had died five years ago at the age of 2 leads her to conclude that "It's -- it's as if they each had half a life." This remark leads Jenny to think how she "had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure."(1)

Margaret tells the doctor, who knew nothing of the child, and he suggests that it might be the key to Chris's amnesia. He tells them to find a memento, a toy or piece of clothing that could break into Chris's amnesia. Margaret volunteers, but expresses doubts, knowing that a cured Chris will have to go back to the war. But she relents, "the truth's the truth, and he must know it," and takes a red ball and a blue jersey out to Chris. Kitty and Jenny remain in the nursery and Kitty asks Jenny to watch from the window and to tell her what she sees.

"There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead."

As most critics noticed at the time, The Return of the Soldier is about how three women, all in love with one man (Jenny's unrequited passion for him is obvious), save him from the trauma of war. But if there is any weakness in this terse tale of a man whose confrontation with the painful reality of the modern world drives him into a denial of that reality and into a retreat long before experience, it is the patness of its resolution - the simplicity of Chris's "cure." Dr. Anderson's job is merely to point out to the three women things they figured out on their own.

The novella reminded me in places of The Beast in the Jungle, which makes sense since West was heavily under the influence of Henry James. Just beneath the lovely surface, in which Baldry Court is itself a place of dreams far from the trenches, there is a crushing pain. The only happy ending is Kitty's, who gets her husband back.

The transformation of West's intimate little novel into a film in 1982 is hardly a transformation at all. Everything seems to arrive intact on the screen, with a little welcome fleshing-out of the characters and their motivations. After a credit sequence depicting Ann-Margret (Jenny) watching over a sleeping Alan Bates (Chris) in the middle of what looks like a nocturnal battlefield, the film begins inside Jenny's dream, with her and Chris as children at play half in Baldry Court and half in No Man's Land - the cratered wasteland between the British and German trenches. Richard Rodney Bennett's music cries out insistently on the soundtrack as Jenny raises a stick like a rifle and - BANG! - she sees Chris blown to smithereens. The film shows us Baldry Court's social life both before Chris goes off to war and after he jettisons his memory. The role of his cousin, Frank (Jeremy Kemp) is greatly expanded in the film, and he is definitely NOT "in the church". And Chris is provided with terrifying visions of death that break into his otherwise placid home life.

One crucial scene not in the novel is an absurdity: Kitty and Jenny travel to France to find Chris. They find him in a ward crowded with other men. He recognizes Jenny but reacts violently to Kitty's suggestion that she is his wife. The absurdity of the scene is that it would be logistically impossible (and probably prohibited) for British families to travel to France to find their wounded soldiers. The scene in the hospital, in which people clamor around a nurse demanding information about their loved ones, is suitably nightmarish. An older man asks in a crushed voice as he passes the nurse on the stairs where he can collect his son's "things."

The film gives us more of William Grey, Margaret's husband (West merely sketches him in). He is played beautifully by Frank Finlay. I mean, what must he have felt about Chris's love letters to Margaret? There is a quiet scene in which he studies Glenda Jackson as she's cleaning up after the milk has boiled over on the stove, like he's trying to look into her thoughts.

Ann-Margret's performance is, thankfully, understated. Julie Christie's pretty frigidity is perfectly contrasted with Margaret's dormant love. Glenda Jackson gives by far the best performance. The scene in the child's nursery as she recalls the short life of her own child is heartbreaking. Ian Holm manages to impress in the tiny role of Dr. Anderson. But Alan Bates carries all the drama of the film, managing to suggest with his bearing alone something of the trauma he's been put through. The film shows us what Rebecca West could not: the very moment of Chris's reawakening. Shot mostly at middle-distance, the scene is perfectly staged. We first see him (from Jenny's vantage point at the window) enter on a bicycle, while Rodney-Bennett's music makes us feel suddenly protective of this middle-aged man who is about to be reminded of his child's death. Margaret presents him with a stuffed toy (ironically a soldier in khaki), he takes it and he acts exactly as if a veil has been lifted from his eyes. He gives the toy back to Margaret and strides resolutely ("every inch the soldier") towards the house. As he nears it, we can hear the sound of the heavy guns in faraway France, and as the scene fades we can hear the officer's whistle ordering his men over the top.

Alan Bridges directed adroitly, interweaving reality, memory, and nightmare in this ultimately sad tale. Hugh Whitemore, who died last month, wrote the script, and his additions to West's text - except for the hospital scene - are perfectly apposite. Two years after The Return of the Soldier, Bridges returned to the English countryside in The Shooting Party, from the Isabel Colgate novel. Set in 1913, and taking its cue from the rabbit-hunting scene in Renoir's The Rules of the Game, its prevailing sense of doom was somewhat overstated but exquisite nonetheless.


(1) Not knowing what to do about Chris, Margaret tells Jenny that she prayed and read the Bible, but it gave her no help. "You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help."