The terrible tragedy of wasted youth

By Philippa Tracy

Alice Winn’s compelling debut novel In Memoriam is a page-turner. Published in 2023, it is a love story that deals with big themes: forbidden love and the First World War. It tells the tragic love story of two young men at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The context is primarily their experiences of WWI and the lasting trauma it caused their generation.

In 1914, Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are classmates at Preshute, a fictitious English public school. At 17, they are too young to enlist when the war starts. Their main concerns are poetry, beauty and friendships. This includes sexual relations with other boys, and in some cases abuse by older boys. Gaunt, at least, accepts this as a temporary state, on an inevitable journey to maturity and marriage with “respectable young women” after Oxford or Cambridge. Gaunt believes Ellwood will marry his sister Maud when the time comes. But both are secretly in love with each other, while neither is prepared to admit it, for fear of rejection.

The title of the novel is a reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem, In Memoriam A.H.H that he wrote after the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Ellwood starts the novel idealistic about war and the glory of empire. He knew Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade by heart and “had a habit of reciting the whole poem in a sonorous voice when he was too tired to be interesting.” He frequently quotes Tennyson as a way of expressing his feelings, often for Gaunt. There are many references to other great WWI writers too. As the novel progresses, Ellwood’s initial enthusiasm and optimism that the war “is what we needed: an injection of passion into a century of peace” turns to bitterness.

The novel is punctuated by extracts from the boys’ school newspaper The Preshutian. Winn tells us that this paper is based on the Marlborough College newspaper from 1913 to 1919. It provides a roll call of deaths, wounded and missing former pupils. Winn herself attended Marlborough College, and the issue of class and privilege often play out in the novel. While many of the school friends end up meeting in the trenches, there is only one working class officer in the novel, David Hayes. Gaunt “can’t help but admire a man who has risen above the crowds of sharply dressed Etonians despite looking like that.” And when Gaunt is made Captain, he tells Ellwood, in a letter, that it “seems a well-tailored uniform and the right accent make me a better candidate than Hayes, despite his years of experience.”

Gaunt, who has German family, joins the war early when pressured by his mother to do so because of rising anti-German feeling. Ellwood follows him to the Western Front, as do many of their year group. Much of the novel is set on the front line with letters home and flashbacks to school days. Gaunt and Ellwood manage to navigate their way through school avoiding intimacy only to find it with the sound of gunfire close by. They live together on Divisional Rest in France, survive the battles at Loos and the Somme, lose each other, and find each other again, both broken in different ways. This is a gripping and tender novel that is easy to engage with, yet powerfully devastating in its depiction of the brutality of war. Ellwood describes it as “the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.” On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British forces suffered nearly 60,000 casualties. The novel is reminiscent of Vera Brittain’s memoir and elegy to a lost generation Testament of Youth. Both convey the terrible tragedy of wasted youth, lost hope and families destroyed through poetry and a powerful love story. I highly re