WAR GOTHIC OF THE WESTERN FRONT: DECAY, LANDSCAPE, AND IDENTITY
IN WWI FICTION

by

Katherine Douglas
B.A., University of Northern British Columbia, 2017

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
December 2020

©Katherine Douglas, 2020

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Abstract

The First World War was a unique and unrepeatable Gothic event, and so, this thesis examines its
modern and postmodern literary accounts within the War Gothic framework. Analysing Erich
Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear, Sebastian Barry’s
A Long Long Way, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, it looks at the relationships of
transformative states; specifically, the decomposition and destruction of the body, the landscape,
identity, and masculinity along the trenches of the Western Front. Moreover, this thesis explores
how the Gothic nature of WWI affects identity politics in the four novels according to personal,
cultural, and national authorial subject positions. The War Gothic unites the German and French
narratives with the previously unrepresented, and now re-imagined, Irish Catholic and Indigenous
Canadian war experiences for the Gothic communicates the ineffable complexities of human
nature and of war.

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Table of Contents

ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................................... II
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. III
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................................ IV
INTRODUCTION: WAR GOTHIC AND THE WESTERN FRONT OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR.... 1
CHAPTER I: BODILY DESTRUCTION, DECAY, AND DEATH........................................................... 18
CHAPTER II: MONSTROUS TRANSFORMATIONS OF LANDSCAPE AND SOLDIER ................... 41
CHAPTER III: MASCULINITY AND THE HORRORS OF WAR ......................................................... 68
CONCLUSION: A LOST GENERATION............................................................................................... 100
WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................................ 109

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Acknowledgments

Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Maryna Romanets, for her invaluable
expertise, guidance, and encouragement during this project. I would also like to thank my
committee members, Dr. Ted Binnema and Dr. Kevin Hutchings, and my external examiner Dr.
Svitlana Krys, for their helpful and positive feedback on my thesis.
Thank you to my family and friends for their continuous incitement, and a special thanks
to my husband, Matthew Hance, whose unwavering support, patience, and overall good cheer kept
me on task.

Introduction: War Gothic and the Western Front of the First World War

This thesis is a comparative study of four literary accounts of World War One (WWI)
within the framework of the emerging War Gothic, which has become a constitutive part of
Gothic studies. The primary focus of this thesis is to examine the relationships of
transformative states, specifically, the decomposition and destruction of the body, the
landscape, identity and masculinity along the trenches of the Western Front. I focus on Erich
Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear (1930),
Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005), and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005). I
have selected German, French, Irish, and Canadian novels to explore the differences and
similarities in their representations of personal and cultural identity in the face of chaos,
which reflect and refract these Western nations’ war experiences and re-imagined warfare.
While the two post-war texts deal with the involvement in the War of two key countries,
Germany and France, the two contemporary texts rememorate the contribution of the then
British colonies, Ireland and Canada. Overall, this thesis examines how, and to what degree,
the Gothic nature of the First World War affects identity formation and its subsequent
dissolution in correlation with national and ethnic (including Aboriginal) authorial subject
positions.
The four novels intersect in the trenches of the Western Front that provide an
abominable Gothic space for declaring their anti-war stance and enacting their characters’
personal dramas and crises. To examine these war narratives, my work draws on
conceptualisations of the Gothic, and more specifically the War Gothic – an offshoot of the

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neoGothic which emerged with modernism and grew alongside the modernist, postmodernist
and postcolonial literary and cultural movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For, throughout the novels, War Gothic elements interact and intertwine with the soldiers’
disillusionment with war, its military glory and its mythology, as well as their scepticism
towards their respective nations while the characters attempt to position themselves as
individuals amid the turmoil of trench warfare. Therefore, this study compares the Gothic
experiences of trench soldiers of the First World War’s Western Front as the War influences
the characters’ sociocultural individuation amid the technological destruction of the human
body and the landscape.
As it has been over one hundred years since the end of the War, with November 11th,
2018 marking the centenary anniversary of the signing of the Armistice and the end of WWI,
it is imperative to re-examine the war narratives and histories of an event which has had a
domino effect world-wide. Despite often being overshadowed by subsequent wars and
conflicts and their own horrors, the First World War has deeply influenced modern and
postmodern ideologies and ultimately questioning what it means to be human, as the war, its
legacy, and its literature have shaped, and continue to influence, the modern world. WWI
developed into what Alfred Kazin refers to as a “continued experience of twentieth-century
man” (qtd. in Fussell 74). This declaration of war as an unceasing condition is true since war
continues to rage across the globe in the twenty-first century. As the effects of the War
reverberate to this day, it is also important to signal that it is the foundation of modern
warfare and it is also the “ultimate origin of the insane contemporary scene. It is where the
irony and the absurdity began” (Fussell 329). For these reasons, the War has become both a
modern and postmodern archetype. Revisiting dominant narratives by modernist writers
about the experience of trench warfare along the Western Front, positioned within a

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hegemonic, imperialist paradigm, in conjunction with its re-imagined postmodern and
postcolonial interpretations allows for widening of the WWI narrative and literary canon.
As such, this study sits within the frameworks of both modernism and
postmodernism. Written in the aftershock of the First World War, both Remarque’s All Quiet
on the Western Front and Chevallier’s Fear follow the modernist literary tradition, which
began to develop at the turn of the twentieth century within political, social, and artistic
spheres as a response to surfacing tensions in all areas of human endeavour and behaviour
(Eksteins xv). The modernist movement “in the arts at the turn of the century was a quest for
liberation, a break, in aesthetic and moral terms, from central authority, from patriarchy, from
bourgeois conformity, from, in short, a European tradition that had been dictated to a large
extent from Paris” (48). However, the Great War acted as a catalyst upon modernist
sensibilities, stimulating and propelling the interrogations of Western traditions, values, and
organisations of thought, and, in turn, allowed for experimentation in the arts with narratives,
forms, materials, and structures (Riqueline 20). Modernism, therefore, is comprehensive as it
encompasses many genres and modes of representation. An important aspect of modernism,
however, is the focus on the self-conscious, the awareness of the self as an individual who
questions where and how they belong and perform in their society. This mindfulness is
essential in this study as it illustrates and exemplifies the shift in the characters’ identities in
response to the horrors of trench warfare, and how their personal experiences impact their
relationships with their fellow soldiers, civilians, and themselves.
In addition to influencing creative and cultural expression, the War is unique for its
literary production even though artistic representations have accompanied wars for centuries.
This distinctiveness lies in the fact that by the turn of the twentieth century, primary
education was mandatory in Western European countries, thus creating a literate population

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by the start of the War (Eksteins 186). Due to the high literacy rate, the front-line soldiers of
WWI generated poetry, personal accounts, letters, and stories about their wartime
experiences during and after their service – making it the first ever war to have spawned so
much written material (Sokołowska-Paryż and Löschnigg 1). With war becoming “the
permanent condition of mankind” (Fussel 71), creative productions of WWI persist in
literature as well as in other artistic mediums. Additionally, the War held many unresolved
issues which continued to haunt people and communities worldwide, stimulating the return of
an old ghost in the new century. Now, in the twenty-first century, the postmodernist
productions of WWI are “imaginative (re)constructions” as “[p]ost-memory literature and
film reinterpret and redefine the Great War but – at the same time – they create and
perpetuate an emphatic connection with this past, and endow it with significance for the
present” (Sokołowska-Paryż and Löschnigg 3). By being empirically removed from the
horrific theatre of the War, contemporary societies are engaged in reflections upon it, thus
generating, in a postmodern sense, a “memory of war” (Fussel 326).
Although postmodernism emerged after World War Two as a movement that sought
to depart from modernism (Brooker 4-10), it is so intertwined with modernism that the two
cannot be separated: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.
Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this
state is constant” (Lyotard 79). Therefore, postmodernism challenges previous forms while
simultaneously taking from those systems. While postmodernism processes and transforms
previous organisations of thought, it also questions dominant grand narratives, especially
with regard to matters of representation and identity. As Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż and
Martin Löschnigg point out, there is an important need to include “marginalized
perspectives” such as race and gender within postmodern memorialisation of the War, as well

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as the “forgotten Great War battlefields” (2). The canonical literature of WWI – which
includes Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front – primarily focusses on the Western
Front and, as a result, “the Western Front has come to stand as a synecdoche for the First
World War” (Phillips 232). Although this thesis is limited to the examination of the War
Gothic narratives of the Western Front, it incorporates postmodern memorialisation through
its examination of postcolonial narratives in order to expand upon the grand narratives of the
trench warfare experience.
Barry’s and Boyden’s novels, A Long Long Way and Three Day Road, retrospectively
re-imagine and construct accounts of war while giving voice to the experiences of soldiers
from colonised countries and marginalised communities. Previously, these soldiers were
missing from mainstream narratives of the War regardless of the fact that they fought and
died all along the Western Front, sharing the intimate perimetres of the trenches with their
colonisers. As postmodernist texts, the goal of these two novels is not to “supply reality,” but
to present what was previously unpresentable in themselves (Lyotard 81) in order to
“disarticulate dominant narratives, traditions and ideologies” (Brooker 25). While Barry’s
and Boyden’s works were both published in 2005, the authors’ temporal removal from the
scene of the Western Front enrich the dialogue of the terrors of war. Like other postmodernist
art, their approach also “reveals and questions hegemonic structures by bringing marginalised
figures and movements into a fuller dialogue, in a fuller and more argumentative artistic and
cultural history” (Brooker 5). This method of retelling war experiences from previously
disregarded perspectives further places A Long Long Way and Three Day Road within the
genre of postcolonial Gothic.
In general, postcolonial criticism calls for “an engagement that is attentive to all
forms of relations of domination,” where these interactions are exposed and dramatised

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(Gelder 192). In this way, postcolonial texts supply a space wherein the colonised meets the
coloniser. What is also fundamental to postcolonialism, and to the Gothic as well, is the
haunting return of a dark past that desires to speak from the position of the dispossessed
(Edwards xxix). Therefore, postcolonial Gothic employs Gothic tropes and aesthetics to
actively revisit past traumas of loss, displacement, and settlement caused by colonisation
(Gelder 198). This is done to draw attention to the politics of power under colonialism, and
its continued impacts (198). It is important to note that the experiences of colonisation in
Ireland and Canada have been different, as the time and place of the countries’ colonisations
were dictated by different historical and political events. Nevertheless, in both Ireland and
Canada, the gruesome nature of the War acts as a repository for unresolved issues pertaining
to the nations’ respective pasts, allowing them to surface and be deliberated upon. In this war
environment, problems concerning dislocation and disruption of social values and culture, as
well as the questioning of systems of hierarchy and identity, concepts of belonging, and
nationality, are exposed for analysis.
In A Long Long Way and Three Day Road, trauma resulting from colonialism
continues to trouble and disturb successive generations. Therefore, as Santanu Das points out,
the trauma caused by war is not “an interruption but a continuation of peacetime victimhood”
for colonial and postcolonial subjects (25). Trauma is a deep-seated force that can manipulate
an individual by means of a past event (Blanco and Peeren 11). The person who is controlled
and possessed indefinitely by the occurrence is also considered to be “haunted, as it has been
commonly construed” (11). Likewise, the trauma experienced during the active stages of war
also has the power to resurface later in the form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in
individuals and in collective memories. Immediate physical or mental trauma, and trauma as
a spectre of war and of colonialism, affects both individuals and their communities. Cultural

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trauma is a “wound to identity and meaning, a sundering of the social fabric, that affects a
group of people that has achieved some sense of identity and cohesion as a group” (Worsham
173). Sanctioned by colonialism or by warfare, trauma is well suited to the Gothic aesthetic
as it disrupts notions of what is known and what is unknown: shattering identity and
subjectivity because trauma itself lies outside the explicable (Edwards 140).
For this reason, the First World War, as an event, and its representations in the texts
under discussion, can be contextualised in terms of Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, “a
disorderly countersite to the normal that actually exists, reverse-mirroring, and contesting the
ordinary world” (Bronfen 114). In the case of the Western Front, the ‘ordinary world’ is that
of the civilians and of the governing authorities who were vastly removed from the soldiers’
miserable lives in the trenches. The Western Front is a unique and unrepeatable setting due to
the forceful amalgamation of binary oppositions that took place during the war. Along the
Front, new and old military tactics, modern and traditional values, coloniser and colonised,
technology and nature, life and death, collided, thus generating an idiosyncratic site for
Gothic horror. In fact, the horrors of the War surpassed all previously imaginable conceptions
of terror, let alone all conceivable ideas of normality and humanity, to become, for these
men, their new vilified reality. Thus, All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long
Way, and Three Day Road are considered in relation to the neoGothic. As mentioned earlier,
WWI is a pivotal point at the opening of the new century as it is responsible for catalysing
the modernist movement, and subsequently affecting postmodernism; however, the War is
equally at the heart of the Gothic revival at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries.
The Gothic resurgence of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is distinct within
the Gothic tradition as old terrors find news means of expression and create new monsters

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with the aid of technology and science. Eighteenth and nineteenth century European Gothic
fears mingle with novel expressions of horror due to the First World War. Graveyard poets of
the eighteenth century, who focussed on ruins, shadows, darkness, death, and graves (Botting
32), reappeared in the form of the war poets. Gothic devices such as doubles, ghosts,
labyrinths, haunting, ambivalence, anxiety, and dread enter the Gothic theatre of war in a
markedly amplified form. For example, instead of the eighteenth-century fear of an
individual being buried alive, the soldiers on the Front lived in trepidation of being violently
buried alive in large numbers by mortar shells and bombs (Linder 363).
It was David Punter’s Literature of Terror (1980) that opened the neoGothic
discursive field. Inspired by the advances in literary and cultural theory since the 1960s, it
expanded upon the study of Gothic literature from the previous two hundred years into the
twentieth century (Hogle and Smith 1). From its eighteenth-century inauguration, the Gothic
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has extended its cultural production to encapsulate
various media outside of literature due to its mutable, unstable, and constantly evolving
nature. Since growing Gothic modes are culturally and spatially dependent, they must be
examined in relation to sociocultural, economic, and historical context (Jones 125, 131). As
products of a “tangible social reality” (Cavallaro 9), the WWI novels under study must be
considered within the specific conceptual framework of War Gothic – a combination of the
Gothic aesthetic with military culture.
War and Gothic have always been “uneasy bedfellows” (Swift 108), as the violence,
terror, and horrors of war are well suited to the Gothic aesthetic. Artistic representations have
followed and chronicled wars and conflicts for centuries; however, it is not until the early
nineteenth century with Francisco de Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of
War) that the “miseries of war,” of the violence wrought by Napoleon’s armies in Spain,

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were “portrayed on such a personal, individuated and bodily level” (Monnet and Hantke xii).
Printed, and easily dispersed thanks to the innovation of the printing press, de Goya’s
uncensored sketches of carnage, mutilation, and castration of bodies rotting in “unnatural
positions” brought attention and critique towards the inhumane conduct of individuals in war
(xvi). Thus, representations of war that utilise the Gothic mode tend to be anti-war and antimilitaristic by nature because War Gothic “depict[s] the savage conditions and violence of
war in graphic and unsparing terms” (Monnet 183). War, as Monnet and Hantke further
explain,
provides a space in which civilization itself – clarified, purified, and reduced to its
essence – can be placed under scrutiny… Given the steady drumbeat of wars
throughout human history, war provides a powerful reminder of how closely
civilization operates in the margins of its own coherence, integrity, and effectiveness:
a cautionary lesson in what to avoid at any cost. (xxiv)
Sunday Swift further adds that the “Gothic techniques can be effectively used to translate the
horrors experienced through war, and provide a parlance for the horrors and trauma of war”
(94). Principally, in wars, the mind and body are defiled, dehumanisation occurs, as does
psychic numbing due to the subjective encounters with trauma and memory.
War Gothic is an important means of expressing “deeply personal and idiosyncratic
experiences,” for it also “gives voice to the unspeakable” aspects of human society, history,
and nature (Monnet and Hantke xx). As the Gothic examines and questions borders, limits,
and categories (Botting 8-9), the chaotic and turbulent war setting provides a backdrop
against which various themes can be explored. Just like the Gothic, War Gothic examines the
inexpressible parts of the human experience, the transgression of social and literary
conventions, as well as critiquing and defying normative morals (Monnet and Hantke xii).

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This is done through the analysis of the devastated and erased landscapes, human death and
destruction, disillusionment with military glory and mythologising, censorship and
manipulation of information and images, and developing technologies (xv). Of course,
characteristic tropes and aesthetics familiar to the Gothic tradition are present in all War
Gothic representations; however, like the Gothic, War Gothic is, as already noted, temporally
and culturally contingent. Every war is experientially different and unique as it is dictated
and moulded by distinct cultural, ideological, technological, and political factors. For
instance, Sunday Swift posits a ‘Khaki Gothic’ associated with the Vietnam War; Sara
Wasson identifies an urban Gothic specific to the Second World War; yet both belong to War
Gothic as they share the commonality of dealing with the horrors of twentieth century
warfare.1 Accordingly, my analysis here specifically focuses on the War Gothic narrative of
the First World War’s Western Front, as All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long
Way, and Three Day Road all deal with the inimitable and dreadful landscape of the trenches,
the futility of escaping death, fear and dread, as well as experiencing and witnessing
monstrous transformations.
Interest in War Gothic is very recent in Gothic scholarship, with Agnieszka Soltysik
Monnet and Steffen Hantke’s publication of War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016)
being the first collection of essays on this genre. Although their book brings together
theoretical discussions of the War Gothic as a whole, WWI is only briefly mentioned in
Monnet and Hantke’s introduction. However, earlier studies on the First World War, which

Some of my research findings on War Gothic have been published as an article, “War Gothic and Bodily
Decay: Reshaping Identity in All Quiet on the Western Front,” Gothic Studies Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, Edinburgh
UP, July 2020, pp. 183-196, DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2020.0048
1

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are unrelated to the Gothic and predate its scholarly reformation in the 1980s, provided
certain critical idioms currently employed in Gothic scholarship.
For example, Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (1979)
examines how identity changes in response to the horror and terror of the War. Leed looks at
British and German personal and fictional accounts of the War, including Remarque’s
seminal novel, to explore how the liminal nature of the war affects the maturation and
identity of the young male soldiers. Although Leed does not link liminality or the war
experience to the Gothic, he describes the landscape of No Man’s Land in quasi-Gothic
terms. For one, he notes that entering No Man’s Land was the most disturbing experience for
many of soldiers as they felt a sense of marginality, having been “sent beyond the outer
boundaries of social life, placed between the known and the unknown, the familiar, and the
uncanny” (15).
Similarly, in “Landscape and Symbol in the British and German Literature of World
War I” (1994), Ann P. Linder does not tie her study of British and German literature in their
depictions of the “landscape of hell” of the Western Front in direct relation to the Gothic
(351). Regardless, Linder examines how the two nations’ literary pasts influence the
depictions of the landscape of the Front in terms of horror, terror, and the grotesque. She
notes that the “German landscapes of World War I characteristically are calculated to horrify
the reader, not to evoke the sense of devastating loss and pity typical of the British
landscapes” (360). From symbols and icons to linguistics, romantic poetry, and folk tales,
Linder outlines how these elements have influenced the perception and recounting of the
Western Front landscape, which, in turn, informed nationalistic “attitudes toward World War
I and the obsessions that would trigger World War II” (366).

