Robert Keable

An enthusiastic, committed but naïve priest, Peter Graham, leaves his fiancée Hilda to serve as chaplain in France during World War 1. He is rapidly made aware of the British ‘tommies’ total indifference to what he has to offer. Also, war has cheapened life and subsequently affected the officers morality with regard to the local French women, many of whom lose their self respect and behave accordingly. The chaplains faith is almost destroyed and while in this disillusioned state of mind he falls in love with a South African nurse, a free and generous spirit, whose total lack of conventionality bewitches him. The novel was hugely successful at the time of publication not only for the honest eyewitness account of service life during that holocaust [the author was a chaplain during that time and fell in love with a nurse] but also for the later scenes of a very frank sexual nature when the lovers spend a weekend together on leave, although these are tame now to a modern audience. Julie, the heroine, is a wonderful creation, the epitome of what it must have been to ‘live now for tomorrow we may die’ and it is her total selflessness that determines the fate of the affair. The author paid the price for his commercial success He earned contempt from leading members of the church, little critical acclaim for his work and a self imposed exile a few years after publication. However, the book still maintains interest because of the element of autobiography. It has that undeniable ring of truth.

Peter Joyce

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