66 The Absolutist - John Boyne
Timely read given it's coming up to Remembrance Sunday. A moving WW1 story with all the horrors conjured up in the thousands upon thousands of young lives that perished in trench warfare. The book starts in 1919 in the aftermath of the war, where Tristan Saddler is travelling to Norwich to deliver letters to Marian, the sister of Will Bancroft a soldier he fought alongside. Will and Tristan meet at training camp in Aldershot initially to befriend each other although on the part of Will a suppressed awareness of a frisson of burgeoning attraction they feel for each other. Tristan the son of a brutal father, having suspected his son of being a homosexual casts him out of the family home. Will the son of a Norwich Vicar having had an altogether gentler upbringing, although it is Will who unflinchingly is to stand up for his principles when he becomes the most extreme form of conscientious objector known as "an absolutist"This is precipitated when during an advancement and the taking of a German held trench during their time in Northern France, they and their fellow fighters annihilate all their young German counterparts in that trench, only to find one, still not much more than a boy had been hiding in a foxhole where he remained unscathed. There ensues a showdown between the men, the moral argument as to whether he should be taken POW the stance supported by Tristam and Will and those who oppose that and would shoot him dead there and then, Unfortunately the latter is to be the young boy's fate, a heartbreaking scenario after pleading for his life, in German, the gist of what he was saying transcended the language barrier in his fraught intonations. Will so appalled by his comrade in arms brutality, is to lay down his own arms and to declare himself an Ansolutist. His Court Marshall and execution by firing squad follow and he was besmirched as a coward thereafter, but as Tristam reveals to his heart broken sister later, his was an act of immense bravery. All the terrors, the gruesome nature and absolute futility of that ridiculous war are conveyed in harrowing detail. Young men used as fodder, forced to advance into a No Mans Land where the inevitability of them being picked off by snipers was to be the majority's fate, survival for a tiny percentage by sheer luck. The complacency of just sending contingent upon contingent of disposable young lives, by senior officers secure and removed from the horrors faced by a generation of boys, barely men, from the safety of their war rooms isn't lost, or the resounding "lions led by donkeys" which is now how history has judged that needless war. A very moving book encompassing, passion, jealousy and heroism, not an easy read. .