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Correspondingly to both Linder and Leed, Alfredo Bonadeo surveys personal and
fictional accounts written during and after the War in Mark of the Beast; Death and
Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (1989). He attends to the transformation of
the soldiers, of the “shrinkage of the human self,” as well as their animalisation (5), which
can be associated with the Gothic mode and aesthetics. He primarily focuses on Italian
letters, reports, and prose, although he does briefly look at German, English, and French
writing – including the novels of Remarque and Chevallier. Overall, his perspective on the
animal behaviour and qualities of the soldiers is negative even though he acknowledges the
survival benefits the men gain in attaining animal-like qualities (3-4). In fact, Bonadeo
equates the animality of the soldiers as a form of physical and mental degradation, and the
first step towards ruin and destruction of the individual and the loss of their humanity (43).
He does not look at the animal transfiguration, or deterioration in his case, as a form of
hybridity, whereas Paul Goetsch’s study of WWI poetry, Monsters in English Literature:
From the Romantic Age to the First World War (2002), looks into the monstrous
fragmentation, hybridity, and cyborg nature of the soldiers within war poetry in more neutral
terms. Goetsch also looks at the liminality of these new war monsters in conjunction with
Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, for a monster “commutes between different worlds and
makes the fantastic appear tempting as well as dangerous” (15). For, the monsters rising from
the chaos and violence of the War are the basis for other neoGothic monsters such as
zombies, aliens, and cyborgs (Bronfen 120).
Martin Tropp and Terry Phillips, like Goetsch who focuses on the modernist literary
accounts of the War, also examine WWI with reference to the Gothic tradition. Tropp’s
Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Cultures (1818-1918) (1990)
pays attention to the Gothic present in the personal letters and journals of soldiers of the

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Western Front. Furthermore, he argues that the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century
prepared the men for the horrors they were to face in the trenches (Tropp 216-217). On the
other hand, Terry Phillips’ article, “The Rules of War: Gothic Transgressions in First World
War Fiction” (2000), analyses the Gothic nature of WWI battlefields portrayed in literature
written during and after the War. Like Leed, Phillips examines the liminal qualities of No
Man’s Land, but now as an important Gothic space in fiction and non-fiction because it
dissolves “the cultural boundaries between the British and the Germans” (234). Furthermore,
Phillips identifies the unique nature of the First World War trench experience, for the horrific
reality of the soldiers in the trenches and the squalid conditions of the Western Front are an
unrepeatable and historic experience.
In English-language academic output, much of the literature that outlines the War
Gothic of the Western Front delves into British, specifically English, and German
representations of the War. As outlined, the comparison of these two countries is common;
however, there is a need to expand the scope of discussion to include more perspectives. As
the first war to engage nations and states from around the globe, a key factor of WWI is the
“unprecedented range of interracial and cross-cultural encounters, experiences and
intimacies” that it created as a result of a history of European imperialism and colonialism
(Das 4). Santanu Das stresses that within twenty-first century studies of the War, there is a
historical and interdisciplinary “interest in transnational or global aspects of the conflict” (6).
Yet, while this attention has passed over into the literary world with works such as Barry’s
and Boyden’s novels, postcolonial WWI novels have not been discussed in relation to their
predecessors, comparing modernist War novels with their postmodernist counterparts.
As previously stated, examining the Western Front in terms of the Gothic might not
be ground breaking; however, this thesis adds to the growing body of War Gothic literature

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of the First World War by exploring Gothic elements within anti-war novels written from the
perspectives of the War’s principle players, Germany and France, and overlooked Irish and
Canadian First Nations narratives. As the most canonical anti-war novel, Remarque’s All
Quiet on the Western Front was chosen for this study due to its international success after its
publication in 1929 (Eksteins 296). Published a year after Remarque’s novel, Chevallier’s
Fear did not meet with the success that Remarque’s novel did because of the novel’s
preoccupation with fear (Chevrière). In comparison to other French WWI war novels such as
Henri Barbusse’s Le feu and Les croix de bois by Roland Dorgelès, Fear was very unpopular
in post-war France (Chevrière). Chevallier’s novel was republished in 2008 as a memorial to
the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War, and it was subsequently
translated into English in 2011 for which it won the Scott Moncrieff Prize (Le dilettante). In
this manner, Fear sits as a rediscovered anti-war classic next to All Quiet on the Western
Front.
As one of the large-scale effects of the War was the beginning of the disintegration of
imperial powers, it is important to explore the complex subject positions of the colonial men
who helped fuel the British army. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland and
Canada were dependent on Great Britain and aspired to achieve their autonomy as
independent countries (Roberts 93, 55). Ireland, as the first English colonial project, was also
one of the first to fight for and gain its independence after the War; I chose Barry’s A Long
Long Way because the novel depicts the intricacies of the Irish-English relations coupled with
the turbulent setting of the War. Moreover, Barry’s novel is even more significant as it is told
from the perspective of a Catholic soldier, when the majority of WWI Irish texts are from
Unionist (Protestant) perspectives as the Irish, who strove for independence, did not

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commemorate fighting alongside the English colonisers with the same amount of enthusiasm
(Jeffery 256-257).
Like Barry who presents the traumas of colonial history mingled with the chaos of the
Western Front, Boyden’s Three Day Road similarly illustrates the continuation of colonial
history into the trenches. In English Canada, WWI is often regarded as a critical and
historical ‘coming of age’ moment; however, the involvement of First Nations, Inuit, and
Métis soldiers has often been overlooked. In WWI literature, Three Day Road is the only
Canadian novel written from the perspective of Aboriginal soldiers. The construction of
stories from untold viewpoints is important as an act of memorialisation, construction of
social memory, as well as a formation for historical and national identities. As Hanna
Teichler remarks, imagination is a production, for “[e]vents like the Great War become
narratives that qualify as frameworks for this process of locating and construction: if a nation
is imagined, then (grand) narratives are the means to assess, construct, invent and produce its
unity” (243). Fiction is a powerful platform for conveying and negotiating identity because
memories and narratives are produced in order to have a “transgenerational effect” and to
form new perspectives and understandings of the world (243-4).
Chapter One explores the representations of human decay and mutilation in all four
novels. In the trenches and in No Man’s Land, death and bodily decomposition perpetually
enclose soldiers physically and mentally, continuously reminding the men of their fate and
imminent mortality as exposure to mangled and dismembered human carcasses became
commonplace encounters for the soldiers. The text’s protagonists are endlessly assaulted with
the presence of perishing and disfigured bodies of countless soldiers and their fellow
comrades. Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the chapter examines how the
grotesque horror of desecrated and decaying bodies disrupts and disturbs the characters in the

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novels. For, as Tropp points out, the unburied corpse is “the ultimate horror of all horror
stories” as it “is our own dead future, the body we bury and disinter with every retelling of
the tale of terror” (219). These experiences with human decay and death affect the soldiers’
perceptions as they contribute to their disillusionment with the War, which not only dispels
their original illusions regarding patriotism and the mythologised glorification of their
respective nations, decay and death are nothing less than traumatic.
Chapter Two looks at the transformations and the liminality of the landscape of the
Western Front and its mirroring onto the soldiers. As a result of the mass number of deaths
and the havoc wrought by new-age military weaponry, the Western Front was a surreal and
other-worldly landscape of putrefaction and disintegration. The industrial destruction of
people and landscape through war in turn “becomes the destruction of the natural and
essential basis of cultural identity” (Larsen 475). Liminality, from the latin limen meaning
threshold (Leed 15), is an important Gothic and War Gothic device. In war, boundaries are
constantly transgressed as the violence, fear, terror and horror of war contravene
expectations, dissolving landscapes, identities, and one’s sense of self (485). As a result, the
soldiers in the novels become monstrous hybrids, and not simply as binary creatures, because
through their experiences of war, the soldiers become physical and psychological
amalgamations of human, animal, machine, and object. These soldier’s hybridity accentuates
and stresses modern and postmodern anxieties around what it means to be human by
mirroring concerns of physical dehumanisation, survival, the horrors of technology, and
military-industrial complexes (Bronfen 120).
Chapter Three examines how fear, the “permanent, albeit multi-faceted, aspect of beingin-the-world” (Cavallaro 6), is involved in the formation of the soldiers’ masculinities. The
chapter also considers the manner in which countries and nation-states used fear to play upon

17
the men’s concepts of masculinity for enlistment as WWI put nationalism and masculinity
together “more closely than ever before and, as it did so, brought to a climax all those facets
of masculinity that had merely been latent that now got their due,” such as aggression,
violence, effeminacy (Mosse 107-108). In the novels, the young protagonists form their
identity and masculinity within the trenches of the Western Front under fear and terror. The
War replaces previous traditional sites for identity production for a generation of young men,
and it also defamiliarises past values as the characters have difficulty relating “the past to the
present” (Goetsch 315). The individualised uncanny fears of each protagonist further
disillusion them from the glory promised by the military because fear has the power to force
awareness, to sharpen the senses – making one realise the complexity of reality (Cavallaro 67).
And yet, in the War’s transformations of characters’ masculinity and self, and the
changes rendered to landscape and body, the War Gothic of the First World War does not
present resolutions to the problems it presents; rather, it is an exposé. For “the Gothic vision
is primarily concerned with evoking a sense of uncertainty and indeterminateness” (Cavallaro
97). Furthermore, war is abject: it is an abyss, the other side of religion, morality and
ideology (Kristeva 209); as such, it is the ultimate test for human identity since all previously
established forms of meaning are abolished, questioned, and reshaped by violence and the
constant threat of annihilation (Larsen 473). Nevertheless, it is important to study the global
and generational effects of the War as its repercussions continue to reverberate well into the
twenty-first century. As well, it is equally imperative to keep the living memory of WWI
alive, for if it disappears, the War can be used for political purposes again. As Charles
Closmann points out, “to analyze war is to ponder the most radical and destructive of human
actions and to confront a fundamental engine of world history” (2).

18
Chapter I: Bodily Destruction, Decay, and Death

The body of a dead man is an object of utter disgust for those
who are alive, and this disgust is itself the mark of utter
prostration.
Chevallier, Fear
The Western Front, as the site of unprecedented mass slaughter, contained thousands
of corpses and an uncountable number of body fragments. The bodies and body parts were
laid bare to the elements, and their exposure produced intense visual, auditory, tactile and
olfactory experiences for all those soldiers from both the Allies and the Central Powers
locked in trench warfare. The corpses’ putrefaction and disintegration perpetually enclosed
the men physically and mentally, unceasingly reminding them of their fate and transient
mortality. All along the Belgian and French line, the bodily carnage and human decay
witnessed in the trenches inevitably unsettled and reconfigured socio-cultural notions
regarding life and death of those who witnessed its horrors. The soldiers at the Front,
including men from Europe and from Europe’s overseas colonies and former colonies,
including indigenous peoples, rapidly discovered how easily their bodies could be
fragmented and desecrated in ways that were previously unimaginable. To survive the hellish
onslaught of corpses, the protagonists in All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long
Way, and Three Day Road can defend themselves against these horrors only by enacting
indifference. Though, try as they might, the surreal terror of the grotesque and grisly
decaying bodies of their comrades causes fear and trauma, and inevitably destroys all sense
of worldly boundaries, for the human corpse is the most destabilising form of abjection.

19
Unlike any other war which proceeded it, World War One utilised global mechanised
warfare. It engaged dozens of nations and colonies in battles using tanks, machine guns, gas
and massive numbers of heavy artillery across land, sea, and sky. Its scope was
unprecedented in modern warfare, as was the magnitude of the casualties. Though the exact
number of killed and wounded soldiers is unknown, it is estimated that over ten million men
“died as a direct result from military action,” and many more from wounds and disease
(Roberts 266). This number, however, does not include the number of civilians who were
killed by military action, illness, and famine because of the First World War. Death, on this
scale, was previously unknown and unimaginable. Prior to the cataclysmic event of WWI,
and outside of any other theatres of war for that matter, death in Europe and Canada was
typically reserved for individuals such as the elderly and the sick. Once dead, corpses would
be buried in the earth, placed in trees, or cremated, etc. and generally left to repose
undisturbed (Taylor 44-53). When it comes to attending their dead, humans have always
taken great care in the burial or disposal processes, and, whatever the practises may be, they
have always been nothing “other than deliberate, ritualized, and regarded as the highest
importance” (45). The act of caring for the dead, as St. Augustine remarks, consoles the
living for their loss, and the gestures of “piety, of love, of affection,” and faith shown
towards the deceased is a sign of our humanity (Laqueur 41). To disrespect the dead is a
terrible reflection on the self, on one’s family and community. For centuries, an inadequate
burial and disinterment have not only been a “social offense to the living but also disturbs the
deceased and risks their return” (Taylor 45). Regardless of the complexity or simplicity of the
services performed for the departed, the living always feared that without suitable “postmortem rituals,” the dead cannot reach their “next state” or afterlife (383). Consequently,
without the proper rites of passage, the dead would “remain near the earthly plane, bringing

20
havoc and death to the living” (383). No longer in the land of the living and not yet in an
afterlife, the souls of the mistreated dead remain in the liminal space between the two realms
as they haunt the living, or their descendants, in the form of ghosts or monsters.
In addition to the fear of the vindictive dead, up until the third century in Western
Europe, people also feared the spiritual pollution of the dead; that, due to proximity, the
cadavers of people buried in cemeteries could dirty or ‘damn’ their souls (Laqueur 94-7).
However, since then, dread and distress caused by corpses have shifted towards more
hygienic concerns. While the rites and customs surrounding cadavers are deemed sacred and
inviolable, the material reality of the decaying body is seen as unclean and fouled. In this
contradictory juxtaposition, the corpse is taboo because it is simultaneously considered to be
sacrosanct and impure (Punter 190). Taboo is a central concept in Gothic writing (Riquelme
25) and, according to Punter, is a “socio-psychological” construction of an object, thing, or
action that resides “on the fringe of the acceptable” and inhabits the space of the in-between;
neither one nor the other, the taboo is frightening as it shares this interstice with fear (186,
189). In this manner, the corpse, as taboo, is in a liminal state, especially physiologically, for
the body’s flesh is in the process of decay and disintegration – it is neither alive nor yet a
skeleton. Therefore, the corpse is an effective and disturbing Gothic element for it is
unsettling as it wavers between the distinctions of life and death.
In traditional Christian faith and First Nations spirituality, life and death are
complementary binaries, or balancing counterweights that form the natural cycle of life.
Decay, however, is often disregarded or purposefully excluded from the equation because it
is seen as ugly, even though it acts as a transitional agent between the two. Decay, on its
own, is a natural process of change that intermediates the relationship between organic life
and death as exemplified in the natural world, as in the change of seasons, as well as in

21
human civilizations. In society, decay can neither be ignored nor condemned, as Friedrich
Nietzsche remarks, because “[w]e need to understand that every kind of disease and decay is
constantly making some contribution to the common fund of our value judgements …
Degeneration, decay and waste … are the natural consequences of life and growth …” (32).
Though Nietzsche discusses the important role of decay as an unavoidable regenerative entity
in the cycle of power of civilizations (32-33), this function can also be applied to all types of
decay as nothing in this world remains static or immortal; everything is subjected to the
inevitable workings of time. The process of decay is equally important as life and death, for
without it, rebirth and the continuation of the cycle cannot occur. Yet, while one can analyse
the rise and fall of empires and nations, there is a large degree of separation between the
observer and the event, resulting in minimal effects upon human sentiments per se. However,
watching the decomposition of the human bodily decay has the ability to directly and
immediately generate a fervent response in the viewer because it viscerally perturbs our ideas
concerning our human condition, for it is through our bodies that we perceive and interpret
our immediate realities. For this reason, observing human decay, or any violent defilement of
bodies as they are injured, rotting, or dead has an immensely traumatic effect on an
individual’s psyche because people can see themselves mirrored in them. Dead and decaying
bodies provide a medium in which the viewer can imagine their future states – which is why
the dead are usually taken care of quickly as to avoid psychological destabilisation of the
living.
With such apprehensive reverence towards the dead, it is only during times of
calamity, such as wars or epidemics, that less attention is given to the appropriate disposal of
corpses (Taylor 45). WWI was, of course, not an exception as not all the human bodies, or
their parts, could be collected and dutifully treated during the madness that was trench

22
warfare. In fact, the Great War was the first conflict in human history where men were
slaughtered and injured in such industrial numbers. Consequently, the terrain of the Western
Front became a site of complete abjection as soldiers were forced to constantly observe and
experience the violent mutilation of the living, as well as witnessing the rotting and
decomposing cadavers of their fellow soldiers. Due to the sheer number of casualties, over
the course of the four years, not all of the bodies, or their parts, could be recovered and given
proper burials before they started to decompose. Indeed, “[t]he poor lads of the Royal Army
Medical Corps, stripped to the waist, hauled those morsels of humanity away if they were
still breathing and gabbling and praying. The remnants were left to decorate the way. Hands,
legs, heads, chests, all kicked over to the side of the road, half sunk in the destitute mud”
(Barry 230). With so much death, only those corpses still recognisable as human were
prioritised, leaving behind the severed bodily members. The desecrated landscape of the
front-line was so littered with human remains that, to walk through No Man’s Land, one had
to walk over the piles of corpses, like “walking through meat” (Chevallier 195).
Remarque, Chevallier, Barry, and Boyden’s novels illustrate these encounters with
the decaying corpses by clearly articulating the sensory experiences of the trenches through
powerful descriptions of human bodily decay in all its multiplicities. In addition to the
description of the visual horrors of the rotting bodies, the novels aptly play to many of the
reader’s senses as they call attention to the smells and sounds issuing from No Man’s Land,
because, as the tissues decompose, various gases and “volatile organic compounds … are
liberated and become airborne” (Strathopoulos et al. 148). Besides the microorganisms in and
around the body which aid in the breakdown of the organic material, the rate of decay is
dependent on exposure to the elements. Lying outside, along the trenches, and in the craters
between the lines, weather and scavengers accelerate the speed of decomposition much

23
“faster than burials because the corpse is exposed to varying environmental factors” (148).
As such, the bodies deteriorated dreadfully quickly in the trenches. In this manner, the
corpses ubiquitously and relentlessly attack the soldiers’ psyches and senses as they lay
exposed in the open. Decay, as a process and literal entity, is disturbing and unsettling
because its very essence presents incoherence and disjointedness as it plays with what is
known about life and death, past, present, and future; “[d]ecay is undeniable, and yet nothing
can decay as what is, but only as what is not: what once was, or what will come to be at its
demise” (Bottum 100). This commanding influence disrupts the protagonists and their
comrades as they are forced to witness the physical transformation and deterioration of flesh
at exponential rates.
The potent power of the rotting corpses is most vividly described by Chevallier as he
encapsulates the dynamic capabilities of human decay to affect as many senses as possible
through Jean Dartemont’s early experiences in the trenches:
My most vivid memory from this time was of a dead body, not one I saw but one I
smelt … As one of us struck his pick into the earth there was a squelch, the sound of
something bursting. The pick had hit a damp, rotten stomach, which released its
miasma right into our faces, in a sudden blast of foul vapour. The stench filled the air,
covered our mouths like a foetid flannel so we could not breathe, pricked our eyelids
with poisonous needles which brought tears to our eyes … The decomposing body’s
disgusting gasses spread out, filled the darkness and our lungs, reigned over the
silence … our bodies had caught the awful, fecund smell of putrefaction, which is life
and death, and for a long time that smell irritated our mucous membranes, stimulated
the secretions of our glands, aroused in us some secret organic attraction of matter for
matter, even when it is corrupt and almost extinguished. Our own promised, perhaps

24
imminent, putrefaction found communion with this other, powerful extreme of
putrefaction, which holds dominion over our pale souls and hunts them down
remorselessly. (Chevallier 36)
Here, not only does the cadaver assault all of Jean’s senses, but Chevallier highlights how the
decaying corpse acts as an arena where life and death collide and intersect. As a “privileged
place of mingling,” decay for Kristeva presents two binaries simultaneously within it as a
third form – acting for and against, the beginning and the end (149). It is for this reason,
Kristeva explains, that decay, as seen in the cadaver illustrated in the passage above,
possesses a gravitational pull that “fascinates desire” (1). Here, the corpse mesmerises Jean,
bewitches him so that he cannot look away – allowing its essence to enter his spirit and haunt
him. In all four of the novels, the gruesome tableaus of human decay deeply perturb the
captive onlookers’ existences.
In such a setting as the Western Front, where all previous notions of self, society,
culture, and nation are in question, the corpse threatens the little that the men have left in
their bleak and repulsive conditions: their perceptions, sanity, and humanity. The ghastly
cadavers that Paul Baümer, Jean Dartemont, Willie Dune, Xavier Bird, and their comrades
encounter are so distressing and shocking that they go beyond the Gothic’s evocation of
sublime emotive excess of terror, wonder and passion (Botting 3), and land just beyond them
in the realm of the abject. The characters in the novel are the ones who are personally facing
abjection, and could thus be named what Kristeva terms ‘dejects,’ as they are trying to find
themselves as a result of the onslaught of decaying bodies (Kristeva 8).
Though Kristeva’s abject and the sublime are alike in their utilisation of similar
subjects, language, and themes, they are, however, not the same thing (Kristeva 11). The
abject, like the sublime, is not a definable and concise object, but it is nonetheless opposed to

25
‘I,’ and the superego; it is the “brutish suffering that ‘I’ puts up with, sublime and devastated
… I endure it for I imagine that such is the desire of the other” (1-2). It is the perverse (15),
the improper and the unclean; it is what we dislike the most and feel a physical “repugnance”
and reaction against (spasms or vomiting) (2). The abject’s effect to simultaneously create
attraction and repulsion in the deject is very Gothic; for the Gothic, as Jarlath Killeen notes,
articulates “both disgust and desire” (10). Furthermore, abjection, like the Gothic, is
subversive in nature as it “disturbs identity, system, order” by transgressing and breaking
down all boundaries, for it “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4).
According to Kristeva, our interactions and experiences with the abject, through
suffering and fear, enable us to become properly rounded individuals by ‘being-in-theworld,’ because we have faced “ill-being” (140). Terror, anxiety, dread, panic, etc. are all
sentiments that are a part of existence, but are often hidden away in exchange for less
disturbing emotions and expressions like happiness, joy, love, tenderness, adoration, etc.
While these are all portions of our human condition, Kristeva outlines that to emphasise the
horror of being is to display the ‘other,’ or counter-site to established religion, morality, and
ideology (208-9). Abjection is thus the dark underbelly that “is radically excluded from
symbolised life” for it draws the individual to a space where all meaning collapses (Farnell
116). Once in this space, however, terror ensues as one tries to fashion new meaning on one’s
own because due to the complete absence of meaning, one must create a new personal,
social, political, and cultural zone for themselves. The corpse, however, is the most
disturbing configuration of the abject (Kristeva 3). As taboo and abject, cadavers are the most
destabilising influence on the self because they simultaneously point to our present and
future; “As they are, so shall we also. As we are, so were they once too” (Laqueur 55). The
dead bodies reflect our selves while indicating finality, as well as the fragility and

26
temporality of our flesh. The self, in confrontation with a human corpse, is pushed to the
limits of its “condition as a living being” and ceases to be as it was because the corpse
trespasses upon all that we know of ourselves at that time in the world, thus making the
decaying human body “the most sickening of wastes” (Kristeva 3).
While decay and the corpse have the power to infringe on boundaries, the most
intimate line that is first transgressed in human death and violence is that of the skin. The
body itself is considered as a fixed territory for there is a clear distinction between the
internal and the external, the public and the private (Edwards and Graulund 57). Skin
intermediates as a wall, keeping the outside and inside separate. In addition to being the
body’s natural protective barrier between the outside environment and our internal organs,
there is also a familiar relationship between the self and skin for our epidermis records our
life journey: our vitality, experiences, age, disease, birth, etc. Skin is therefore an important
identity marker as well as the “most fragile boundary,” as Judith Halberstam observes, “and
the most stable of signifiers” (163). Furthermore, in Gothic tradition, the skin is “the ultimate
boundary” because as this barrier is transgressed, inversions occur: “slowly but surely the
outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains,” and offers itself for
the formation of new meaning (7). For example, if one were to place the body of a healthy
individual side by side with a freshly dead corpse, the first noticeable difference appears on
the surface organ.
In fact, any changes to the human body, from mutilations to lesions, that are visible
on the skin are deemed grotesque and even monstrous (Edwards and Graulund 2). When
something pierces the skin barrier, the first reaction is of disgust, or of horror, and if
something oozes out of our skin (when it is not supposed to), the reaction is again the same.
Crossing the perimeter results in a response of revulsion and instability, as it would for the

27
Gothic monster since the impeding of boundaries is seen as impure, unclean, and
“categorically interstitial” (Carroll 54-55). In Remarque’s novel, the discomfort with such
crossover manifests itself through Paul Baümer’s unease and repulsion of the transformation
in his friend’s skin. As Kemmerich slowly dies, the skin melts away, and the skeleton begins
to show, motioning death’s approach: “He looks ghastly, yellow and wan. In his face there
are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of
times. They are not so much lines as marks. Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has
already pressed out the boundaries of the body” (Remarque 14). This slow and controlled
change occurs while Kemmerich is alive, as is similarly seen in Boyden’s novel when Xavier
notices Elijah’s skin displaying its own degenerative alterations: “the high cheekbones and
hollowed cheeks, so gaunt from” morphine and madness (231). The way the skin is
transgressed in these two characters is not as aggressive as the incisions caused by bayonets,
shrapnel, or mortar shells, which would result in a forceful inversion of the bodily organs.
Nevertheless, the changes on the skin affect the viewer and foreshadow the inevitable. Yet, in
both cases, Paul and Xavier see the bodies of their comrades as frightening and abnormal,
because any irregular physical changes to the body over time are considered monstrous
(Halberstam 8). Here, however, the changes occur in the living bodies of the men, but
gruesome transformations of the skin and flesh are even more frightening and perturbing
when viewed in the dead bodies. As the corpses and their decay accentuate the men’s
existential awareness, the characters are forced to watch the many ways their bodies can be
defiled, splintered, and fragmented.
In effect, the decomposing cadavers of the battlefields in the four novels signal the
core reality of trench warfare – of the young men’s inexorable deaths and the “common fate
of … [their] generation” (Remarque 87). Even though the men are alarmed and frightened by

28
the corpses, the contact between the living and the dead nevertheless establishes an intimate
and vacillating relationship that is concurrently positive and negative. The dead, as Thomas
Laqueur notes, have always had a productive and destructive power over the living and have
therefore shaped the way we think, feel and act (21-22, 102-103). Here in the trenches,
however, the relationship that the soldiers develop with the cadavers exponentially
transgresses all previous boundaries between the living and the dead as the cadavers are
continuously visible and active in the men’s everyday lives. The proximity between the two
during the War was so great that it was very common for body parts, such as “[l]imbs and
torsos,” to be “churned up again and again by the shelling. Working parties digging or
repairing trenches repeatedly uncovered corpses in all stages of decay and mutilation”
(Eksteins 151). Much like skin, the trench walls function as a protective barrier between the
defenders and the opponents, forming a decisive line between us and them, safety and
danger, life and death. These dugouts required constant repair and upkeep because of the
bombardments and raids, and even though they were constructed primarily from sand bags
and dirt, human remains also became a part of the fortifications. Stuck in the trenches with
water up to their knees, the men are bombarded by “the shells, the machine-guns, the evil
stenches” (Barry 234). Willie, in A Long Long Way, remarks on the conditions of the walls
from which “hung the sad bones and fleshy remnants of other souls, as if some crazy farmer
had sown them there, expecting in the spring a harvest of babies” (234). As if fragmented
body parts, like sown potato fragments or fertiliser, could not only revive the dead men but
grow new ones. Here, the visibility and presence of the mutilated cadavers in the trenches
blur the distinctions between life and death in a veritable Gothic play of opposites, wherein
life is dependent on death.

