Elise

“It seems unfair, doesn’t it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this.”
“Busily building up the world that led to this.”
“I suppose they thought they had their own problems, said Ellwood.
“No one ever thinks their life is easy.”

The story revolves around two best friends who love each other unconditionally yet refuse to acknowledge their feelings. When the entire nation is battling against war with the germans, they fight with emotions eliciting within them. With their friends Dying one by one, Gaunt was forced to enlist early due to anti German attacks (he is half German) Eventually Ellwood decides to enlist, joining Gaunt in the British Army. Amid the inevitable emotions and death looming around the corner they find Solace in each other.

In this novel, love is portrayed as sacrifice. Gaunt and Ellwood’s love acts as an invisible shield to protect each other. They battle in fields with the intention of saving one another. Ellwood dreams of writing poems for his love while Daunt’s ready to sacrifice his life to save Ellwood. They are magnets attracting and repelling with emotions.

i woudn’t be doing justice to the book by only discussing the love between two men. The story provides the perspective of soilders in WW1. As a reader, i rarely seen or heard the voice of an solider, whose life hangs by a thread. How inhumane is to kill knowing the opponent is innocent, how cruel is it to live with ghosts who once were a friend, realising it could happen to them any second of the day. The undescribable fear of never seeing their loved ones chokes them evey time they enter the battlefield, and coming to understand that death is better than to live in a world filled with such horrors.

Thus, the book is about love and war.
- i havent picked up historical fiction in a long time, and i realized how much i missed reading this genre, so i took my time reading and annotating. As i mentioned before this book is mixture of everything, one thing i didnt expect is the humor. typing this review on my laptop makes me wanna re-read this book.
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