In Memoriam is the story of two young men, students from the prestigious (fictional) British public school Preshute, who go off to fight in the First World War. You can imagine, if you are at all familiar with WWI literature, how this tale is going to go, and yet Winn, in her first novel, manages to create a story that is faithful to the horrors of that conflict while still surprising the reader with its conclusion. Winn, herself the product of a British boarding school, taps into a rich vein of historical information — the school newspaper from the real Marlborough College during the war years — and uses it for the basis of her novel. In Memoriam uses the fictional school paper “The Preshutian” to show the mounting deaths, enveloped in rousing patriotic terms, associated with the First World War while Preshute’s young students and alumni rush to enlist and cover themselves in glory.
The main characters of In Memoriam are Henry Gaunt, an 18-year-old student whose parents are German, and Sidney Ellwood, whose ancestors converted from Judaism to the Church of England. Gaunt and Ellwood are in love with each other but have never confessed their true feelings. Gaunt is repressed and ashamed, doing everything he can to hide them. Ellwood, a budding poet, has never tried very hard to hide that he is gay but he has hidden his true feelings from Gaunt because he fears losing the friendship. It is also important to note that at this time in history, homosexuality was a crime so one needed to exercise caution in order to stay safe. Insofar as the war is concerned, Ellwood, like most of Preshute’s students, is excited to go fight when he is of age (19) and expects war to be a glorious thing. He frequently quotes The Charge of the Light Brigade and is fond of verses that pay homage to an idyllic, pastoral England. Gaunt, on the other hand, is opposed to the war. He is a student of history and sees the war as colonial powers flexing their might at the expense of common men. While many young men have run off to war early, lying about their ages to enlist, Gaunt is adamant that he will not go until two things happen to change his mind: his mother and sister encourage him to go because their German heritage marks them as “unpatriotic”, and a young woman gives Gaunt a white feather — a symbol of cowardice. Gaunt signs up and leaves Preshute immediately.
At Preshute, all the students who have enlisted are heroes (and also officers), and even the increasing number of casualties and dead, always listed in the school newspaper, do not diminish most boys’ thirst for war. Elwood’s letters to Gaunt are full of enthusiasm and poetry. Meanwhile, it takes little time for the reality of war to change Gaunt. The death, mud, and gore age him, and some of the actions he has taken cause him nightmares and eat away at him during his waking hours. When Ellwood enlists into Gaunt’s company and joins him at the front, their relationship and their personalities will be transformed, often for the worse. The brutality of WWI will both bring them together and tear them apart — emotionally, physically, psychologically.
Winn includes an enormous amount of accurate historical information in her novel and explains her sources at the end. It is fascinating to read. And of course it is incredibly sad. A generation of men died, leaving a generation of young women behind (we learn a bit about this from Gaunt’s sister Maud). Among the survivors of the war, many men suffered debilitating physical and psychological injury, and Winn, to her credit, shows how that might have looked in the immediate aftermath of the war. The book doesn’t end with the armistice, which I think sets it apart from much WWI literature; we do get so see how characters who survived tried to live again and how incredibly broken and unsupported they were. If WWI literature is your interest, In Memoriam is worth picking up.