29
The cadavers were usually unintentionally placed within the sandbags, but in Three
Day Road, Xavier and his comrades actively repair the trenches with body parts: “Those who
aren’t collected we bury the best we’re able in the trench sides when they begin to swell and
stink. I make sure to thank them for helping to strengthen the trench line, tell them that even
in death they are still helping” (Boyden 81). Xavier recognises the role the fleshy segments
play as material for reinforcing and fortifying the line, which will in turn aid his survival.
Used in this manner, the remnants of the dead have a positive connotation as they are of
assistance even as they disintegrate. At the same time, however, the mangled corpses also
serve as detriments to the soldier’s survival as Xavier later learns during an advance. The
corpses are saviours as much as they are miscreants, for the dead become obstacles as they
fall on the wire during an advance and keep the living from proceeding; “too many corpses
jam up the hole for anyone to get through…Others are climbing over the bodies of the dead,”
and consequently, expose those still alive to machine gun fire (Boyden 237).
Neither useful nor useless, evil nor good, the corpses are all of these at the same time.
Although the cadavers are inanimate, the characters in the novels instinctively assign these
types of meanings to the putrefying bodies as they try to make sense of their new
surroundings. This wavering and open-ended room for signification further places human
decay as abject, for the corpse does not adhere to any form of categorisation because it is a
vesicle of “commingling contradictions” (Farnell 115). Because of their “categorically
interstitial” nature, the decaying cadavers are also defined as monsters (Carroll 55), for their
abjective embodiment functions to serve as “an economic tool” that condenses, unifies, and
represents multiple unsettling social issues while illustrating as many “fear producing traits
into one body” (Halberstam 3-21). Thus, the corpse is more than a form of abjection as well
as a grotesque aesthetic element of the Gothic; it is a War Gothic monster. Created by war,

30
the thousands of rotting bodies of the trenches are a new type of Gothic monstrosity whose
role is to question what it means to be human by challenging accepted hierarchical structures
of power and values by undermining and playing with dichotomies, such as good and evil,
and dead and alive (Riquelme 29-31). However, in this case of trench warfare, the monstrous
corpses also serve to question the living soldiers’ existential purpose as they are faced with
utmost doom and despair.
Monsters, as Gothic creatures, arise from outside accepted understandings of the
human world and from outside “ordinary social life,” which includes all ideas concerning
normal behaviour (Carroll 57). Likewise, the environment of the Western Front, with its
complex trench system, is a privileged position for giving rise to new forms of monstrosities
as the tactics and technologies used were previously unknown in other military engagements.
The cadaverous monsters of No Man’s Land are the most predominant type of monster to
have risen from the horror of the War as they outrank any other, due to their ubiquitous
presence, number, and shape:
The trench was full of them … Corpses contorted into every possible position,
corpses which had suffered every possible mutilation, every gaping wound, every
agony. There were complete corpses, serene and perfectly composed like stone saints
in a chapel; undamaged corpses without any evident injuries; foul, blood-soaked
corpses like the prey of unclean beasts; calm, resigned, insignificant corpses; the
terrifying corpses of men who had refused to die, raging, upright, bulging, haggard,
cursing and crying out for justice… And then there were the pieces of corpses, the
shred of bodies and clothes, organs, severed members, red and purple human flesh,
like rotten meat in a butcher’s, limp, flabby, yellow fat, bones extruding marrow,
unravelled entrails, like vile worms that we crushed with a shudder. (Chevallier 62)

31
This passage is gruesome and ferociously disturbing but nevertheless depicts the inescapable
monstrosity that was inflicted on the flesh of hundreds of men. Putrid, rotting, and
masticated, the corpses here are seen as grotesque and impure because their state violates the
accepted notions of how a normal human body should be – one that is whole, healthy, and
living. Likewise, these cadavers also defy how a dead body should be – one that is whole,
calm, and not yet decaying. Bodily defilement contravenes conceptions of what is ‘natural’
and is hence seen as horrific and monstrous (Carroll 52-6). However, what renders decay,
and more specifically, the decaying flesh of the trenches, further into a monster is the
characters’ perceptions of it (Carroll 53). As mentioned earlier, character interaction alone
depicts the corpses as possessing good or bad qualities, while, moreover, the fear and
revulsion that the soldiers express for the corpses brings the dead bodies to life as they appear
animated and amused. It is important to note here that while these mouldering bodies belong
to the category of undead monsters, they are not the living dead or the Westernised
Hollywood concept of zombies, who were indeed created as reflections of the wounded
veterans of WWI (Riquelme 34). These corpses, produced en masse, stolidly occupy the
trenches of the Western Front and can only move when an outside force, such as a bomb,
physically displaces them. Remarque’s graveyard incident showcases such reconfigurations.
In this scene, the corpses, immobile and inert, lay in their coffins when they were “killed
once again” by the shelling as they were forcefully and unintentionally “flung up” from their
places of rest to save the men’s lives (Remarque 70-1).
These slaughtered bodies do not rise from the dead nor do they hobble around in
search of victims, as their abilities to engage with and terrorise the characters and the reader
depend on their influence to haunt the living within the peculiar setting of the First World
War. The depictions of the corpses in the four novels are not fantastical or far-fetched, and

32
their ability to terrify and to cause “discomfort, discomposure and uneasiness” relies on the
grotesque violent reality of the Western Front and “on the historical standards of ‘normalcy’
and what is ‘proper’” (Edwards and Graulund 12). Yet, there is always a small element of the
unknown and the fantastical in the Gothic as the Gothic tradition oscillates “between two
structural poles,” those of fantasy and realism (Punter 188). However, the War Gothic
pendulum swings closer to reality as its texts have to recreate and adhere to realistic
encounters with the dead even though the reality it portrays is so horrific and unimaginable
that it feels unreal. In this sub-category, the element of fantasy is nevertheless present in the
characters’ imagination and delirium, for realism cannot explain that which is terrifying,
mysterious and inexplicable (Punter 186). The combination between the two elements within
the decomposing corpses creates impressions and has power over those in their vicinity,
ultimately putting the onlooker in danger, because a cadaver “sometimes appears to be in
motion, that is, changing, while spiritually it is supposed to be absolutely inert” (Taylor 384).
This contradiction is formidable and makes it effortless for our perceptions to reanimate the
dead. For this reason, Richard Taylor stresses the importance of corpses to “be covered from
the moment of death until safely buried in the ground or otherwise disposed of” (384).
As there were a multitude of corpses that laid unburied during WWI, those in No
Man’s Land were even more petrifyingly life-like to the observer because of the danger and
threat of death for the living within that space. In Boyden’s novel, Xavier and Elijah peer
down into a crater on one of their reconnaissance missions in Saint-Eloi as they are assailed
by the stench of human flesh:
The sky flickers as if full of lightning, and when I look I see that the water is more a
stew. Besides the limbs, rotted faces peek over at us. I see the eye sockets are empty
and their lips have pulled back from their open mouths so that they look like they’re

33
screaming. ‘Xavier, see those faces there,’ … ‘They look alive.’ He is right. When the
shellfire flickers, the water shivers with explosions and the faces come alive. I feel
like I’m going to be sick. The stink is worse than animal rot. (Boyden 70)
Though Xavier and Elijah know that the bodies are dead, the men cannot help but interpret
the expressions set in the rigid faces. To them, the dead are crying out: raging as if refusing
to die in the shell-hole. The cadavers appear to the two soldiers in active protest of the
situation in which they found them, alone, and negligently discarded, when in actuality, their
reading of the dead men is in fact a projection of their own unease and anxieties.
Interestingly, this is one of the few scenes in all of the four novels where expressions of pain
or discomfort are found on the faces of the corpses, as the dead are habitually grinning or
laughing back at the living.
In Fear, for example, Jean confronts a corpse who laughs at him while the dead
man’s brains spill from the remaining half of his skull (Chevallier 63). In A Long Long Way,
“the sightless sockets peered at the living soldiers, the lipless teeth all seemed to have just
cracked some mighty jokes. They were seriously grinning. Hundreds more were faced down,
and turned on their sides, as if not interested in such awful mirth” (Barry 178). The corpse “is
chuckling at what he knows” (Boyden 30-1), and so are all of them, as if finding amusement
in jesting at the living – of knowledge that the protagonist can only guess at. Indeed, the
laughing and grinning troubles the soldiers and their nerves because they read their own
imminent and inescapable fates on the faces of the festering human remains. As mentioned
earlier, the corpse serves as a physical vessel wherein one can imagine one’s own death
(Laqueur 83), but to be met with a grimace is not only surprising but disconcerting and
ominous. While the combination of laughter and fear have been present within the Gothic
literary tradition since its eighteenth-century inception to produce uncertainty – a liminal

34
emotion of ambivalence – between the serious and the trivial (Botting 168), to interpret this
intermingling of laughter and fear from the corpses of the Western Front requires a more
gruesome lens.
In the four novels, however, the grins and laughter of the dead bodies are not comedic
but have an uncanny effect. The heimliche (familiar) smile of amusement related to humour
on the cadaverous faces is in fact an unheimliche (unfamiliar) sadistic and macabre sneer.
The soldiers experience a disturbing sense of fear and wonder for the uncanny is
“undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” (Freud 825).
The expressions of the dead are discomforting, “eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear...”
(Freud 827); however, due to the corpses also being abject, the combination is ultimately
grotesque and creates an “experience of disorientation, bewilderment, confusion and
bafflement” (Edwards and Graulund 6). Consequently, the macabre and unsettling
disposition of the corpses expresses the absurdity of life and death in WWI, for here
overexposure to the sheer number of deaths leads to shock and dread. The combination of
uncanny and abject terrorises the men and in turn traumatises them as attention is directed
towards the futility of escaping the same fate as the dead bodies.
For the characters on the Western Front, death is nonsensical and remains their most
terrifying and plaguing nightmare; as remarked in All Quiet on the Western Front, “fear we
don’t know much about – terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical”
(Remarque 139). These soldiers became so familiar with the death and destruction of their
fellow man that “[a]fter several weeks of front-line experience there was little that could
shock. Men became immunized, rather rapidly, to the brutality and obscenity” (Eksteins
154). Yet, even though routine subjection to horror can jade people, and even make it tedious
to some, the carnage and violence caused by WWI constantly changed and evolved along

35
with the weather and seasons, as well as with technological developments and manoeuvres
(154). This is why terror and fear never disappear, and in fact, only heighten throughout the
novels and the characters’ lives; the only thing that the characters can do to fight the horror is
to try managing it. The men become accustomed to having their “[b]rains poached and
scrambled by noise, terror and foul deaths” (Barry 137), and they have no other choice but to
learn to cope with the grotesque nature of the War “if they were to survive” (Eksteins 154).
This corporeal dread of death is further heightened because the cadavers, as part of
the forsaken landscape of the Front, are thus viewed outside the constructions of faith,
science, and reason; violently terminating the division between life and death (Kristeva 4).
As an inevitable result, the soldiers struggle to keep hold of their sanity and, moreover, their
lives, as it is the horror of human decay and death that each individual soldier is truly
competing against and not the soldiers in the opposite trench. Since the battles that each man
fights are indeed internal, the only way that the living can combat the unceasing assaults of
rotting bodies is by becoming indifferent towards the catastrophic mangling and killing. This
attitude is enacted as a self-defence mechanism for survival – survival against insanity and, in
due course, death. As mentioned earlier, these men are not jaded or disenchanted by the
number of revolting fatalities that they see – they have learnt to ignore them.
For Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont the response to the chaos and madness consists in
forcing it from his mind as he repeats to himself, “I must not think” (69), for he is “[m]ore
than anything afraid of fear itself overwhelming … [him]. One must use any bit of folly to
control it” (Chevallier 284). To allow everything in would mean that he would embark on an
offensive that would lead to nowhere but madness and death, for if they are to survive, the
men’s trench reality must be kept at bay. As their own bombs are falling on his brigade,
Willie Dunne in Barry’s novel deeply “wished he were a horse on the road with his leather

36
blinkers doing good service” because he desperately “tried to half close his eyes as he passed
now over fresh bodies, the exterminated forms of his own mates” (Barry 175). Though he
tries, Willie cannot close himself off from the who, what, where, how and why of his
situation as he attempts to keep himself together. Remarque’s Paul Baümer identifies the
necessity of forcing a level of indifference as he says: “I soon found out this much: – terror
can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; – but it kills, if a man thinks about it”
(Remarque 138). When Xavier Bird, from Boyden’s Three Day Road, evaluates his fellow
soldiers’ abilities to keep sane in the after effects of a shell attack, he notes the speed with
which ‘normality’ is restored in the trenches, for
one’s mind does not allow him to dwell on the horror of violent death, for it will drive
him mad if he lets it. That is why they [the soldiers] … can light up a cigarette with
fingers still bloody from the soldier they have just finished burying … I keep my head
attached to my body by doing the simple things that it knows to do. (Boyden 84)
In the trenches, the sheer act of contemplating death, in any of its expressions, dramatically
hinders the chance of survival for it shocks the soldiers into immobility or into madness and
suicide, ultimately rendering them helpless to defend themselves or to escape in times of
need. The act of harnessing indifference, of putting things out of one’s mind is, according to
Judith Herman, a “natural human response” and “is the only possible response to trauma”
(qtd. in Robinett 306). Yet, for the protagonists, it is the only weapon with which they can
deter the war horrors from their psyche.
The deaths were a ceaseless attack on the soldiers as men were killed at a rate of five
thousand per day over the course of the four years of the war (Roberts 247). Fundamentally,
the bodily consequences of WWI underlined a reality that is often overlooked or purposefully
ignored: of man’s impermanence and physical limitations in their ‘being-in-the-world,’

37
which consequently caused crises of existence and purpose in the soldiers. As reaffirmed by
existentialism, man is doomed to “a life bounded on all sides by the infinite of death. Its
distinctive note, its characteristic song, is its awareness of death as a tragedy of
meaninglessness that befalls each man. Each man dies alone, and the world then ceases to
exist for him” (Glicksberg 121). In the squalid setting of trench warfare and surrounded by
cadavers, the realisation that one is destined to die alone is oppressive, making suicide a
compelling escape from the overall madness of their new lives. Even Paul tries to find
meaning and worth to his existence within the turmoil and mayhem: “What does it matter to
me, I have only one life to lose” (Remarque 211). As tempting as it is to end their plaguing
nightmare by choosing death, it would mean that they would not only join the legion of
rotting corpses, but they would lose their internal war with themselves. This juxtaposition, to
live and to thrive while one’s chances of survival are slim and hopeless, is not simply an act
of overcoming and defying death, but an act of re-affirming life alongside death. For
existential individuals who are faced with disparity, meaninglessness, and nothingness, one’s
decision to continue living comes from an “irrational” and “undeniable” necessity to “affirm
life at all costs” (Glicksberg 121), because in death, there is life as long as one is determined
to preserve it. Knowing these statistics, to live is in its essence ironic choice for the men since
the War became “a matter of life, not death; it was an affirmation of vitality, energy, virtue”
(Eksteins 94).
It is the men’s sheer will and determination that aids them in their pursuit to avoid
death. However, try as they might, they cannot completely censor the surrounding decay and
bleakness as it continues to haunt and wear the soldiers down as “[e]very day and every hour,
every shell and every death cuts into this thin support [of indifference], and the years waste it
rapidly. I see how it is already gradually breaking down around me” (Remarque 275).

38
Forsaken to the trenches, the protagonists have no other option but to endeavour to keep the
horrors at bay. By doing so, they get a chance to persevere and thrive given their dreadful
circumstances. And yet, the men’s lives and deaths are governed by chance, as they have no
control over their fate: “We lie under the network of arching shells and live in suspense of
uncertainty. Over us, Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither
know nor can determine where it will fall” (Remarque 101). This lack of agency further
forces the men to become indifferent and distant with regard to their situations in order to
avoid psychosis. Following Remarque’s determinist philosophy of chance, Barry notes the
soldiers’ inability to control their situations on the Front for, they too, could barely help
themselves, let alone help the dead and dying: “There was nothing they could do, only follow
each other to the other side” (178).
Furthermore, because the men’s fates are left to chance, the cadavers around them
become even more terrifying Gothic monsters, for any one of them could have ended up in
the place of the decaying corpse. As stated earlier, the men fear the corpses because they
represent their own pending terminations, but the cadavers become even more frightening
and upsetting when one sees them in terms of this “fragile and fallacious chance” (Kristeva
3). As such, they are in continuous existential despair because they recognise that they can be
“hurled at any moment into nothingness, and this awareness adds a tragic dimension to …
[their] existence” (Glicksberg 121). Who dies in one moment, who narrowly escapes death
and watches the person next to them die: that is all left to chance. Resting and enjoying their
tea side by side, Willie Dunne, in A Long Long Way, froze in shock as his comrade, Private
Byrne, was shot through the eye by a sniper as he realised how it was only by chance that it
was not him the sniper chose (Barry 67).

39
Confronted by the spectre of an inescapable death and monstrous brutality, the
characters from all four novels have to fight in order to keep their resolve to live, to ensure
what Remarque’s Paul Baümer calls the “preservation of existence” (273). Everyone wants to
stay alive, even the dead men, as Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont remarks for they are “men just
like us, just as obsessed with staying alive, with running away, with putting an end to their
torment…” (65).
Paul, Jean, Willie, and Xavier are all young men, not even twenty years of age when
they enlist, so for them to give in to death as their adult lives have just begun would be an
admission of defeat. The First World War may have started with an engagement of opposing
nations, but for these front-line men, the war became a fight for survival as decay and death
render senseless the orders and propaganda from their respective high commands. For the
men in the trenches, the War consumed so many lives: men and even women and children
were killed senselessly as their lives were taken without regard. Willie Dunne and other
soldiers like him do not want to see their fellow man “mangled like this for nothing … it was
a queer thing to think that this was a site of victory” (Barry 175, 179). In its entirety, the
Great War can be defined as an incongruous event because the slaying of thousands of
soldiers is in itself an “[e]xcessive consumption” of human bodies and “a manifestation of
grotesque corporeality” (Edwards and Graulund 4).
While the havoc and violence at the Western Front threaten the easily extinguishable
lives of the soldiers, the cadavers, as the abject, hold their victims captive and slowly release
them, but never entirely (Kristeva 9), resulting in lifelong trauma and altered perceptions for
the individuals. The men’s sanities are tortured; they question all pre-supposed notions of
society, reason, and identity, for the extermination, dismemberment, and decay caused by
warfare are both powerful and caustic. Portrayed in this manner, war, and subsequently

40
death, is de-romanticised because it personally and intimately attacks the body, removes
boundaries as flesh is pulled apart and turned inside out. Those men who were able to get
over the shock of the corpses did so because they were able to mould themselves and adapt to
their new trench environment. Nevertheless, death in this modern warfare can no longer be
noble or dignified, for there is no triumph or glory to be found in mass murder or
deconsecrated corpses.

