Non-Combatants and Others by Rose Macaulay was first published in 1916, and that really is the most surprising thing about it. It’s described as a pacifist novel and I find it amazing but also heartening that it was allowed to be published at a time when the government was exhorting all males to join up and do their bit. There’s quite a lot about the waste and ghastliness of war.
Alix Sandomir is a young art student who has been living at Wood End with her aunt and cousins. Both of her parents had been political peace campaigners and her father had died in a Russian prison. Her mother is busy in America giving speeches on pacifism. Alix isn’t really interested in anything like that.
‘Life at Wood End, as at other homes was full of letters from the front. They seemed to Alix like bullets and bits of shrapnel crashing into her world, with their various tunes. She might, from her nervous frown have been afraid of ‘stopping one’.’
When she is given the chance to move to a villa in Clapton which is nearer her art school, she takes it. The house is called Violette and is peopled by various relatives who are all busy getting on with their own lives. In truth though life at Wood End had become too much for Alix to cope with. The war was too close for her liking as John, a relative, had been wounded and was back at Wood End, scarred and unable to speak properly, a nervous wreck, prone to sleep-walking and talking, and crying in his sleep.
Alix is also worried about her younger brother who had gone straight to the army instead of to Oxford where he had got a scholarship. She thinks that they shouldn’t be sending children to war.
As time goes on and bad news from the war gets closer and closer to Alix, she realises that she can’t stay aloof from it all, it has changed her profoundly.
This is a really good read if you’re interested in the Great War and the social history side of it. The book ends on the last day of 1915 and it’s probably just as well that as the author wrote it she was obviously unaware that that there were almost three whole years more to go before the armistice.