41
Chapter II: Monstrous Transformations of Landscape and Soldier

War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth
Boyden, Three Day Road

The decaying bodies scattered across the trenches and No Man’s Land terrorised the
soldiers as they constitute an integral and distinctive component of the Western Front’s War
Gothic landscape. Modern warfare in the First World War combined visceral hand-to-hand
trench fighting with powerful, modern weaponry which in turn rapidly destroyed the fertile
lands of Northern France and Belgium as well as the lives of thousands of men. In this
landscape of nightmares, all of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long
Long Way, and Three Day Road, and regardless of their origins, experienced a strong
alienating sense of loss, dislocation, and disorientation in their new setting – further
highlighting this landscape of desolation and death as a nucleus of terror for the Gothic of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The hellish landscape of the Western Front is essential
to the four novels as it governs the protagonists’ narratives and shapes their experiences,
actions, and thoughts. On the Front line, the men form new relationships with various aspects
of the environment and landscape, and in doing so, they mirror and embody the changes
within themselves. However, as a result, the young protagonists in all four texts transform
into monstrous multifaceted hybrids – an ultimate amalgamation of human, animal, machine,
and object.
Firstly, to examine the manner in which the characters in the novels by Remarque,
Chevallier, Boyden, and Barry adapt to the unique environment of the Western Front, it is of
foremost importance to distinguish landscape from environment. For one, a landscape is not a

42
“natural phenomenon” because it is defined and created by humans (Larsen 470). Indeed, it is
an aesthetic space that requires a human observer to reflect on and to experience it, whereas
one is surrounded and enclosed by an environment which can exist without the presence of
humanity (Brantz 68-9). While an environment is “characterized by the direct and continuous
impacts of nonhuman physical forces” (Brantz 68-9), a landscape is a “visual scene, a
description, visual or written, of ‘the surface of the earth’” (Linder 351-2). While both rely
on “artificial distinctions” imposed by man, the two are also inseparable for a “landscape
always consists of an environment,” and an environment usually contains a landscape (Brantz
69). On this note, this chapter will primarily examine how the ‘landscape’ of the Great War
was both manipulated and experienced by humans. Specifically, the landscape will be
examined under four different categories as identified by Svend Erik Larsen: as the physical
surroundings (natural resources), as a geographical and geological entity, as a symbolic
phenomenon (Gods, spirits, myth, legends), and as the mental projections and relations of
human memory and emotions (475-476). It is important to note that “[l]andscapes and war
alike are individualized enterprises” because one’s “perceptions and choices are made and
changed on individual conditions” (485); therefore, each experience and recounting of the
events of war, let alone fictive discourses, are subjective. There is no overarching World War
One landscape experience, though various elements of the soldiers’ front-line existences are
communal. For example, Barry’s protagonist, Willie Dunne in A Long Long Way, does not
interact with or notice the landscape in the same way or degree compared to the characters
from the other novels. The landscape in Barry’s novel is not as prominent as in the other
three, and this demonstrates that there are differences in perception and interaction with the
landscape among the soldiers in the books.

43
Landscapes are important for people as we are immediately involved in their creation
and construction, thus making landscapes the very “basis of our existence” and an integral
part of our being and social behaviour since they form meaning and impressions on the
individual level (Yamagishi 99). Every individual is influenced and formed by what Takeshi
Yamagishi calls the “primary landscape” – the landscape of childhood (97). This ‘primary
landscape’ is an indispensable and crucial part of an individual’s identity and existence as it
“forms the center of one’s foundation, perspective, and orientation” without which one
cannot discuss themselves, their opinions, or their present state (97). However, all other
landscapes that follow the primary are always seen in comparison to it and this appraisal
constantly forms impressions upon the psyche. Therefore, to experience change or loss in a
primary landscape is not only painful to the individual, but the very concept of reality falters
since “identities and individual realities are supported by landscapes,” and in turn form new
meaning for the self (98-99). To witness a transformative change in or to destroy a landscape
not only impacts us but challenges our sense of self and our ideas. Hence, the devastation,
ruin, and death that characterise the War Gothic landscape of the Western Front make it not
only surreal, desolate, and a “howling waste” (Remarque 112), but internally alters the men
within its trenches.
Since the Enlightenment, the area between northern France and Belgium that the
Western Front occupied has been revered by Europeans for its serene and pastoral landscape.
With the Great War, the agricultural fields and forests of Northwest Europe were utterly
destroyed by trench warfare and radically transformed into complete “environments of war”
(Gregory 39-40). In Fear, for example, Jean Dartemont’s once loved French countryside has
been transfigured into an extra-terrestrial nightmare as a consequence of the violence:

44
Ahead and behind merged into limitless desolation, all covered with the same churned
up grey mud. We were stranded on some ice-floe out in space, surrounded by clouds
of sulphur, ravaged by sudden bursts of thunder. We prowled in these accursed
limbos which at any moment now could turn into hell. (64)
Paul Baümer, in All Quiet on the Western Front, similarly describes the landscape of the
trenches as being outer worldly with its “stony” appearance “full of craters and frozen lights
like a moon” (123). The landscape is bizarre and alarming for Paul and Jean, and they
immediately feel alienated and disoriented from their primary landscape of Northwest
Europe, for the changes and the disappearance of landmarks induce one’s perception of
reality to collapse (Yamagishi 98). Following suit, feelings of loss, confusion, and fear
appear and add to the sensation of terror and horror that is already threatening Jean and
Paul’s lives on the front-line. However, unlike most Europeans, represented by Chevallier’s
Jean and Remarque’s Paul, who were familiar with this idyllic landscape and had their
identities inscribed and defined by it, the rural European landscape was completely
unfamiliar to non-Europeans who fought in WWI.
Nevertheless, the War quickly estranged every soldier regardless of their origins.
Xavier Bird, in Three Day Road, who is used to roaming the wild forests, rivers, and lakes of
Eastern Canada, never shared the European notion of the pastoral ‘ideal’ like the characters
in the other three novels. And unlike Elijah, his fellow Cree Canadian, Xavier was taken out
of residential school early by his aunt Niska and was thus subject to very little Eurocentric
indoctrination. Instead of feeling loss for the landscape like Paul and Jean, he struggles to
find familiar points of reference between his Canadian landscape and the landscape of war.
To Xavier, the Western Front is incoherent and “stranger than anything … [he’d] ever seen.
Pocked and pitted, little valleys of mud filled with water and corpses” (Boyden 71). He

45
imagines the landscape around him as being “once beautiful country,” and now a place that
he cannot see ever healing as he tries “to imagine the countryside here in ten years, in fifty
years, in a hundred years, but all … [he] can see in … [his] mind are men crawling in and out
of the tunnels in these hills like angry and tired ants, thinking of new ways to kill the other”
(Boyden 205). Xavier sentences the turbulent landscape to constant destruction and havoc as
he cannot see any hope for its future or for humanity’s either.
The destruction and hostility of the war landscape felt by the protagonists solidify the
Front’s landscape as Gothic, for Gothic landscapes are, by definition, “desolate, alienating,
and full of menace,” with “gloomy and mysterious” atmospheres (Botting 1-2). During the
eighteenth century, eminent English and Irish Gothic landscapes were those of “wild and
mountainous locations,” castles “full of hidden passageways,” and dark forests generally
located on the European continent (2). Likewise, in German literature, forests and castles
have also been sites of Gothic terror. Horrifying and frightening landscapes are traditional to
German storytelling as they have long been tied to those depicted in Volksmärchen (folktales)
and Kunstmärchen (fairy tales) where landscapes were typically macabre, “mysterious,
usually sinister, and controlled by powers beyond the understanding or influence of the
protagonist,” and lacked the presence of a benevolent Nature (Linder 360). Then, in the
nineteenth century, the Gothic moved closer and intimately inhabited the urban and industrial
modern city “with its dark, labyrinthine streets” which evoke “the violence and menace of
Gothic castles and forests,” thus becoming a new site for horror and terror and the
construction of new monsters (Botting 2). These traditional gothic landscapes are the basis
upon which the War Gothic landscape rests as the trenches and No Man’s Land are similarly
macabre and ruinous. Furthermore, the War Gothic landscape of the First World War
combines the two conventional Gothic landscapes as it superimposes one over the other. The

46
products of industrialisation and urbanisation, of machines, weapons and planning of the
trenches, are affixed onto natural landscapes, of fields and forests, resulting in a terrestrial
map of devastation and death.
Through the War, the French and Belgian countryside became bleak and an
aesthetically “ugly place” with “skeleton trees” as the land was overturned and destroyed,
and all living things that remained were in constant threat of extermination (Boyden 13, 22).
Like the Gothic tradition, the environment of the Front was constantly unstable and volatile,
as earth, trees, and buildings were uprooted, displaced, and reshaped at the whim of the
cannons and mortar shells as the bombs “distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great
heaps of it” (Barry 24). No longer the castles, forests, and cities, but the trenches and No
Man’s Land compounded terror and anxieties into one labyrinthine site of horror. Willie
Dune, in A Long Long Way, in his fear of having lost Greta’s correspondences, likens the
possible misadventures of her letters in the trenches “as any letters might in the strange
‘streets’ and ‘avenues’ of the trenches” (Barry 61). In their complexity, the trench systems
were as convoluted as the paths in a town or a city. Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont also
describes the trenches as a “labyrinth” (39), but instead of identifying them as urban, he sees
them more romantically, “like tiny embankments, or narrow, winding streams” (38).
Similar to the Gothic cities, castles, and forests, the trenches were indeed a
labyrinthine network. Labyrinths are ancient in design, and best known by the one made by
Daedalus for King Minos’ Minotaur. The Cretan maze with its own monster and victims was
a place of death; yet, it also acted as a site of heroic contest for Theseus. By the eighteenth
century, Minos’ labyrinth altered shape as it entered the Gothic romance novels’ garden
mazes, long castle corridors, cellars, and dark forests, to signify fear, confusion, alienation,
darkness, horror, desire, and helplessness from which the hero or heroine would eventually

47
be saved (Botting 81). Furthermore, these eighteenth-century labyrinths were always
external, separate and distant “from all social rules” and places to allow for “complete
transgression of all conventional limits” (Botting 81). The trenches of the Western Front
were also located ‘externally’ and geographically situated away from the large cities, and
they too were governed by a different set of rules: a mixture of military structure and survival
instincts. Yet, unlike the Cretan labyrinth, or the Gothic eighteenth and nineteenth century
replicas, there were no heroes to come and save the doomed soldiers (Tropp 189).
Nonetheless, accompanied by their fellow comrades, the men did their best to survive
as the First World War violently brought together and fused “men, technology and
environment” (Brantz 70). The events and military tactics of WWI inevitably altered the way
the men interacted with and responded to their surroundings. Environmental factors, like the
weather and the animals on the Front line, were another threat to men’s safety. Chevallier,
Boyden, and Barry make numerous remarks about the endless rains that filled the trenches
and turned the ground beneath the protagonists’ feet “into slippery dough, in which we kept
getting stuck” (Chevallier 55). Jean from Fear notes how the men’s “feet sank into the mud,
which held them so firmly that in order to extricate them we had to pull at our knees with
both hands” (67). The mud, as a result of all the rain, sucks and immobilises and makes the
men miserable. It is another hazardous obstacle that the soldiers must overcome, as Xavier
from Three Day Road remarks: the “thick mud sucking at boots, threatening to pull them
from the soldier’s feet with each step” (Boyden 18).
Here on the Western Front, the mud is an interesting liminal entity; neither solid nor
liquid, it is inescapable and concurrently an “all-encompassing, all-enveloping medium into
which the body enters” (Giblett 61-63). In A Long Long Way, mud is also a monstrous
“enemy” as it actively takes “hold like very hands” of Willie and his comrades’ “boots and

48
pulled and held them,” keeping them from advancing (Barry 234). Prior to the War, Martin
Tropp remarks, mud in Gothic literature since Walpole and Dickens has been “identified with
the poor and especially the urban poor” as the social group endeavoured “to free itself from
the downward pull of poverty” (192). Now, as an inextricable component of the trenches and
No Man’s Land, the mud keeps hold of the soldiers as they enter it, trapping them in the
fields of France and Belgium as they strive to escape from the downward pull of death and
war without much avail.
The mud and the rain also aggravated the men further as they never properly dried –
leaving them open to the cold and illnesses such as trench foot and pneumonia (Brantz 7880). In Three Day Road, the “pelting rain” fills the trenches “with water. Many men fall to
pneumonia, and many others suffer skin irritations from being constantly wet that turn into
nasty festers” (Boyden 199). Although cold rain is “part of Cree existence,” as Boyden notes,
and Xavier and Elijah brought their moccasins to use as aerating footwear instead of the
rubber boots (199), the rain at the Front is a bothersome hindrance as Xavier’s “skin is
always so wet that … [he] feel[s] like a frog or a fish. All this rain makes keeping my rifle
clean and working difficult” (13). While Xavier feels like a frog, in “the heart of ‘dry
Champagne’” Jean from Fear, feels that the French soldiers are penned in “like cattle in a
slough of despond, where all we can see is running water, dampening and depressing our
spirits” (Chevallier 259). In both cases, the men are made wretched by the rain and the mud
as it inhibits their abilities to move and react to their surroundings.
Inversely to the way that the rain and the mud are depicted, the earth in Boyden’s
novel has positive connotations as a place of safety in which the men can sleep and rest
within its crevices and is used as a form of cover from which Xavier and Elijah snipe (73,
194). However, unlike Boyden’s perception of the earth, Remarque’s protagonist in All Quiet

49
on the Western Front has a more complex relationship with the ground. While the earth
provides safety and shelter from the on-coming shells and bullets, Paul Baümer describes the
relationship between the soldier and the dirt during an oncoming bombardment as follows:
To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself
down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her
from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother;
he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and
releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and
often for ever. Earth! – Earth! – Earth! Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes,
into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under
the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou
grantest us the great resting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried
away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy
redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony
of hope bite into thee with our lips. (Remarque 55)
Sensual and ecclesiastical, the earth in this passage – Derek Gregory notes – provides Paul,
and soldiers like him, a “sense of security, a geo-intimacy born of knowing and depending”
on it (13). Due to the physical closeness of Paul’s body to the dirt in these moments of fear
and death, the earth is a soothing and intimate female protector: mother, sister, and lover.
Additionally, the way Paul addresses and beseeches the earth is akin to pagan worshipping of
the goddess Gaia as he entreats her for protection and salvation from the shells as he moves
deeper into the earth’s folds. Body, mind and soul, Paul knows that his life depends on the
earth, but he cares for it as much as he hates it, for the earth also holds the dead and serves as
a continuous reminder of the War.

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Dorothee Brantz observes that during the War, the men were forced to take shelter in
the earth, and thus created a “reversed spatiality of the combat zone, where the living had to
stay hidden below ground while the corpses claimed the space above ground” because of
modern weapons: machine guns, artillery, flame throwers, planes, etc. (74). The earth, like
the mud and rain, is an inescapable reality of the trenches as the protagonists live and fight in
the dirt for days, sometimes weeks before they are relieved. The mud, earth, and rain of the
Western Front intimately characterise the soldiers’ behaviour, interactions, and overall
experience of modern warfare as body and place intertwine, become inseparable from each
other as memories form and are inscribed into the self and the landscape (Yamagishi 101). In
this manner, the earth, the rain, and the mud embed themselves into the characters both
physically and psychologically. Remarque’s Paul Baümer, in all his vehemence for the earth,
is also sickened by the dirt when he sees it encrusted under Kemmerich’s dying nails as it
shows “through blue-black like poison” (Remarque 15). Barry’s Willie Dunne feels that the
mud is now part of him, as if implanted into “his very arteries,” taking it with him back to
Ireland on his second leave (Barry 240). During the creeping barrage at Vimy Ridge, Xavier
senses the effects of his company’s artillery resonate through the earth and his body: “The
whole earth is on fire in front of me exploding in huge fountains of mud and fire. I can feel
the rumble below me, through me, swallowing me. My whole body vibrates with it” (Boyden
233). The men become part of the earth and part of their environment as they in turn mirror
their landscape as “[b]ody and land have become the malignant figure for each other; both
are diseased not only physically but also psychologically” (Giblett 66).
Of the four novels, Chevallier and Remarque have the most detailed descriptions of
the War Gothic landscape of the Western Front. Both authors’ personal experiences of WWI
allow them to articulate the relationship between the landscape and the men as inseparable.

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For example, during a long offensive on the front-line, Remarque describes the attack on the
landscape and the men: “The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth…the earth is the
background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons…thus we stagger forward, and into
our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy
sun and the convulsed and dead soldier” (Remarque 115). In this passage, the soldiers mirror
and internalise the condition of the landscape. Likewise, Chevallier describes the heavy and
oppressive landscape bearing down on the men:
Before us in every direction spread a flat, dreary, silent expanse, as far as the rainy
horizon, sunk beneath low clouds. The landscape was nothing but a pulverised mire,
uniformly grey, overwhelmingly desolate…It looked like a barren land, recently
stripped bare by some terrible flood, which had retreated leaving in its wake
shipwrecks and bodies buried under a coat of dark slime. The heavy sky weighed
down on us like a tombstone. It all served to remind us of the inexorable fate for
which we were destined. (63)
In both excerpts, the authors describe how the destruction and chaos of the landscape impress
doom and negativism in the men as they feel as lifeless and desolate as their surroundings.
Indeed, it is as if the barrier between the soul and the outside world has been removed as they
both resonate to the violence and the weight of destruction together.
As mentioned earlier, self and landscape are so tightly connected that what happens to
one affects the other. Thus, the War Gothic landscape of the Western Front becomes even
more frightening and devastating because of the soldiers’ active participation in the
transformation of the land into an environment of war as they attempt to kill the enemy. The
men are responsible for the devastation of the land around them as much as they are for
killing the opposition with machine guns, bayonets and gas. The acts of annihilation that the

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men perform and hide from, in addition to living in the trenches for long weeks, also shape
the characters into monstrous hybrids.
From the dirt, mud, rain, and corpses of the trenches, more Gothic monsters emerge.
As War Gothic creatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the hybrid soldiers of
WWI are multifaceted as they combine more than two contrasting elements, embodying
human, animal, machine, and object, physically and mentally. Like the dead corpses
discussed in the previous chapter, these hybrids are important War monsters as the neoGothic
is interested in stepping “outside of the human condition and explor[ing] a grotesque realm in
which humans merge with animals, and people amalgamate with machines” as a way of
resisting a hegemonic power (Edwards 152). Furthermore, the hybrid presents the
incompatible for, as a monster, it is “an economic form” that unifies and compresses “as
many fear-producing traits as possible” into one entity “even if certain forms are eclipsed
momentarily” (Halberstam 5-21). In this manner, monsters are abject beings as they resist
categorisation: transgressing borders, barriers, norms, time, and space (Goetsch 12-13).
Monsters symbolise the abnormal, the “strange phenomena in the environment” and the
“strangeness of other human beings and groups,” differentiating the self from the other in
order to call attention to conflicts (4-5).
In the case of the hybridity of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear,
Three Day Road, and A Long Long Way, the characters’ ‘strangeness’ is a result of their War
experiences and the forceful changes they witness in its landscape. Like all monsters,
however, their hybridity and monstrosity begin with the physical state as the men’s
transfiguration is all due to the tangible nature of the human body. As Justin D. Edwards
notes, the human body is “a platform for identity” because it is malleable and “can be
transformed” by internal and external stimulus (152). Additionally, as Yamagishi states, the

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body is of utmost importance as it is the medium that “enables us to belong to the world of
everyday life; it is the origin for the coordinates for actions, perspectives, and orientations”
(97). Thus, the events of the War are executed and experienced by the men’s bodies as they
adapt to their new environment. In wars, the human body is of immense value, for wars are
“based on human bodies killing and dying” (Gray 215-216). Undeniably, if no body is
present to fight, a war cannot occur. Therefore, the notion that human bodies alter as a result
of war into anything less or more than what they were prior to the violent engagement (what
was socially and culturally accepted from outside the constructions of war) is seen as
threatening notions of ‘purity’ and ‘perfection’ of the living body, which inevitably signals
the monstrous.
As the First World War wounded and maimed the soldiers, altering and damaging
their bodies forever (further discussed in chapter three), it also brought upon physical
transformations. For one, humans rely predominantly on their sense of sight; yet, with the
nature of WWI, of the destruction and havoc caused by various projectiles, the majority of
attacks and battles were conducted under the cover of night. Thus, the soldiers had to
improve and heighten their other senses in order to guide them in the dark and to survive.
Remarque’s and Boyden’s novels mention the necessity of discerning the type, size, speed,
and location of different shells and bombs via sound (Remarque 53; Boyden 18), while
Chevallier refers to Jean’s dependency on touch in the darkness to find his way to safety:
“Night came. When it did, we got lost, as usual…We took over old dugouts, groping our way
in the dark” (56). As a result of the war, the protagonists are forced to rely on their other
senses in the trenches and No Man’s Land; however, since the novels are realistic, the men’s
bodily transformations are therefore not fantastical or unbelievable as would be the case if
they developed super powers or grew extra limbs. In addition to the development of one’s

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senses, the men’s animal instinct of fight-or-flight is intensified as they attempt to survive:
“with the explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting,
a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. The body with one
bound is in full readiness” (Remarque 54). While the amplification of one’s senses and
instincts is beneficial for the men’s survival, and is animalistic by nature, the men distinctly
felt like animals in the squalid conditions of the trenches – in the mud, rain, and dirt.
Humans are animals, and yet, we like to distinguish ourselves as separate from and
superior to our animal relations. A distinctive marker that is used to aid this division is that of
cleanliness. There is an understanding in many cultures that cleanliness, order, and sanitation
mark social and cultural elevation, whereas incivility, filth, germs, and disease are base, and
only reduce man to the level of animals. In the trenches of the Western Front, the men lived
in foul conditions – conditions Chevallier’s Jean perceives “as sordidly as the denizens of
night shelters, and … [the men’s] quarters, filthier than those shelters, were also deadlier”
(Chevallier 29). In this setting which Jean describes as worse in every way possible than
those of the French homeless, he cannot in any way feel noble or heroic in the mud and dirt.
In this manner, the French soldiers were aptly nicknamed poilu (the hairy ones) for their long
hair and lack of hygiene, and the Germans were named Kriegschwein or Frontschwein (war
pig or front pig) (Brantz 23). While the term poilu is preserved in the English translation of
Fear, the translation of All Quiet on the Western Front does not mention the German
counterpart. However, when Paul is being transported by rail car to the hospital after his
injury, he pauses and questions the nurse about his state of filth before getting onto the “clean
snow-white linen” bedsheets of his bunk: “I feel like a pig. Must I get in there?” (Remarque
246). Although he feels muddy and grimy in contrast with the sanitised sheets, his hesitation
before getting into the bed shows human consideration and reflection – traits not typically

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shared with pigs. In the same way, Willie in A Long Long Way prevents his sisters from
hugging him on his arrival back in Dublin while on leave as he feared to contaminate them
with lice; “’I’m lousy and God knows what’” (71). Though Jean, Paul, and Willie may feel
like animals because of their filth, their human consideration remains.
The presence of lice was a part of universal trench experience. Jean in Fear considers
the presence of these parasites upon one’s person to be a fall from humanity and civilisation
after he finds his “first louse, pallid and fat, the sight of which made … [him] shudder with
disgust,” for “[l]ice marked the fall into ignominy and a man could only escape this squalor
of war by spilling his blood” (29). The only way out of this parasitic infestation, and back to
respectability, can be found by the sacrifice of his own life, either by injury, suicide, or death.
Xavier in Three Day Road also recognises the entwinement of the parasites and the mud to
their daily existence as his battalion moves to the reserve lines with their “rifles slung over …
[their] shoulders, packs heavy with muddy clothing and mess kits … [their] skulls and
uniforms crawling with lice that have become a part of … [them] now” (83). The weathered
soldiers’ infested and grimy conditions are placed in stark contrast with the fresh soldiers
who come up to relieve them from the Front line. Unclean and infested, Xavier and his
fellow soldiers go round the “shell-holes and weave around the craters like a line of ants”
when they see the new platoon that is to replace them, “uniforms clean and boots shining in
the moonlight, their stride long and timed right, their faces open, eyes wide” (Boyden 83).
The cleanliness of these soldiers also represents their innocence and inexperience in
comparison to the men who have transformed and hardened by exposure to life in front of the
cannons and bullets. After a certain time, the men change; like monkeys and apes, they
dedicate time to hunting down the lice (Chevallier 45), searching for them and “cracking
them with nails that have grown long for the purpose” (Boyden 12). Along with their habits,

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hygiene, and senses, the way the characters describe their movements on the Western Front is
also animalistic.
Counter to classic and romantic ideals linked to heroes and warriors – of pride,
bravery, nobility, and honour, and the fierce predator animals that typically define their
actions – of lions, bears, wolves, the Gothic landscape of the Western Front does not allow
such myths to perpetrate amidst the horror and the death of the trenches. The men adopt
postures of fear and terror in the desolate and exposed landscape, compelling them to acts of
secrecy, stealth, and trickery as they prostrate themselves before the guns. Therefore, the
men’s movements are portrayed in relation to animals that fit the above-mentioned
behaviour. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baümer marks the transformation of the
men “into animals” as he and his battalion return from the reserve line back to the Front, for
this switch is “the only thing which brings … [them] through safely” (Remarque 138-9). The
men’s animal-like adaptations and movements in their landscape is key to their survival since
they must quietly avoid notice from the other side of the line as they crouch “like cats” along
the trench and “snake … [their] way forward” (114, 212), moving “over the ground like a
crab” (214), and sprinting “like a deer” when need be (236). The walls of the trenches were
neither high nor deep, and so proximity to the ground was an essential tactic for concealment.
Comparable to Remarque, Boyden, in Three Day Road, describes Xavier and Elijah’s
movements in relation to furtive animals as the two men evade shells and shots by diving
“like an otter” (32); “sneaking about like a fox at night” when doing repairs on the trenches
and on raids (84); jumping from one crater to another like a “leapfrog” (148); and “moving
from crater to crater, peering over the sides first before slithering into them like snakes” (68).
Since the two men spend much of their time sniping, they do a lot of “slithering” (140), when
they discreetly make their way unnoticed along the line and into No Man’s Land and “slither

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closer like snakes” to their sniping spots (181). Crawling, diving, and mostly prone against
the ground, the quick and sly movements are paramount for the men’s survival and in their
success as snipers. Like Remarque, Boyden never compares the soldiers’ behaviour to
animals associated with grandeur and strength; after a successful trench raid, the men’s
demeanour quickly changes as they are being fired upon and they scurry “not like majestic
beasts but like rats, shell-hole by shell-hole down the hill” (211). It is notable that Three Day
Road is careful with the animals employed to describe the protagonists’ movements as
Boyden uses animal references throughout the book that are inherent to the Canadian
wilderness. For example, he describes Sean Patrick as “a gangly moose yearling not yet
weaned from his mother” (14), and the planes that “swoop like ospreys” (28). Xavier’s
understanding of the war and the European environment is compared to what he should
already know from his Canadian primary landscape. By characterising Xavier’s
understanding in this way, Boyden creates a credible character as he narrates within the blank
space of First Nations experiences of the Great War.
Barry too, in A Long Long Way, uses animals that are common to the Dublin area
from which Willie originates to position his protagonist within the Irish landscape. While
Boyden makes references to a plethora of animals, Barry refers to the men as dogs
throughout his work. For instance, Pete O’Hara jumps in fear “like a dog” (108), Christy
Moran is madly “snarling like a giant dog” during an attack (222). As for Willie Dunne,
Barry compares him to a specific breed. During Willie’s first encounter with the Front, he
trembles in fear “like a Wicklow sheepdog” (Barry 24), and while repairing the fence in No
Man’s Land, Willie and his comrades “dropped like Wicklow sheepdogs” (34) – another
stealth move as this dog breed drops its body close to the ground in order to advance
undetected. It is important to note that dogs are known for their loyalty and obedience, and

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not their stoicism or independence, which makes a sharp remark on the Irishmen’s
involvement in fighting for the English.
In Fear, Chevallier often describes the wounded men as “beaten dogs” (78);
“[a]bandoned creatures, wounded, lying out there somewhere, perhaps from our regiment,
howled like injured dogs” (Chevallier 58). Yet, unlike the other three novels, Chevallier does
not describe the uninjured soldiers’ movements with any precise animal equivalent, just as
generic ‘beasts.’ During an attack, the men in Jean’s battalion had given up their will to fight
in the war early on but, nevertheless, “ran, like beasts, no longer soldiers but deserters yet
towards our enemy, with this one word resounding in us: enough!” (Chevallier 58). The term
‘beast’ is used in the novel to note the lack of human presence, thought, and reflection in
their actions as the soldiers are overcome with fear and rage: “The poilus are like wild beasts
in a cage…It is an instinctive reaction, joyful savagery born of extreme stress. Fear has made
us cruel” (221). A couple of times in the novel, however, Chevallier, unlike the other three
authors, employs the image of the tiger, a regal and predatory feline, in his descriptions. Yet,
the large cat is used mostly in relation to the protagonist. During Jean Dartemont’s first
advance, he refers to the men running “like beasts” and then jumping “like tigers … over the
shell’s smoking craters” (58). In this case, the narrator is referring to the men’s ferocious and
precise movements, but later in the book, Jean describes his own movements as he “springs
like a tiger, with admiral agility and coordination” (220). In this second instance, he
venerates his body’s capacity for predatory action, when, for the majority of the novel, he
sees himself and his fellow soldiers as “undignified animals whose bodies only moved
instinctively” and “nothing more than hunted prey” (46).
While the body acts on animal instincts, the soft tissues and bones are not invincible
for they are prone to injury, mutilation, and obliteration. In all four of the novels, the men

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must act to secure their survival. As a result, whatever sense of human dignity they had is
washed away into the mud. In reference to Fear and All Quiet on the Western Front, Alfredo
Bonadeo recognises that the men are kept alive by their reliance on their animal nature but in
doing so, the characters are robbed of their humanity; in effect, the soldiers’ animal-like
behaviour degrades the self, and inevitably leads to the men’s ruin and destruction (43). As
mentioned earlier, Paul Baümer is ashamed of his filth but he is not as vocal or as critical as
Jean Dartemont when he views his change and remarks his degradation: “I’m living like an
animal, an animal who has to eat and then sleep. I have never felt so stupefied, so blank”
(Chevallier 186); “I am ashamed of the sick animal wallowing in filth that I have become…It
makes me want to spit on myself” (211-212). Regardless of his broken human pride, Jean,
like the other men in WWI, has no choice but to endure his transformation as the only other
choice is death. To die on the front-line, or to be killed for desertion, the soldier’s life is
sighted at the end of a gun: a machine. The men are simultaneously subject to the machines
of industrial warfare as they are wielding them.
The infantrymen in the four books are equipped with knives, rifles, bombs, machine
guns, and sniper rifles – all of which are armaments and, therefore, extensions “of the human
body (as is acknowledged in their collective designation as ‘arms’)” (Scarry 67). In this
manner, the mechanised component adds an additional layer to the characters’ already hybrid
nature. The primary goal of a soldier, as Elaine Scarry explains, is not in the defence or in the
protection of a homeland, comrades, or beliefs, but is first and foremost to cause injury to the
opposition (65). Consequently, the soldier is in turn a weapon, a unit to cause pain and
destruction. The soldiers of the First World War are particularly important as they used – and
were targets for – new technological weapons on an industrial scale. These armaments and
soldiers marked an important transition for warfare and industry as the technology behind

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weapons no longer focused on killing one individual at a time, but became indiscriminate in
obliterating as many people, buildings, and landscapes as possible (Brantz 74-75), thus
becoming a “war against everything” (77).
Faced with these munitions, the human body is rendered even more vulnerable and
temporary as it is fused into “cyborgian (human-machine) weapon systems” (Gray 216). A
cyborg, as defined by Donna Haraway, “is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” wherein the organism is
the “animal-human” combination (142, 152). Derek Gregory claims that the first cyborg
warrior spawns from the trenches of WWI; yet, Gregory only sees the soldier as a hybrid
between human and machine, a creation of “bio-physical entanglements,” where the body is
soft and weak in comparison to the productions of weapons of metal, steal, and gas of the
human imagination (14). What Gregory fails to consider, however, is the animal aspect of the
cyborg. The cyborg of the Western Front is a hybrid composition of the three components, of
man, animal, machine, and they are often inseparable as they constantly overlap or eclipse
one another. This blurring of the lines between the three categories further classifies the
hybrid as a “grotesque montage” (Goetsch 10), making the First World War soldier a
veritable Gothic monster. Horror and unease come from this amalgamation as the War
Gothic landscape in combination with military order affects the protagonists in the novels.
In Fear, Jean Dartemont recognises the active effect of the army and his trench
experience on himself as the animal and machine are carved into his human existence:
“Military routine, with all its petty rules and regulations, doesn’t need my consent and drafts
me into the herd. I am becoming an infantryman, one whose intellect stands permanently to
attention; I do what I’m told, one little cog in the machine” (Chevallier 187). Intriguingly,
Chevallier often alludes to the battalion as a herd, “a herd of cattle” (28), which complements

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his view of being a simple “cog in the machine.” One cow or one cog is insignificant within
the grand scheme of herd and machine, alluding to Jean’s individual erasure within his
battalion and the War in general. This is the nature of all wars, for the individual is fed into a
unit with one hundred other soldiers to become one battalion: moving and acting in as one
being (Scarry 87-88). Through drill and daily routine, military culture removes the soldier’s
sense of individual freedom and values in order to have the participation and complicity of
the entire group (Thrift 274-277). Essentially, an assortment of individuals is forced to accept
and embody one collective understanding of a national identity in order for them to
cohesively work together as a group and define themselves against the other, and thus
creating one herd, one machine.
Paul Baümer in All Quiet on the Western Front refers to this unity as his section is
called to move in order to continue an attack even though they lack the will and the strength:
If we were not automata at that moment we would continue lying there, exhausted,
and without will. But we are swept forward again, powerless, madly savage and
raging; we will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are
aimed against us, and if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us. (Remarque 115)
Rabid and ‘automative,’ Paul is pulled back into the fight with his fellow soldiers like
puppets. Senseless and obedient, they fear their own annihilation and therefore move
collectively in response to command as well as violence and terror. This combination
forcibly brings the battalion together to coordinate an effective and distinct us versus them;
either we die, or they die. In A Long Long Way, Willie Dunne’s battalion is turned around
just outside of Dublin as they are marching to the ships that would take them back to War.
Without explanation, the infantrymen are suddenly ordered to attack the ‘enemy,’ their
fellow Irishmen (Barry 89-92). During this event, Willie’s unit is expected to react to

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command like machines and dogs without thought or deliberation. With so much confusion
and lack of information of the 1916 Easter Rising, in addition to the pandemonium of the
experiences in Europe, Willie is at a loss what to think as he deeply wishes for the human
aspect of the soldier to be removed, to have “men made of steel, who could march on through
chaos so that when they were blown into a thousand pieces there were no mourners for them
at home and no extremity of pain” (175). To remove the human connection from the hybrid
soldier is to remove the complexity of human emotions, thoughts, and relationships, reducing
the soldiers to mere robots, which is, sadly for Willie, impossible.
While Barry, Remarque, and Chevallier refer to automatons and men of steel, Boyden
is the only author not to make such associations. Regardless, Xavier and Elijah undeniably
have the cyborg element to them because they are inseparable from their sniping rifles as
they spend long hours with them in No Man’s Land and along the trenches. In the course of
their training prior to their arrival in France, Xavier and the other trainees are told by their
English officer to cherish their Ross rifles as they would their wives: “Marry it, man! Marry
it! Cherish your rifle for she’s your very own” (Boyden 103). Although Xavier discards his
Canadian Ross rifle for the prized German Mauser, his abilities with the gun distinguish him
as a marksman and earn him respect from the Caucasian soldiers in his platoon (109). The
weapon also serves to define him in terms of what he does not want to be: prey. Not long
after his arrival at the Front, Xavier realises that the key to his survival is “to be the hunter
and not the hunted … This law is the same law as in the bush” (Boyden 19). Ultimately, to be
in the position of the prey is to die because one becomes the target, a mass of flesh to be
consumed, senseless bio-matter that is no longer human, animal, or machine, but fodder – a
thing – to be fed to the monster of War.

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Similarly to the soldiers, the Western Front is also a hybrid, a monstrous being as it
encompasses everything: from the landscape to the weapons, from the privates to the
generals, from the rats to the corpses. It is life and death for the men as they live in
trepidation of its intense rumblings, orders, and bullets. Compared to the War, the men are
nothing but “worms, writhing to escape the spade” as their “[b]odies whimper, dribble, soil
themselves in shame” at the onslaught of shells (Chevallier 225). The front-line, for Jean, is
an uncanny and gruesome mixture of a carnivorous beast and factory:
there before us lay the front line, roaring with all its mouths of fire, blazing like some
infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava.
We shuddered at the thought that we were nothing but more coal to be shovelled into
this furnace, that there were soldiers down there fighting against the storm of steel,
the red hurricane that burned the sky and shook the earth to its foundations. (28-29)
In comparison to the War’s entirety, Jean feels his life is rendered insignificant as the
weapons of destruction pulverise everything around him like a “herd of elephants,” affirming
themselves as “masters of the earth” (225). War is everything as the protagonists exist within
it as man, animal, and machine: their lives governed and fed into its system as tools and
flesh.
Paul Goestch, in his study of World War One English poetry, remarks that it is often
defined by the War poets as a place of “bestial slaughter rather than heroic action” (317-319).
The perception of the War as a slaughterhouse reverberates and holds true in the four novels.
Remarque, for one, often depicts the attacks and the killing of the men as slaughter (108,
113), but Chevallier takes the use of the word further. He describes the consumptive nature of
the WWI wherein the men often struggle at the sight and sound of a bombardment “between
futile revolt and the resignation of beasts in a slaughterhouse” (59); or that they are being

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marched by pied piper generals like flocks of sheep “to the slaughterhouses, to the sound of
music” (10). Compared to Chevallier and Remarque, Barry takes the allusion of the War as a
human abattoir in A Long Long Way even further with more critical and precise inferences.
In the opening scene, Barry recounts Willie Dunne’s birth in the Rotunda Hospital,
and brings the reader’s attention to the “[b]lood gathered on the nurses’ white laps like the
aprons of butchers” from all of the babies that had been born that night (1). These babies –
with Willie among them – are pre-emptively ticketed for slaughter in the trenches. For, just
as they are born, they are born to die prematurely. Later, after Willie’s nine months of
training in Fermoy, he is sent on to the Front, and his health and physique are referred to as
“wraps of prime meat to make a butcher happy” (23). He had been fattened and strengthened
as one would a steer or a cow before they are butchered and prepared for human
consumption. Again, further on in the novel, Willie is asked to speak to Jesse Kirwan who is
being kept in isolation at a slaughterhouse until he is court-marshalled for refusing to fight
under the English since the Irish deaths at the Easter Rising in Dublin (Barry 151-159). Just
before Willie sees his comrade, he witnesses the brutal slaughter of an ox. Improperly, and
hastily done, the bullock is cut up on the spot, parts of it “thrown into big tin carts like
imperial prams, and wheeled away all busy like” (151), a process that foreshadows Jesse
Kirwan’s own hasty and improper execution by the imperial English Army and ties back to
the slaughterhouse-like scene of the babies in the hospital. Jesse Kirwan’s execution sets an
example in order to control the Irish soldiers, because, like the slaughtered bovine that will
feed the army, the Irish soldiers, like other colonial subjects, fuel England’s war.
Again, as Willie and his regiment near the approach trench near Guillemont, he
comments on the discarded refuse of dead bodies:

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The approach trench was a reeking culvert with a foul carpet of crushed dead. Willie
could feel the pulverized flesh still in the destroyed uniforms sucking at his boots.
These were the bodies of the creatures gone beyond their own humanity into a severe
state that had no place in human doings and the human world. They might be rotting
animals thrown out at the back of a slaughterhouse, ready for the pits, urgently so.
What lives and names and loves he was walking on he could not know anymore;
these flattened forms did not leak the whistle tunes and meanings of humanity
anymore. (174-5)
The cadavers and their remnants are no longer discernible as human, and for Willie, like for
Jean in Fear, the men are viewed as animals and flesh for slaughter, but they are not
consumed by anyone but the monstrous War. Nevertheless, the idea of people as meat has
been around for centuries in all parts of the World, being exemplified in Western European
literary tradition by Homer’s Odyssey (Edwards 389). Seen in general as a grotesque and
horrific act by most societies, cannibalism is a Gothic taboo, a “taboo par excellence, for it
breaks down artificial distinctions between the human and the animal, even the human-asanimal, and figures flesh of the human body as meat” (Edwards 7). The concept of humans as
meat is further broken down as the idea that the human body is worth nothing more than
inanimate fodder, matter, and nutrients is unnerving and induces abject horror. Moreover, the
consumption of human flesh by another human being signals the absence of humanity and
civilization in addition to a transgression of boundaries and culture (Laqueur 4). This also
holds true for Algonquin societies as seen in Boyden’s Three Day Road (Visvis 226). More
specifically, in Cree and Ojibwe cosmology, the Windigo is a cannibal monster that arises in
the form of human possession during times of starvation or great trauma (227).

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The First World War is one such traumatic event, and Boyden utilises it to
demonstrate how the monster of War, a Windigo, materialises in Elijah as he becomes one.
Elijah’s grotesque enjoyment in killing German soldiers is increased as he feeds from the
corpses by “opening each man’s eyes and staring into them, then closing them with his
calloused hand, letting a strange spark of warmth accumulate deep in his gut each time that
he does it … he says the spark fills his belly when it gnaws for food” (Boyden 200). Elijah’s
Windigo transformation is induced by “part shell shock, part morphine addiction induced by
European contact, and part internalized racism learned at residential schools” (Visvis 233);
however, it is further spurred on by his obsession and hunger for recognition as the best
sniper among the Euro-Canadians, the English, and the French. One French soldier
intensifies Elijah’s hunger for fame when he tells him to collect scalps as evidence of his kills
in the field: “‘Do what my people taught your people a long time ago. Take the scalp of your
enemy as proof. Take a bit of him to feed you ... They will buy you honour among us…and
we are honourable men’” (Boyden 204). As Vikki Visvis notes, this exchange reverses
preconceived notions of Native savagery as it is the European who incites Elijah’s grotesque
action of scalping (240). Indeed, through the use of Gothic elements in describing the actions
and psychosis of the Windigo in the novel, Boyden exposes that Elijah’s bloodlust is not an
“innate Indigenous characteristic,” but a product of European cruelty and mania (240).
Overall, Elijah’s Windigo turning is unavoidable; as Xavier notes, it “is simply what this
place and these conditions have done to him” (Boyden 210). The various factors that have
gone into constructing and defining Elijah implode in the environment of the Front. Thus, the
First World War catalyses his monstrous transformation as the War, itself, is “an implacable
and ravenous Windigo” (Visvis 230).

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The Great War, the setting of Three Day Road, A Long Long Way, Fear, and All
Quiet on the Western Front, is a monster, a “place of corruption” as it embodies horror and
excess from outside accepted normality (Halberstam 2-3). It is a site of Gothic horror and
death, and thus an entity in its own right. It is a human construction, a machine, and monster
that encompasses and inspires everything as the characters mould with the changing
landscape and terror that envelop them. In the violence of the War, the Western Front became
a Gothic landscape which, for the first time in human history, amalgamated the environment,
men, animals, and man-made machines “into an unrecognizable landscape of total
destruction” (Brantz 78). The bleak and ruinous war environment comprising of mud, rain,
machines, and corpses, further fuels the soldiers’ perceptions of reality and identity because,
with monstrous conversion, comes monstrous action, challenging what it means to be a
human as the men’s hybrid existence of animal, machine, and thing disrupts accepted
sociocultural concepts of behaviour.

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Chapter III: Masculinity and the Horrors of War
Two years of shells and bombs – a man won’t peel that off as
easy as a sock.
Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

The environment of the First World War bears distinctly Gothic markers due to its
historical, socio-political, and geographical conditions. The impact of violence and death
upon both man and landscape along the Western Front quickly replaced the haunting legacy
of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic wars, and the Industrial
Revolution in Europe (Tropp 3). WWI imprinted a new definition of terror upon the
twentieth century, and consequently moulded the “aesthetic consciousness” of the modern
world (Cole 1632). With it, the War brought into question personal and national identity
politics. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long Way, and Three Day Road the
young protagonists’ identities and values are severely impacted by the death, devastation, and
dehumanisation. Entering the war, the young men have idealistic concepts of masculinity
which profoundly influence their decisions in enlisting. As the war progresses, the nightmare
environment of the Western Front reveals the falsity in their understanding of manhood. In
this manner, the violence and fear of the Great War expose the fragile construction of
masculinities at the turn of the twentieth century through their role in the characters’
voluntary enlistment, as well as in their relationships with the other soldiers and themselves.
The abject terror produced by the corpses, the disorientation caused by the landscape of
the Western Front, and the composite hybridity of the soldiers as man-animal-machineobject, all amalgamate to aid in the fragmentation and decomposition of previously accepted
normative social models of behaviour. Indeed, the Gothic environment of the trenches in both

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fictional as well as non-fictional accounts illustrate how “trench warfare … provides a space
in which previous assumptions and categories are dissolved” (Phillips 234). Terry Phillips
further remarks that, in First World War novels, this liminal space of the trenches and No
Man’s Land, where meaning breaks down, is akin to “the medieval past of original Gothic, in
that they constitute a world unknown to most who read them,” or did not experience it (qtd.
in Killeen 161-162). However, unlike the imagined medieval settings of eighteenth-century
Gothic literature, the War Gothic zone of WWI was empirically experienced by a group of
people, and it formed a deep impression on the men who fought in the trenches and No
Man’s Land. Among these soldiers, it is predominantly the younger men who were the most
severely affected by the environment of the Western Front compared to the older soldiers, for
the younger ones had yet to solidify their sense of identity.
Paul Baümer in All Quiet on the Western Front, Jean Dartemont in Fear, Willie Dunne in
A Long Long Way, and Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack in Three Day Road, all exhibit
the manner in which their socio-cultural identities are influenced by the violent Gothic
horrors that envelop them in their respective novels. The War traumatically embeds itself
within the psyches of these young men who are no older than nineteen when they volunteer
to fight for their respective nations. The war affected the way the protagonists view
themselves as individuals within their societies. As Remarque’s Paul Baümer points out,
We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it
is but an interruption...We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what
the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have
become a waste land. (20)
Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont equally echoes this sentiment of loss for what is supposed to
have been the “best years” of his life which are instead, as he puts it, spent in servitude and in

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squalor for the ambitions of others (264). Jean and Paul, like Willie Dunne and Xavier Bird,
are heavily affected by their experiences of terror and survival as their formative years and
remaining innocence are spent in the trenches of the Western Front – killing others as they in
turn endeavour not to be killed. As a result, the violence and death of the war environment
undermine their expectations of war as well as their masculine identities with which they
enter the trenches of the Western Front.
WWI was itself a masculine event, as it was ordered and fought by men. Women only
occupied passive roles as nurses, family members, or prostitutes in comparison to the frontline soldier (Mosse 106). At the brink of the War, the concept of masculinity was already
tenuous as there were growing concerns in Western Europe of the debasement of the middleclass male as well as the breakdown of established gender roles (Hendershot 21). The modern
concept of masculinity in Western European middle classes started to develop at the end of
the eighteenth century and was associated with medieval ideals typically ascribed to knights:
those of chivalry, male honour, courage and sangfroid, individual reputation, dignity, and
social standing (Mosse 22). However, by the turn of the twentieth century, tolerance grew for
various expressions of masculinity, which differed from popularised hegemonic male
behaviours, and so, ‘true manliness’ became a conservative force striving to maintain a
normative standard (Mosse 15). By the time the War started, there was a movement to
reclaim this form of manhood from extinction; however, with the constant threat of violence
and death from artillery and machine guns all along the Western Front, masculine ideals
imposed by societies were discredited, along with militarism and nationalism.
In all of the novels under discussion, the young protagonists form subjectivities within
the chaos of the First World War that are driven by their fears as they become disillusioned
with military glory. Though the latter is a characteristic of the War Gothic, for, preceding the

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First World War, very few works of art (other than Francisco de Goya’s famous Los
desastres de la guerra and a few others) in eighteenth and nineteenth century Western
European culture portrayed war negatively (Monnet and Hantke xiv). War novels written
prior to, but also including many written during and after WWI, also brandished the notion of
war as the utmost test of masculinity, a rite of passage, and an adventure wherein boys shed
their innocent youth to metamorphose into glorious warriors (Teichler 245). Nevertheless,
war in many cultures continued to be the traditional and ideal setting for masculine initiation
(Leed 14), and the First World War became another venue in which young men were eager to
prove themselves since the War promised to be a constructive site of transition and progress
for both nation and man.
At the outset of the four novels, the young protagonists are eager for war. Though some
are more enthusiastic than others at the start, they represent one of the three archetypal frontline soldiers found in most Great War literature: the 1914 volunteer (Leed 37). Unlike the
other two archetypes, the survivor and the stormtrooper, the volunteer appears at the
beginning of the war experience as he represents the “war as a national and communal
project” filled with “the essence of idealist expectations” (37), supplemented by a “pastoral
conception of war” that involved travelling, male companionship, adventures, and heroism
(Gregory 6). Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont, for example, is primarily interested in joining the
war effort based on his curiosity. Prior to his experiences of abject horror and violence at the
Front, the War for Jean is “a show” that was assured to be “the most remarkable spectacle of
the age – I would not want to miss it” (Chevallier 14-15). The War, for him, appears as a
grand “sightseeing” expedition (24), and his zeal for adventure fills him with excitement and
enchantment as he breathes in fresh countryside air while exploring his first destroyed town
en route to the Western Front (40). This pleasant romantic view was predominantly upheld

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by the Allies as it resonated with many men in their desire for travel and a change from daily
routine as well as for adventure, whereas the predominant German sentiment envisaged the
destruction of war as means for change (Eksteins 197-201).
The implications of war were vague and distant, and to imagine them, the young
volunteers had “to refer back to History, to what little … [they] knew of it” (Chevallier 6).
The last war for Germany and France was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Canadian First
Nations were involved in a small capacity in the Boer War in 1899 (Summerby 14), as were
the Irish, who supplied troops to the British imperial army throughout the nineteenth century
(Darwin 328). Even then, wars were portrayed as glorious and filled with heroes. The
generational divide between the young men and these armed conflicts further motivated their
enthusiasm in enlisting in WWI as it was a chance for them to physically prove their
manhood as warriors. The image of the warrior represented the pinnacle of ‘manliness’ in
both Western and First Nations cultures, and it thus influenced the construction of normative
masculinity in many Western societies from the eighteenth century up to the First World War
(Mosse 106). The stereotype of the ‘noble savage,’ constructed by Europeans in the mideighteenth century, asserts respect for Indigenous men as noble warriors, allies, and advisors
(Sheffield, “Red Man’s” 4). Alongside these stereotypes, the Native population was also
viewed as ignorant and wise “child[ren] of nature” (Haycock 7) and treated by the colonisers
and the government as wards (Dempsey 38). By the turn of the twentieth century, this
stereotype of the noble savage dwindled with the increase of reserves and residential schools
in Canada, but the warrior ethic for many tribes became a longed-for ideal on reserves and in
ceremonies regardless (Dempsey 1). In Western Canada, for example, the warrior ethos was
still alive in the collective memory of tribes with warrior traditions, and many First Nations
men were thus enthusiastic for an opportunity to prove themselves as warriors in the fight

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overseas (Dempsey 1-21). This eagerness is mirrored in Elijah Whiskeyjack from Three Day
Road as he convinces his best friend, Xavier Bird, to travel with him and enlist for the war
effort in Toronto (Boyden 294). Though Xavier is reluctant, their enrolment and staying
together throughout the War, as well as their reliance on each other, mirrors “part of the
warrior tradition” that continued into reserves and boarding schools, wherein “young boys
chose partners, or comrades, with whom they would go to war. They were expected to travel
together, and to protect each other in times of danger” (Dempsey 5).
The idealisation of the warrior and the noble savage are nonetheless stereotypes, for they
embody “manly ideals” which not only “objectify human nature, making it easy to
understand at a glance and to pass judgement” on individuals, but have “influenced almost
every aspect of modern history” being involved “in fashioning ideas of nationhood,
respectability, and war," as well as culture, ideologies, and politics (Mosse 10-11). Still, all
normative masculinities are based on the physical body, which is why “stereotypes of true
manliness” from the eighteenth century up to the First World War in Western cultures have
been so influential; the male body can “easily be seen, touched or even talked to, a living
reminder of human beauty, of the proper morals, and of a longed-for utopia” (Mosse 12).
And those who failed to meet whatever physical standards set by the culture and class
became the marginalised ‘others’ to counter and thereby support popular ideals (Mosse 14).
It is this feeling of physical inadequacy that drove Willie Dunne from A Long Long Way to
volunteer for the War as he wished to prove himself a man. Willie Dunne’s “’damnable’
height, as his father began to call it” – his five feet and six inches – is the cause of his
insecurity and his enlistment in the army (Barry 6). A foot shorter than his father, and four
inches from “the regulation height” for a policeman, Willie falls short (no pun intended) of

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his father’s hopes and expectations as he cannot follow in his footsteps by joining the Dublin
Metropolitan Police (6, 5).
Willie Dunne’s genetic shortcomings in comparison to his father and normative
masculinity spark his feelings of inadequacy. In addition, as Willie has relations with the
English in the trenches at the Front, his feelings of marginalisation and emasculation are
further increased because of his position as an Irishman. In the nineteenth century, the Irish
were seen as inferior in terms of “race, religion and class” by the British, occupying a
disturbing liminal space of “neither ‘white’ colonisers nor ‘black’ colonised” (Beatty 4-5).
The English considered Ireland to be “populated by effeminate male degenerates,” even
though in Ireland, “the effeminate man was considered a more spiritual and cultural figure,
open to truths, cut off from the physical rationality of the Saxons” (Killeen 79). However, the
negative portrayal of Irishmen by the British was countered by the Irish nationalist movement
that aimed to create their own self-image by reconnecting with “a lost masculine strength,”
which was destroyed by British rule, and thus negating the colonisers’ conception that they
were effeminate, incompetent, passive, and child-like ( Beatty 6, 32, 37). To do so, the
movement drew its inspiration from the heroic figure of Cú Chulainn, whose strength,
virility, and warrior nature became the blueprint for their new masculinity (Romanets 1). For
example, with Cú Chulainn “as a symbol of masculinity for the Celts,” the Gaelic Athletic
Association founded in 1884 promoted physical-contact sports, including Cú Chulainn’s
favourite, “caman (hurling),” among the “youth of Ireland” (Kiberd 25).
With the rise in popularity of sport and national militarism, physical culture gained
footing as it promoted virility and strength in the reforming corpus of masculinity and
patriotism within men, and especially, the Irish Volunteers (Beatty 65). As such, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the predominant masculinity was not only “quantified”

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and based on the popularisation of physical culture in English-speaking countries and
colonies, but the model for normative masculinity in Ireland was based on the physical and
behavioural entry standards set by the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan
Police (Heffernan 237-243). Entry requirements into the national and capital police force
prized the male body, for it was believed that one’s internal value is reflected in one’s
physique (244). Wille Dunne, unable to meet the height requirements, became a builder, but
the War offered him a chance to prove his worth in a military fashion akin to the police force
as there were no height restrictions in the army. On the transport to France after his training,
Willie believes that he has achieved his “bloody manhood at last” (Barry 21):
He felt so proud of himself he thought his toes might burst out of his boots. In fact he
imagined for a moment that he had grown those wanting inches, and might go now
after all and be a policeman if he chose, astonishing his father…Willie felt his body
folding and folding over and over with pride like the very Wicklow mountains must
feel the roll of heather and the roll of rain. (22)
Innocently, Willie, like Elijah, Xavier, and Jean, is satisfied in his belief and expectation that
war will give him the chance to affirm his masculinity and transition into adulthood. Paul
Baümer in All Quiet on the Western Front is the only character from the four novels who did
not enlist to prove his manliness or for a youthful adventure, for it was hegemonic German
masculinity that forced him to volunteer.
It is Kantorek, Paul’s teacher, who “shepherd[ed]” his class to register at the District
Commandant’s bureau (Remarque 11) by “preach[ing his] students into enlisting” and thus
was responsible for having altered their lives (174). He channelled his nation’s expectations
for the young men by directly targeting their sense of Pflicht (duty), as well as their
masculinity in order to have them join the war effort. In Germany, since the early nineteenth

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century, militarised masculinity was the hegemonic ideal for middle class men leading into
WWI (Crouthamel 15). The German warrior archetype was at the foundation of “national
regeneration” and German unification by the end of the nineteenth century, for it was “used
to promote self-sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty,” as well as “patriarchy, antidemocratic
politics, and traditional social hierarchies” (19). War, therefore, is an arena for young males
“to demonstrate their individual worth within the collective act of defending the nation” (19).
In this way, refusing to answer Germany’s call to war not only exhibited one’s effeminacy,
but it located the individual as a traitor and enemy. As Paul Baümer remarks, “even one’s
parents were ready with the word ‘coward’” and the community would ostracise anyone who
showed signs of pacifism (Remarque 11).
Similarly, in Fear, Chevallier’s Jean watches as a man demonstrates his peaceful
opposition to the war fervour in the first excitable summer months of the War. Because of not
standing and taking off his hat during la Marseillaise, the man is physically attacked at the
café by the people around him for exhibiting his anti-war spirit (Chevallier 10-11). Not only
does the man show that it is “‘folly to go against public opinion’” (11), but the pacifists are
seen as unpatriotic cowards, and even spies in the eyes of the populace, and many men on
both sides were socially pressured into performing their devoir or Pflicht for the good of the
nation. While German Pflicht seeks to solidify a national unifying voice by looking to the
present and the future for renewal and glory, British duty and French devoir are rooted in
defending their imperial histories and colonies (Eksteins 194). Furthermore, all of the
nationalist efforts are constructed on masculine honour and willpower (194). Indeed, never
before had nationalism combined so closely with masculinity, and by doing so, “[t]he First
World War brought nationalism’s aggressiveness into sharp focus and made man as warrior
the centre of its search for a national character” (Mosse 107). After success in the Franco-

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Prussian War, newly united Germany sought to assert itself as an international player, while
Canada and Ireland sought independence and recognition; in comparison, Britain and France
were on the defensive to protect their colonial empires and traditions.
Regardless of the nations’ goals, stereotypes of masculinity were employed by each
group to strengthen “normative society against those who supposedly wanted to destroy its
fabric, and who through their looks and comportment made clear their evil intentions”
(Mosse 17-18). In the process, enlistment numbers were stimulated, and those who publicly
opposed the masculine ideal were enemies of the state. While the characters in All Quiet on
the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long Way, and Three Day Road enlist due to a combination
of social and familial pressures, and to assert their own masculinity in what was expected to
be a traditional war setting, their enrolment is also done out of fear – fear of missing out and
fear of being a failure as men to themselves, their families, and their community. Although
fear is the active motivator within the four novels, the fear caused by the Gothic terror and
horror of the Western Front has a transformative effect on the characters’ perception of their
masculine identities. The young soldiers were expected to form productive and positive
experiences while at war, and yet it causes the opposite as the experiences of the Western
Front have a destabilising and adverse outcome. Thus, the rite of passage of the trenches does
not yield the imagined results that were hoped for as the reality of the war experience
challenges and contradicts it.
War, as a rite of passage is to be examined in three stages: firstly, the individual is
removed from the group, then the individual experiences liminal rites, and thirdly, the
individual is welcomed back into the group (Leed 14). The second stage is of particular
importance, for though it is not discussed in conjunction with the Gothic, Eric Leed identifies
that in the secondary stage of the rite of passage, the war experience of the trenches is a

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transformative in-between space in which “[a] youth undergoing initiation is no longer who
he was, but neither is he what he is to become” (17). The Gothic element within the liminal
step in the production of a male warrior identity usurps the formation of a masculine
selfhood. As mentioned before, normative masculinity is a stereotype, but a ‘stable’
masculinity is also a fabrication, a myth that is seen as whole and dominant in comparison to
the ‘other’ presented by femininity which is understood as “lacking and incapable of ever
achieving wholeness and mastery” (Hendershot 1-3). However, Lacan points out that “the
female subject position is the condition of all of us,” for all bodies and identities are unstable
illusionary ideologies that are constantly subject to change (qtd. Hendershot 3, 9). As such,
the incompleteness and volatility in male gender identity, alongside its liminal state, is
characteristic of Gothic modality and is instrumental in exposing and exploring the
contradictions inherent in standardised masculinity (Brinks 4).
Even though human identity is malleable and allows the individual “to produce himself
(sich bilden)” (Redfield 43), Gothic fear and terror are agents of change as they promote the
formation of a newer and higher “sense of self and social values” because they stimulate “an
imaginative expansion” of the individual’s view of themselves (Botting 9). Fuelled by the
violence and horrors of war, self and society are thus interrogated as the War transgresses
and shatters all previously established boundaries as well as “distinctions that were central to
orderly thought, communicable experience, and normal human relations” (Leed 21). In wars
in general, soldiers are not only witnesses “to the violence but are transformed by it, the
means to its end, becoming the war itself as we are ‘experienced’ by the violence as much as
we experience it” (Miller 321). Therefore, war is an abject experience as it involves the
departure from the realm of what is known into an alien other where the “familiar symbolic
world of word and referent” is shattered (321). Meaning is broken, and new meaning is

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formed, for violence is also used to produce new types of identity, gender, race, or nation,
and thereby can create a new sense of self and community (Thrift 276). However, the
formulation of an identity within a Gothic space is never clear or straightforward since
characters often end up as contradictions or in stasis, unable to make sense of themselves or
the world around them. This process is similar for masculinity because within the Gothic
tradition, masculinity typically strives “to establish itself as the norm and centre of power”
while it simultaneously “destabilises its own fiction of supremacy” (Bauer 25).
Consequently, the relentless sense of fear which plagues the soldiers throughout the four
novels challenges the protagonists’ individualised masculinities as they struggle with
uncertainty and ambivalence within the trenches.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baümer’s greatest fear has to do with his
relationship with his group of friends in the trenches. Camaraderie is a central component of
the war mythos as it invigorates and constructs masculine normativity in Western Europe.
Medical officials in Germany and France declared that war, like sports, is a healthy form of
exercise for young men because of the physical exertions, the restriction on alcohol and
tobacco, and the moral corrections in the training camps (Mosse 113). Furthermore, the male
camaraderie present in both war and sport was supposed to be “an antidote for degeneration”
of the middle-class male that threatened the two countries at the end of the nineteenth century
(113). Male fellowship was glorified by many war poets and praised for its ability in aiding
the soldiers in coping with the violence and brutality of the trenches (110). In WWI,
camaraderie was a crucial part of military masculinity for it had a positive, and even
essential, impact on the men’s morale; so much so that the men at the front created
communities of their own that disdained the population at the home front as well as the
military governing body.

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Of the four novels under study, celebration of the soldiers’ camaraderie is unequivocally
displayed by Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as the protagonist, Paul Baümer, is
predominantly defined by his circle of friends whom he holds dear. According to Paul, “the
most important result was that … [the war] awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit
de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war –
comradeship” (Remarque 26-27). For Paul, this fellowship between the front-line soldiers is
the only positive thing to have occurred during the First World War. Due to shared
experiences of violence, constant exposure to one another, the disappearance of shame
around their bodies, previously unmentionable things like bowel movements and sexual
experiences are discussed without taboo or secrecy for they are “as natural as eating and
drinking” as the men smoke, play cards, and chat while sitting together on the latrines (8). As
Paul comments when he is later in hospital, when Lewandowski explains to the men in his
ward his anxiousness at his wife’s visit and shares with them how he wishes to be intimate
with her again, “in the army there are no secrets about such things” (265). The intimacy,
trust, and rapport that are formed among the men in the novel generate a unique community
centred on kinship and survival in the face of death and annihilation.
Indeed, Paul’s connection with his fellow soldiers is so strong that he yearns for their
company while he is home on leave, and in front of his family, he acts the stoic, quiet, and
emotionally immovable soldier (201). Within his childhood home, Paul feels estranged, and
it is not until he is back in the trenches with his friends that he feels consoled and reassured
by their presence that he is able to drop the socially expected masculine pretence in order to
cry and lament his mother’s health condition (201). During one of Paul’s patrols, he is caught
in an oncoming bombardment and is forced to take cover in a shell hole. As he waits for the

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bombing to subside, he experiences a horrible bout of fear but is later soothed by the
approaching sounds of his friends:
They [his comrades] are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than
motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there
is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades. I am no longer a shuddering speck
of existence, alone in the darkness; – I belong to them and they to me; we all share the
same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I
could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will
stand by me. (212)
Through their conditions on the Western Front, the soldiers share an intimacy that is
inexplicable and foreign to those on the home front and to those officers away from the frontline. The value that Paul ascribes to his friends is immense. He cherishes them above
everything as his comrades are the sole reason Paul continues to persevere in the hellish
environment of the trenches. Thus, his bond with his group is integral to the personal identity
that he has formed, and to lose his comrades would be to lose himself.
The War for Paul creates a “great brotherhood” – a union made through life in the everpresent threat of death (272). Yet, his love for his fellow soldiers also signals Paul’s deepest
fear – of being and dying alone. His only comfort in the chaos of the Great War comes from
the presence and “the steady breathing” of his comrades (275); however, the security the
other men provide Paul exists only as long as his friends remain alive. As such, Paul’s
treasured connection to his comrades is frail, and by extent, so is his purpose for being. On
the Western Front, death threatens to snuff out the men’s existences at every possible
moment, and ever since the death of his childhood friend, Kemmerich, at the start of the
novel, Paul is constantly aware of his and his comrades’ impermanence. His life and the lives

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of his companions are the only things left of any value in his new world as the threat of dying
and suffering the horrors of war utterly alone is beguiling. In the final two chapters, Paul’s
will to live deteriorates as, one by one, Tchaden, Detering, Beger, Müller, and Bertinck die in
different ways. Yet, when Katczinsky falls from an injury to his shin, Paul’s fear is amplified
as “[t]he anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one
friend left” (288). Stanislaus Katczinsky’s demise bookends the last meaningful death for
Paul as he is left distraught, horrified, with no one to live for anymore (290 -291). As a result,
Paul is left a hollowed husk before his own lonely demise.
George L. Mosse takes issue with the male solidarity represented in Remarque’s novel
for he notes that WWI not only “encouraged the views of the war as dependent on a
functioning male camaraderie as soldiers fought, lived together, and died together in the
trenches,” but that it venerates a component of military masculinity when, as an anti-war
novel, the book’s mission should be to dispel it (106-107). Mosse observes that the masculine
ideal was “so closely linked to war, it even informed the attitudes of those who asserted their
hatred of the military conflict,” as seen in Remarque (Mosse 106). Though the young soldiers
in the novel are rendered “hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough” by war (Remarque 26),
their experiences of death and destruction do not make them unfeeling or callous. On the
contrary, Paul and his friends become emotionally dependent on each other, for, in their
trench intimacy, they have created a space in which they can freely express themselves and
their fears without judgement. Outside of the theatre of war, this type of connection among
men would have been unfathomable in normative Western European societies such as
Germany and France at the beginning of the twentieth century, because men were not
supposed to have ever felt fear in the first place. During times of violence and destruction
throughout All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers cry, call for their mother, and hold

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each other as they whimper in fear and terror during the onslaught of shells and bombs. Far
from being portrayed as the courageous strong-willed heroic warriors, the soldiers are turned
into frightened children by the destructive forces of the guns. Their fears are at odds with the
ideals associated with masculine bravado as the soldiers of WWI were expected by the home
front and their leaders to keep emotions “under control; a true man did not cry out in pain nor
did he shed a tear even for fallen comrades” (Mosse 109).
The divergence between the expectations of ‘manly’ comportment and the experiences of
the soldiers on the front-line is also explicit in Chevallier’s Fear. In comparison to All Quiet
on the Western Front, as well as Three Day Road and A Long Long Way, camaraderie is not
an important aspect in the identity of Fear’s protagonist, Jean Dartemont. Chevallier neither
critiques nor rejects the militarised camaraderie in his novel, though he briefly acknowledges
the “strict solidarity” that exists among the front-line soldiers (Chevallier 122). Compared to
the characters in the other novels, who are surrounded by a circle of people who remain more
or less constant throughout the War, Jean is more solitary and, as a result, he appears rather
selfish since he is primarily concerned with himself and not with the welfare of his fellow
soldiers. As Jean is both narrator and protagonist, he voices the large majority of opinions
concerning the war, which, ultimately, make the tone of the novel even more cynical, critical,
and contemptuous of the war. As such, instead of fearing for the wellbeing of others, Jean’s
greatest dread is a personal matter as he is consumed by the apprehension of his own bodily
mutilation.
Going into the War, Jean is pleased and “rather proud to be suitable material for a soldier,
not to belong to that category of despised citizens in the prime of life who have stayed at
home” (Chevallier 15). Prior to his medical examination, Jean was insecure about his body;
yet, his masculine ego is flattered and validated “by the medical officer’s decision” – a fellow

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man – when his body is deemed worthwhile for duty (Chevallier 14-15). Jean’s body is
desired by the state for service and he will not be socially ostracised for his lack of health. In
France, up until the middle of the twentieth century, gender and sex were synonymous and
dictated at birth (Nye 6). Hence, gender and sex are corporeal, “a natural quality, expressed
in and through the body and its gestures…not imitative or consciously learned, but is an
embodiment” (6). Therefore, a man’s sexual identity is very much tied to his body, and so
Jean’s medical approval for war is simultaneously a social and personal affirmation of his
masculinity. Moreover, France is preoccupied with honour and shame, and for bourgeois men
such as Jean, a man’s personal honour is also linked to his body and sexual identity (9). At
adolescence, young men are attributed a certain amount of honour, and from there, they must
“accrue to theirs by seeking glory and distinction in the public arena”; however, it can be
easily lost by acting “in a cowardly or fearful manner” among other ways, and its loss would
then imply “suffering a kind of annihilation and social death” (9-10). Additionally, cowardice
was deemed to be feminine, and “effeminacy is deplored, especially when linked to
cowardice” (10). However, with WWI, cowardice and fear were experienced en masse by
thousands of French soldiers. To be afraid, and to admit one’s cowardice, is not masculine,
and when Jean, while in hospital, tries to explain to the nurses that the horrors of the War
caused him and many others to experience fear, the nurses cannot take his stories for reality.
Instead of accepting his truth, they mocked him, “gave a little indignant shriek and ran off”
with “revulsion on their faces” (Chevallier 106).
For the soldiers in the trenches such as Jean, the shame associated with fear is “obsolete”
(106), but for the rest of French society, like the nurses, fear remains an emasculating
emotion. The men went to war to build upon their masculine identity and honour, but in the
eyes of the community they failed if they returned and shared their experiences of fear. In his

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1931 review of Fear, Joseph Jolinon states that Chevallier’s work is a notable war novel
unlike previous French war texts at the time for the fact that it addresses and discusses fear
(108). According to Jolinon, all other French anti-war novels avoided the taboo matter of fear
and its role in the disillusionment in military glory (108-109). Aptly named, Chevallier’s
novel is about fear and the horrific realities of the War, as Jean and others in the trenches are
in a constant state of terror. The Gothic fear and violence which unendingly surround the
soldiers force the men into trepidation; as Jean notes, “[w]e were cowards and we knew it
and we could be nothing else” (Chevallier 59). Fear is an invariable truth of the War, and the
“Gothic terrors activate a sense of the unknown and project an uncontrollable and
overwhelming power which threatens not only the loss of sanity, honour, property or social
standing but the very order which supports and is regulated by the coherence of those terms”
(Botting 7). Within the War environment, courage, manhood, and the image of the warrior
are dispossessed of their previous powers over the men. At the Chemin des Dames, Jean and
his battalion are attacked unendingly “[d]ay and night” by German machinery with no means
to counter the attack as they are forced to cower (Chevallier 209). As a result of the length of
the attack, Jean feels transformed by the violence:
I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self … I am: a fellow who is afraid,
with insurmountable fear, a cringing fear, that is crushing him … My fear is abject. It
makes me want to spit on myself… Death would be preferable to this degrading
torment … Yes, if this must continue much longer, I would rather die. (211-212)
Attacked physically and mentally, Jean is ashamed of his fear for he senses that whatever
feelings of honour and self-respect he has left are destroyed by the guns. In moments like
these throughout the novel, Jean’s experiences of fear are mingled with self-loathing as he
considers himself weak and unmanly and sometimes inhuman. For front-line soldiers like

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him, fear in the trenches of the Western Front is inevitable as it transforms and disillusions
the men to the concepts of “honour, courage, noble attitudes” (159); yet, Jean’s utmost fear is
the harm that violence wreaks on the body.
Jean is helpless as a result of his circumstances, and his body is the only thing left which
he has control over. The body is important and fundamental for one’s identity “because
through them the body serves as the visible image of the subject’s ego” (Hendershot 9). Any
horror that strikes the body is therefore an attack on the individual and society’s construction
of their identity and place. As Justin D. Edwards observes, there is a lot of “anxiety about the
body’s degeneration or mutilation,” and to lose control of one’s body, or to see it occur in
someone else is terrifying and horrific (57). Jean looks upon the living mutilated soldiers as
the most gruesome sight imaginable, and as he realises this, he questions himself asking: “Is
it just the sight of all these mutilations that could have been mine that move me? Isn’t our
pity a contemplation of ourselves, via others? I do not know” (Chevallier 81). Though he
cannot answer, he is nevertheless troubled and disturbed by the grotesque disfigured bodies
throughout the novel as he worries for his own physique, since his “worst fear was mutilation
and the long drawn out agony” that the wounded suffer (110).
While he is in the hospital, various injured soldiers are brought in, and the worst case is a
man, “a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it
shocked men who were no longer shockable … This thing, this being, screamed in a corner
like a maniac” (Chevallier 79). The entire ward is repulsed by this soldier whom they can no
longer recognise as a human being for there are no markers left that distinguish him as one,
either physically or vocally. While the men are bothered by his presence, Jean is more
preoccupied with those soldiers whom he can still identify as human, but who, because of
their amputations, “their shattered limbs,” or blindness, can never again live independently

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(78-79). It is the uncanny men who trouble him, for the uncanny “disturbs the familiar,
homely, secure sense of reality and normality” and “renders all boundaries uncertain”
(Botting 11). The severely wounded and amputees are still recognisable as human but are no
longer whole. In their helplessness and fragmentation, their bodies can no longer be sites for
normative masculine identity, for, in their disenchantment, the “violated body is not a magic
site for the production of culture” (Cole 1633). Furthermore, the mutilated bodies intensify
Jean’s fears as the wholeness of his body is central to keeping hold of what remains of his
sanity, personal identity, and life (Chevallier 81); and yet, to be whole in time of war meant a
return to the front-line (129).
In the early twentieth century, people with disabilities and those whose bodies did not
measure up to the social standard in Western Europe, were marginalised as the unwanted
‘other’ (Mosse 13-14). In the case of the French soldiers, serious injury or dismemberment is
not only equivalent to social alienation but to sexual castration, for “[t]he notion that a man’s
identity was rooted in his sex – and was therefore an aspect of his organic being – was still in
vigor in France in 1918 as was masculinity as a quality of a man of honor” (Nye 227). This
idea is addressed in Fear, when a new patient in the ward confides in Jean, “’Me, I’m not a
man anymore’” and shows him his “shameful mutilation” (Chevallier 96). Married with one
child, the man is at odds with how he will keep his wife from leaving him: “’Women, you
know, you need that to keep them!’” (97). Jean pities the man and loathes the way the nurses
disdainfully regard him because of his unfortunate castration: “Faced with a man who is
incomplete, they [the nurses] lose that very discreet air of submission and fear that women
have with men. Their lack of respect means ‘there’s no danger in this one,’ the worst insult a
woman can direct at us” (Chevallier 97-8). To be looked down upon by men is one thing, but
for Jean, who is a misogynist, to be looked down upon by women, the ‘weaker sex,’ is abject

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humiliation. While losing one’s genitals is a definitive sexual castration, the mutilated
soldiers lose their masculine attributes including their honour as they are no longer seen as
complete men. They partake in the category of the liminal ‘other’; for, like a eunuch, the
disabled soldier is no longer a man, and not a woman. The same men who entered the war to
gain their masculine honour as soldiers were, by the end of the war, refused their masculinity
by French society if they were visibly wounded, disabled, or suffered from shell-shock (Nye
226-227). Even though Chevallier’s Jean Dartemont survives the war intact, during his time
on the Western Front he lives in fear at the possibility of his own emasculating mutilation as
it would be the final stage to complete his personal sense of degradation.
Apart from Jean Dartemont, Xavier Bird from Three Day Road is the only other
protagonist to survive the First World War, and he, unlike Jean, does return from the War
having had his leg amputated. However, Xavier’s frustrations and defeat over “the wreck” of
his post-war body have nothing to do with physical or social castration, and everything to do
with his abilities to return to his former lifestyle in the bush (Boyden 324). His mobility and
his independence in the Canadian wilderness are compromised as he angrily points out to
Niska: “‘Look at my leg, Auntie…Look at what is left of it …What am I supposed to do with
this?’” (356-357). Prior to the War, Xavier lived with Niska according to a traditional Cree
lifestyle in the wilderness and not on a reserve, and so he sees himself as a ‘bush Indian’ and
not one of “the homeguard children” (24). This distinction is important to Xavier’s
masculinity, for in Canada, the colonial institution took away the men’s sense of identity via
cultural genocide in the residential schools as seen through Elijah who is a product of the
system. As Xavier remarks, “No Indian religion for him. The only Indian Elijah wants to be
is the Indian who knows how to hide and hunt” (137). Furthermore, First Nations men’s

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traditional identities were also affected by the loss of traditional territories as people were
moved onto reserves (Anderson et al. 272).
Through Xavier and Elijah, Boyden undermines what McKegney calls “hypermasculine
stereotypes” created by European settlers of First Nations men: those, as mentioned earlier,
of the “noble savage and the bloodthirsty warrior” (McKegney 2). Right up until WWI, these
two stereotypes were prevalent among Euro-Canadians, the majority of whom had relatively
little interaction with the Indigenous population, and as a result, First Nations peoples were
fictionalised according to the belief that they would inevitably go extinct according to notions
of social Darwinism (Dempsey 17-18). With the rise of media in Canada at the beginning of
the twentieth century, newspapers further promoted and enforced other stereotypes and
misconceptions surrounding Indigenous peoples that “shaped and reinforced” AngloCanadians’ opinions and presumptions about them (Sheffield, Red Man’s 6). These views
were not only numerous but showcased paradoxes of Gothic othering as “Canadians’ notions
of Aboriginal people included great warriors and vicious savages, Indian princesses and
lascivious squaws, wise elders and drunken vagabonds, and sometimes all of the above in
spite of the contradictions” (Sheffield, Indifference 60). Equally, the Canadian military
service for WWI shared these “conflicting images” for on one hand, there was a “favourable
impression of Aboriginal men as natural warriors, well prepared for soldiering by their racial
attributes and wilderness skills; on the other, the many negative views of a degraded inferior
race” (61). While one can identify the binary ‘hypermasculine stereotypes’ of Indigenous
men as ‘noble’ and ‘savage’ in Three Day Road in Xavier and Elijah, Boyden’s narrative
simultaneously discredits them. As a postmodernist and postcolonial work, the novel presents
the First Nations’ masculinities of the two soldiers as complex and running counter to the
restrictive binary stereotypes created by British colonisers. However, since there is already

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considerable scholarship about the intricacy of Elijah’s character, 2 it is Xavier’s identity that
will be explored.
In traditional societies, prior to the arrival of Europeans, gender roles between Indigenous
men and women were “based on equity and balance” and one’s role was not considered more
valuable than the other (Anderson et al. 267, 269). With the disruptive effect of European
patriarchy, dispossession of land, and separation of children from their families, First Nations
men were deprived of their traditional roles of providers and protectors and forced, instead,
to depend on federal institutions (271-272). In opposition to colonially imposed constrictive
models, First Nations masculinity is very much tied to one’s independence and freedom of
movement. Xavier, who was taken out of the residential school as a small child by his aunt
Niska, was able to grow up in a self-sufficient and traditional lifestyle outside the direct and
continual influences of the residential school and Euro-Canadians. As a result, Xavier
experienced a traditional male rite of passage during his first solo hunt as a young boy
wherein his success in hunting a grouse during the winter is celebrated by the community and
he earned his name of Little Bird Dancer (Boyden 363). Xavier proves himself a capable
provider and hunter at a young age, and so, by the start of the War, he is very much in tune
with his Cree culture and enters the chaos in Europe with a concrete understanding of who he
is and where he comes from.
Throughout his trials on the Western Front, he keeps to his identity and traditions
overseas despite the constant fear and threat of death. For example, he dutifully wears the

2
See, for example, Vikki Visvis’ “Culturally Conceptualizing Trauma: Windigo in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day
Road,” 2010, or Sophie McCall’s “Intimate Enemies: Weetigo, Weesageechak, and the Politics of
Reconciliation in Tomson Highways’ Kiss of the Fur Queen and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,” 2013, or
Hanna Teichler’s “Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road: Transcultural (Post-) Memory and Identity in Canadian
World War I Fiction,” 2014.

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medicine bundle made by Niska around his neck as it not only brings a homely comfort to
him but is a constant reminder of who he is; “It feels warm against my skin, like it is filled
with blood” (73), and later in his anger towards the army and the war, he removes his
military identification tag from around his neck but keeps his medicine bundle, saying: “That
alone is who I am” (365). While Xavier’s skills in providing are established prior to his
enrolment in the army, the horrors of the trenches prevent him from maintaining his
masculine role as protector. However, both of these aspects are essential for the wholeness of
his masculine identity, that should consist of the individual and the communal (Anderson et
al. 272). Unable to completely embrace all formative stages of traditional Indigenous
masculinity because of the turbulent environment of the War and industrialised warfare,
Xavier is forced to kill the one he has a duty to protect, Elijah.
Neither Xavier nor Elijah joined the War with the goal of defending King or country, but
because they enlisted together, warrior ethos compels comrades in war to watch over each
other (Dempsey 5). Deena Rymhs notes that throughout Boyden’s novel, “the possibility of
tribal warrior traditions translating in the First World War becomes undermined” as the
Western Front is a non-Indigenous space and the warrior identity that Xavier and Elijah try to
achieve within it belongs to a pre-colonial time (172). Nevertheless, Xavier and Elijah are
inseparable as they remain together during their time at the Front: sniping and spotting
together. Xavier observes how Elijah’s love of killing – of “Fritz-hunting” – transforms him
into a monstrous Windigo (Boyden 68). From the beginning of their time at the Front,
Xavier’s eerie feeling of fear escalates as he watches Elijah:
He crawls up and his eyes are wide with excitement. ‘Three of them!’ he whispers. ‘I
slit the throats of three of them so quickly that I surprised even myself! I am truly a
ghost man now!’ His hands look black in the dark, and I realize that they are covered

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with blood… the high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks, so gaunt from the medicine
[morphine]. His eyes sparkling like sunlight on water and I stare for a while, taking
all of him in. He is beautiful, like a wild animal. Too delicate, it seems, for what he is
good at. (Boyden 230-231)
As he gazes at him, Xavier experiences abject horror and fascination as he is both repulsed
by and drawn to Elijah. Even though he identifies that Elijah’s obsession with killing “is
simply what this place and these conditions have done to him” (210) – acombination of the
war environment, the morphine, and his need for acceptance – Xavier cannot shake the
unease that grows within him, because “behind his friendly smile burns an obsession that is
frightening” (246). Xavier’s fear is uncanny as he recognises that Elijah is going mad in
attempting to gain acknowledgement as “a warrior of the highest order” from his non-Native
superiors, as well as a reputation among all the Canadian, British, and French soldiers
(Boyden 143). The Gothic depictions of Elijah’s monstrous actions and conversions in the
novel highlight the horrors of WWI as well as illustrating the inversion of “Native
primitivism and European superiority” as the Windigo psychosis is caused by European
culture and historical events (Visivis 238-239).
Initially, the residential school system is responsible for the trauma that formed
Elijah, but the war acts as a traumatic colonial continuum which finally consumes him (239).
Desperately, Xavier wishes to help him, to “pull him from the war madness that swallowed
him whole” (Boyden 269), but he is powerless against the horrific setting of the First World
War. Irrespectively, Xavier never reports Elijah’s misconduct and his silence makes him
complicit to Elijah’s activities of scalping and wandering off into the night alone to kill
Germans (McCall 75). Whether from fear or from denial, Xavier suppresses acting upon the
uncanny characteristics of the Windigo materialising in Elijah until the pivotal point where

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Elijah jokingly says that the meat he has given Xavier is human (Boyden 310). At a loss,
Xavier builds a matatosowin (sweat lodge), for purification and to ask for guidance (320321). With no response from the spirits, Xavier addresses Niska whom he believes dead:
“Elijah crossed the line, crossed it long ago. He won’t stop. Is it up to me to stop him? I wish
that I had you here to ask, Niska” (347). Xavier is at an impasse without support or assistance
– unsure what to do. On one hand, killing Elijah would keep the Windigo contagion from
spreading (262), but, on the other, he would be killing his protégé. To kill Elijah would be an
act of fratricide as well as a failure of achieving the second passage to affirm a traditional
warrior masculinity; and yet, to perform a ritual Windigo killing would also mean that he
steps into his familial role as hookimaw (Windigo killer). Thus, Xavier is burdened with a
dilemma for he cannot allow Elijah to return to Moose Factory and become “a great chief” as
he plans to do (Boyden 332), but neither can he kill his best friend.
It is not until Elijah murders Captain Breech and Grey Eyes in cold blood (339-340)
and attempts to kill Xavier (368), that he is forced to ascend to the role of hookimaw. The
confrontation between the two friends is momentous, as Xavier, who has struggled with the
concept of killing another human being since the beginning of the war, takes Elijah’s life by
strangling him with his rifle (370). In this scene, the roles of Windigo and hookimaw eclipse
one another in a classic Gothic double encounter as Xavier is forced to become like Elijah to
fulfil the ritual killing. Thus, the distinction between Windigo and hookimaw are unclear in
that moment (McCall 75). Subsequent to Elijah’s death, the Gothic doubling continues as
Xavier is mistaken for Elijah, although he chooses not to clarify the mix up: “I allow myself
to believe that I am Elijah. In this way he is still alive” (Boyden 375). Xavier is ashamed and
saddened by the choice he made and asks Elijah’s spirit for forgiveness for having killed him
(Boyden 380). Unlike Xavier’s first test of masculinity as a provider, there is no honour,

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pride, or glory to be found in the role of a protector in the First World War because he killed
his best friend and brother: “The war is over. I don’t feel anything” (Boyden 374).
The intimate killing removes any hope that, up to this point, may have endured, and
for Xavier, that was the possibility of returning home with Elijah. In the context of the War
Gothic, the exploit of killing one’s double or twin on the battlefield is significant as “one sees
the other destroyed, but not before recognizing that it is echoed in a part of himself” (Tropp
211). In all four novels, killing at close range aids in the final demythologisation that the
opposition is not a monstrous enemy, but a man no different from themselves who is stuck in
the exact same situation. Like Xavier, Paul Baümer, in All Quiet on the Western Front,
experiences a brief change of place with his War Gothic double when he hides in the mud
and water of a shell-hole during an attack. There, he kills a French soldier, who falls over
him, in a frenzied need for survival: “This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom
I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing” (Remarque 221). In his fear and mania, he
feels that his life is now bound to the Frenchman and that he must stand in for his double to
provide for the wife and child he had just widowed: “I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval.
I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer –” (225). His obsession, however,
subsides along with his fear upon his return to his group where he realises that the promises
he made to Duval will never be followed through (226). Nevertheless, by killing him with his
own hands, he recognises that the French are no different from the Germans.
Similarly, Jean Dartemont in Fear has the same awareness as he explains to a priest
what the War has forced him to do: “I don’t have sins any more. The greatest sin, in the eyes
of the Church and the eyes of men, is to kill your brother. And today the Church is ordering
me to kill my brothers” (Chevallier 116). He and the other soldiers, likewise, are being
ordered by their nations in blind belief in a “fratricidal struggle” that is entirely meaningless

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when they have been taught from childhood that they are all the children of God in spite of
the man-made construction of borders and countries (116). Identifying the soldier in the
opposite trench as suffering the same predicament as oneself within the war environment is a
WW1 anti-war novel trope. However, for Barry’s protagonist in A Long Long Way, Willie
Dunne, struggles with discerning the difference between friend and foe within the chaos of
the War. Willie’s predicament disturbs him throughout the novel as the significance of
knowing one’s mind was impressed upon him before the war.
In addition to the masculine ideals represented by the Irish constabulary, as discussed
earlier in this chapter, Mr. Lawlor, the father of Willie’s love interest, Gretta, stresses the
importance of a man’s certainty and confidence in his opinions. After asking Willie what he
thought about the violence of the 1913 Dublin lockout, he lectures Willie:
You should know. You should have an opinion. I don’t care what a man thinks as
long as he knows his own mind… The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts
that are only thoughts which have been given to them. They’re not their own
thoughts. They’re like cuckoos in their heads. Their own thoughts are tossed out and
cuckoo thoughts put in instead. Don’t you agree? (Barry 9)
Unable to answer, Willie takes Mr. Lawlor’s word to heart as he is not only at an
impressionable young age, but has fallen in love with his daughter. When Willie enlists,
Gretta, whom he had been seeing in secret for some time, is against his enrolment in the army
and asks him for his reasons. Among the ones he gives, he adds, “Your Da said himself we
have to know our own minds” (13). Not only is Willie trying to impress his possible future
father-in-law, but he expects that by “play[ing] his part” in the War he would be taking a step
closer to maturity and manhood as he believes that he will “not be remorseful, but content in
his heart that he had followed his mind” in participating in the Great War (13). However, the

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combination of Willie’s complex identity married with the volatile and macabre events of the
War quickly illustrate the impossibility of Willie ever formulating a proper opinion.
As a postcolonial character, Willie, like Xavier and Elijah from Three Day Road, has
a multifaceted identity for he too embodies the complexities of being a colonial subject in the
First World War. Indeed, Willie and the other soldiers in A Long Long Way embody “the
contradictions of their time, being loyal, in varying degrees, to harp and crown alike”
(Howard lx). Going into WWI, Irish identities at the turn of the century were intricate and
could not be “neatly assigned to one of the two apparently absolute and opposed categories”
of Protestant and Catholic, especially for those who worked in the civil services and the
military (Nash 428). Such ambiguity and sometimes doubling are also experienced by Willie,
who is heavily influenced by the outlooks and politics of his father, the chief superintendent
of Dublin. Not only is his father a civil servant, but he dislikes John Redmond, the leader of
the Irish nationalists, and has a “fervent worship of the King” (Barry 22). With a royalist
father, who named his son after William of Orange, the protestant king who is considered to
be the “saviour of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy” according to unionist history (Killeen
90), the Dunne family is nevertheless devoutly Catholic. With these conflicting yet
inseparable influences, Willie initially enters the theatre of war as an apolitical actor who is
neither there to support nor oppose Ireland’s nationalist effort for Home Rule, but to acquire
his masculinity and his father’s approval: “For if he could not be a policeman, he could be a
soldier” (Barry 15). Yet, his enlistment has an adverse effect on his father, for “the big,
blank, broad face of the policeman wept in the darkness” for his son instead of being proud
of his participation (15).
Willie’s naivety, innocence, and illusions concerning the War begin to crumble with
his first experience of fear and horror on the Western Front. In his first gas attack at Flanders,

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he saw the front “turned into a mere pit of death…filled with bodies…The faces were
contorted like devils’ in a book of admonition, like the faces of the truly fallen, the damned,
and the condemned” (50). The deaths disillusion Willie to any possible militarist masculine
glory, for “[n]o general, no soldier could be proud of this work; no human person could take
the joy of succeeding from these tortured deaths” (51). However, it is the events of the Easter
Rising, an Irish Republican insurrection which aimed “to force through Irish Independence”
(Beatty 2), that quickly transform Willie “from a naïve idealist into a living ghost” (Howard
lx), as his turbulent involvement during the Easter Rising bewilders and confuses him. Just
before his regiment embark for the continent, they are turned around at the pier without
explanation, ordered to march back to Dublin city, and told to fire on the Dublin civilians
(Barry 87-89). During the skirmish Willie, who had taken shelter in a doorway, approaches a
man his captain had just shot. The Irishman assumes Willie is a Tommy (a nickname given
for the British soldiers in Ireland), and Willie in turn thinks the injured man is German:
“’German?’ said the man. ‘German? What are you talking about? I’m an Irishman. We’re all
Irishmen here, fighting for Ireland’” (92). Uncannily, both men mistake the identities of the
other. This youth of nineteen, a fellow Irishman and Catholic, then dies a slow and horrible
death in Willie’s arms:
His blood was vigorous and generous. It started to fill his throat in the wrong way and
the young man began to splutter and choke, spraying Willie’s face and tunic. He was
coughing now for dear life, for dear life itself… The man’s head tipped back and he
was gurgling, in a nasty, metallic way, like a banging lid. Choke, choke, choke…then
the man was as still as a dead fish … Willie bent his head and muttered a quick
prayer. (93)

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This death mars Willie Dunne as it “shifted his very heart about, though he had seen a
hundred deaths and more” (102), for he was told by one of his superiors that that young man
and the others with him were the enemy. As he gazes into the dead man’s eyes, Willie is
mirrored in his eerie double who is from the same city, culture and religion; and yet, they
have been pitted against each other like sworn enemies just by being on the other side of the
conflict. Willie’s inadvertent involvement in the Easter Rising complicates and questions his
service in the War for he, as an Irishman and colonised subject, is fighting on behalf of the
British Empire, the coloniser. Yet, the combination of the two proves too much for Willie’s
comprehension as he is confused as to whom he is supposed to stand against, the Germans in
the trenches or his fellow Irishmen.
Overall, the Irish rebellion of 1916 was a complex and pivotal event that altered the
course of Irish and British history (Walsh 42). In a truly Gothic turn, as far as Willie’s
fighting at the Western Front is concerned, the Easter Rising was supported by Germany,
although the German ship, which sailed for Ireland in 1915 carrying weaponries, was
captured by the British (44). Despite the failure in attaining armaments, the rebellion against
the British rule was launched at what its leaders conceived as an opportune moment due to
the War, but, within a week, it was brutally suppressed by British troops (Jeffery 250). At
this point in history Barry has his protagonist unknowingly and involuntarily involved in the
bloodshed. As a result of the intricacies of the politics behind the Easter Rising, as well as the
bewilderment of having part in its suppression, Willie’s anger is directed towards everyone
as he is unsure where the fight places him as he cannot articulate his own position (Barry 96).
In addition to being a conflicted character, Willie is riddled with ambivalence: an expression
that is found in Gothic writing everywhere (Killeen 10). Willie is ignorant and oblivious
about the political situation in Ireland and so he relies on his fellow soldiers, similarly to

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Remarque’s Paul Baümer, for information and assessments as he attempts to make some of
his own. For example, it is Jesse Kirwan who explains to him Irish nationalist politics;
“‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. Did you never hear that, Willie?’” (Barry 96).
He also turns to Christy Moran who, Willie hopes, can give him a different and “cool
perspective on the matter” of the Easter Rising (102): “‘The fuckers’… What the fuck are
they doing causing mayhem at home, when we’re out here fucking risking our fucking lives
for them?’” (103). In comparison to his friends, Willie is unable to take a stance in the
conflict even though his obliviousness and unbiased attitude makes him appear like a juror
expected to make a verdict. From this point onwards, Willie floats through the remainder of
the War with perpetual uncertainty and fear as he becomes more and more unsure of himself;
and thus, failing to ever know his own mind.
Willie Dunne, like Xavier Bird, Jean Dartemont and Paul Baümer, fails to attain his
idealised manliness as a result of the violent and turbulent events of the First World War. As
the men cried in fear at the violence and terror along the Western Front, the War was not to
be a site for them to assert traditional hegemonic masculinities. Although WWI did not add
to the stereotypes of modern masculinity (Mosse 106), stereotypes were employed by
societies to prey upon the young men’s views of manhood for enlistment purposes (Keene
58). Through the characters’ experiences, however, the War became “fixed in their character”
(Leed 38), as the young protagonists’ sanities and wills are tested during their disillusionment
with military glory. As a consequence, the young men, who invested their youths in the
conflict, became estranged from the very societies that urged them to participate in the Great
War.

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Conclusion: A Lost Generation

But everything, no matter what, no matter how vexing, ruinous, or cheering,
could be brought into battle, with the rest of a soldier’s pack. It had to be;
grief and horror could not be left behind. They folded to nothing and were
carried like boulders.
Barry, A Long Long Way

All Quiet on the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long Way, and Three Day Road tell the
stories of young men who are altered by the overwhelming events of the First World War.
During their time on the Western Front, the abject horror of the corpses and the destruction of
the landscape unavoidably influences the way the protagonists view themselves as soldiers,
men, and human beings. Ultimately, the fear created by the horrors of the trenches and No
Man’s Land —as seen through the critical lens of the War Gothic — not only encourages the
men’s survival in the face of death and decay but, in turn, causes the characters to question
their participation in the war effort as they confront their collusion in the violence and havoc
of the War. Consequently, the soldiers become disillusioned with the militarised glorification
of war as their selves are fragmented by the destruction and annihilation caused by new
technological weaponry on a mass scale.
At the end of the World War One, there was no utopian ending for any of the
countries or nation-states involved in the conflict as hoped for at the end of Chevallier’s
Fear, where a heavily pregnant German woman points to her belly and exclaims: “‘Bedit
Franzose!’” (small Frenchman) (299). Even though the child is an optimistic symbol of
future unification between the two warring factions – a sign of rebirth – peace would take

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decades to form. Indeed, the death tolls of WWI are evidence “that history, rather than being
a story of uninterrupted progress, had become (or revealed to be) a Gothic narrative, that is, a
dystopian one with dark dissolution suggested as its undercurrent and center” (Riquelme 26).
The men, disenchanted with the promises of honour, adventure, and masculine prowess that
society offered them in exchange for their services, are at odds with the population of the
home front who, in their inexperience of the war, still believe in the glorifying myths of
warfare. People at home did not want to imagine the conditions the men lived in during their
four years on the front-line, and even if they did, “they couldn’t have without experiencing
them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too unprecedented. The war
would have been simply unbelievable” (Fussell 87). As well, the war experiences were in
stark contrast with the images depicted in the media and in propagandist war literature which
reported the men taking part in battles as sporting and “wholesome fun” (27). Worldwide,
everyone wanted to forget the War, and mass denial and repression of its events ensued
(Eksteins 254-256). Not only did the rest of the population not want to hear about it, the
majority of soldiers who returned remained silent regarding their war experiences; to discuss
their trials would be to relive painful and dreadful memories. As a consequence, after WWI,
a majority of the soldiers “withdrew from social activity and commitment” as many believed
that society had failed them in producing “the apocalyptic resolution[s] promised by wartime
propaganda, the whole social purpose of the war – the content of duty and devoir [and
Pflicht] – began to ring hollow. Since the tangible results of the war could never justify its
cost, especially its emotional toll, disillusionment was inevitable, and soldiers in the postwar
world withdrew from social activity and commitment” (Eksteins 292). In this manner, the
men felt contempt towards everyone removed from the fighting and the dying, and thus, felt

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alienated from the very societies who encouraged their participation without reward for their
sacrifices (230).
Notwithstanding their alienation, the end of the war was indeed welcomed despite the
frustration experienced by many soldiers. Ultimately, the horrors of the First World War
destroyed a generation of young men by taking away their lives and their innocence, deeply
traumatising the survivors physically and mentally. Disturbed by their experiences, the
veterans struggled to return to the ‘normality’ of civilian life, for, as Modris Eksteins notes,
the front-line soldiers greatly suffered:
The burden of having been in the eye of the storm and yet, in the end, of having
resolved nothing, was excruciating. The result often was the rejection of social and
political reality and at the same time the rejection even of the perceptual self – only
dream and neurosis remained, a world of illusions characterized by a pervasive
negativism. (293)
At a loss, the young men became reclusive, choosing to remain silent instead of confronting
or sharing their experiences of fears and death as the shock and trauma of the War made it
difficult for the soldiers to properly articulate what they had gone through. It was not until the
late 1920s that accounts of the war – “literature of disenchantment” – began not only to rise,
but surge as works such as Remarque and Chevallier’s captured a world-wide sentiment of a
collective wartime experience (298). With the publication of these WWI novels during the
inter-war period, the soldiers’ realities and experiences were no longer silenced as its events
were made more human through individualised stories. Although Eksteins claims that the rise
in popularity of First World War novels in the late twenties and early thirties was “less a
genuine interest in the war than a perplexed international self-commiseration” (298), the
modernist anti-war texts allowed for the examination and discussion of an otherwise

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inaccessible and unique experience. As well, the horrors of war had been silenced, and it is
only through the Gothic mode, whose foremost ability is to facilitate the communication of
trauma and the unspeakable, that the terrible experiences of WWI are shared in poetry and
prose.
Subsequent to the publications of war poetry and novels during the interwar period,
postmodern reinterpretations of WWI in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
such as Barry’s and Boyden’s postcolonial works, expand upon the hegemonic Eurocentric
narratives of the War. Three Day Road and A Long Long Way examine the experiences of
colonial soldiers as well as functioning as a commemoration of the men who died in the
trenches of the Western Front whom history has overlooked. Similarly to War Gothic novels,
postcolonial Gothic narratives rarely resolve the conflicts of displacement and belonging, as
well as possession and dispossession that they present to the reader, but rather bring them to
attention (Gelder 201). As post-memory writing, a literal “‘after memory,’ indicat[es] the
absence of a first-hand empirical connection to the war depicted in literature, on the screen,
or on the stage” (Sokołowska-Paryż and Löschnigg 1), Boyden’s and Barry’s novels enrich
the cultural memory of the War as well as expand the literary War canon. Furthermore, by
discussing WWI experiences of colonial subjects, they also reduce the likelihood of
generational amnesia by reimagining the soldiers’ experiential horrors of being on the frontline of the Western Front.
Following the aphasia of the post-war decade and its inability to articulate the events
of the war (Fitzpatrick 257), Gothic literature allows for the communication of difficult and
taboo subjects of war through prose. For, as Julia Kristeva notes, literature
represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious
apocalypses … Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the

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sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an
unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection
through the Crisis of the World. (208)
Therefore, the deployment of the abject in writing, and in this case, War Gothic literature,
allows for the examination of upsetting, grotesque, and uncanny themes such as death, decay,
the destruction of landscape, and the hybrid alterity of the men caused by warfare. In the First
World War, boundaries of all kinds are repeatedly transgressed, and create a space for sociocultural investigation in addition to being a source of horror and fascination for the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Within the framework of war, this investigation also provides “a
powerful reminder of how closely civilization operates on the margins of its own coherence,
integrity, and effectiveness: a cautionary lesson in what to avoid at all costs” (Monnet and
Hantke xxiv). WWI Gothic novels thus illuminate the horrors and atrocities of war as much
as they disenchant and demythologise military glory. However, that does not necessarily
imply that these novels posit themselves as the righteous alternative to warfare, for, like the
Gothic and the events of the Great War, anti-war novels are riddled with ambivalence. The
disenchantment of war through portrayals of violence, “bodily injury and decomposition are
meant to activate the reader” to the terrors of war (Cole 1639-40). Gothic images appear to be
the “ethical alternative” besides military glorification and enchantment because this
alternative represents “experiences and consequences without justifying or celebrating” war,
and yet, this mode is unable to answer all of the ambiguous questions that violence and war
bring forward (1636).
The ambiguity created by War Gothic follows the traditional Gothic play between
binaries and the inability to discern limits as the Gothic “is an inscription neither of darkness
nor of light, a delineation neither of reason and morality nor of superstition and corruption,

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neither good nor evil, but both at the same time” (Botting 9). Thus, distinctions between good
and evil, right or wrong are erased as both Allies and Central Powers suffered enormous
casualties as a result of WWI. Paul Baümer in All Quiet on the Western Front does not live to
see the end of the War as Germany was forced to accept the treaty of Versailles because
“[s]tarvation and social breakdown threatened” the country due to the hunger blockade
imposed by the Allies (Eksteins 253). As a result, Germans saw the treaty as harsh and unfair
as they were forced to take the blame for the war and make reparations to the other countries,
a feeling which helped lead to WWII (253). Throughout the War, Fear’s Jean Dartemont
observes the physical devastation of his country, France, as “countless villages [are]
destroyed or disfigured and woods, fields, [and] orchards [are] ruined… The effects persisted
for decades” (Brosman 166). The demolition of the landscape, the obliteration of villages and
towns, the overwhelming high mortality rate among soldiers and civilians alike, meant that
France was not keen for any more warfare twenty years after the end of the First World War
(166). Additionally, France, like Great Britain, fought to defend its colonial empire and
traditions; however, the opposite occurred. The end of the War marked the beginning of the
disintegration of global colonial power as nation-states like Canada and Ireland saw the First
World War as an opportunity to prove themselves and gain their independence as “chief
actors on the twentieth century diplomatic stage” (Roberts 55). However, for Ireland, the
road to independent sovereignty was not to be easy. Canada, on the other hand, received
partial independence from Britain in the 1930s without objection.
Yet, the conditions and treatment of First Nations populations by non-Indigenous
Canadians did not change after the War despite their involvement in WWI. Canada never
imposed conscription on Status Indians (registered First Nations) as they were still
considered at the beginning of the twentieth century as minors and wards of the government

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and crown (Dempsey 38), but it did not prevent them from joining – as represented by Xavier
Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack in Three Day Road. While proper records were never kept of
the exact number of Indigenous men who volunteered, it is estimated that one third of the
male population who were of military age enlisted (Summerby 5). After WWI, living
conditions and treatment towards the Indigenous population did not change despite the
pressures placed on the federal government by the League of Indians of Canada formed by
Aboriginal veterans (Dempsey 72-81). The men returned to reserves that had not altered
since they entered the war, and Indigenous peoples were in the same state of poverty under
the same federal “paternalistic regime” (vii). Despite the significant military service during
WWI, reform in the conditions of the Aboriginal population would not take place until after
WWII and many more challenges (Toomy 93).
As for the Irish, Great Britain did not enforce conscription on Ireland until the last
year of the war (Roberts 250), though it did not prevent around 206 000 men from
volunteering for the war effort (Fitzpatrick 241). At the onset, Ireland participated in the War
to gain self-governance; instead, the end of the war marked future turmoil and unrest as the
events of the Great War led to the Easter Rising in 1916, as witnessed by A Long Long Way’s
Willie Dunne, which led to division, civil war and guerrilla warfare (McGarry 275). In 1919,
Sinn Fein proclaimed Ireland’s independence, resulting in the division between Protestant
Unionist North and the Catholic Republican South, and the Irish War of Independence which
lasted until 1921 (Roberts 285).
In all, the First World War informed the historical tone of the twentieth century and
shaped cultural and artistic spheres by accelerating and influencing the modernist movement
(Eksteins 208). Although many people wanted to forget the trauma inflicted by it, the War
nevertheless consciously or unconsciously found its way into the imaginations and voices of

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many: it is an “evocative force, a stimulus not to social creativity but to personal imagination
and inwardness, an avenue to new and vital realm of activity” (218). Furthermore, because of
the horrific and violent nature of WWI, the war kindled the Gothic revival for the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries as industrial and technological warfare created new possibilities
and expressions for horror and the grotesque on a limitless scale.
Despite its importance in inaugurating the Gothic into the twentieth century, the
impact of the First World War on the neoGothic is often overlooked as it is overshadowed by
the wars that followed it. Even though the War Gothic is a recent field, the majority of
academic studies briefly mention the effects of WWI before turning their attention to other
atrocities performed globally such as WWII, Vietnam War, Korean War, etc. There is so
much material related to the literature of the First World War for further studies within the
War Gothic field as there are very few cross-cultural comparative analyses of war literature,
and more cogently, virtually no work that deals with its representations across literary
movements (for example, modernism and postmodernism). This thesis is limited to the
examination of four novels pertaining to the experiences of the earthbound infantry soldiers
of the trenches of the Western Front when WWI was fought on other fronts, on sea and in the
air as well. Moreover, among other questions that demand critical attention in All Quiet on
the Western Front, Fear, A Long Long War, and Three Day Road, are the role of women, the
racism experienced by the First Nations and Irish soldiers, and the incompetency of the
officer class to name but a few. Each of these issues can comprise a separate study, thus
further expanding the problematics of the War Gothic field.
With the centenary anniversary of the end of WWI having passed in November 2018,
it is important to reflect on the war, its legacy, and its literature as they have all shaped the
modern world, either directly or indirectly. The employment of Gothic modalities in my

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comparative study of works published shortly after the War with recent reimaginings allows
for broadening the canon of war literature by integrating postmodern and postcolonial
perspectives into hegemonic narratives. As WWI initiated a turbulent century of human,
technological, geographical, and cultural transformation, this thesis attempts to start a
conversation which involves transgenerational and cross-cultural analysis of the War by
exploring Gothic elements of transformation and liminality in the writings of the First World
War’s Western Front and how they affect identity politics and survival mechanisms, as well
as individual and collective traumas, for, these novels provide spaces through which the
unspeakable horrors and actions of the War find expression and voice.

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