The Novel

The main action of this powerful war novel—Robert Ross’s initiation into adulthood through
confrontation with death, violence, love, and sexuality—is preceded by a brilliantly constructed
frame which engages the reader’s interest and establishes the objectivity and credibility of the
first-person narrator, who is either a historian or a biographer. The frame is also thematically
linked to the main plot as another aspect of the difficulty of the search for truth about any man at
any time. The first section of part 1, “Prologue,” presents a remarkably memorable image of
Ross at the devastated front lines, about to commit the error of benevolence against which the
preceding epigraph warns. This scene is repeated verbatim in part 5, section 11; only then will
the reader grasp the motives, consequences, and meanings of the event.

This structure gives the novel a quality of resonance and reverberation, for to understand the
scene fully is to understand one major theme of the novel. The scene also secures the reader’s
interest in Ross and his sympathy for the narrator’s search for the truth about this man among the
archives of letters, documents, and photographs of the scholar-athlete and his loving, wealthy
family, of Ross during basic training, and one of him in flames astride a black horse, so vividly
described that it burns itself into the reader’s mind. Then the narrator inserts part of a transcript
of an interview with the nurse who cared for Ross after the flames; she will also return at the
conclusion of the novel to illuminate her comments here. Then the novel jumps back to Ross, on
his way to join the Canadian forces to fight the war to end all wars, and a quick flashback to the
events that lead to his decision.

From that point until the end, apart from the narrator’s remarks concerning the nurse and Lady
Juliet d’Orsey’s diaries, the action is relatively conventional and sequential in order, covering
primarily the action of one year, 1915-1916, when Ross was nineteen and twenty. The narrator’s
concern for and repetition of precise and sharp details, facts, and dates and his inclusion of a few
historically true individuals are absolutely convincing. This framework is fascinating, but, more
important, it is essential in establishing and keeping the serious realistic tone of a story centered
on a seemingly ordinary youth who commits a bizarre, almost unbelievable act which is labeled
by some as insane, by others as treasonous. It is the narrator’s and reader’s task to understand the
act in order to understand this man and, thereby, all the men who have ever fought in the wars.

Robert Ross, at nineteen, does not understand how to deal with death, violence, or women. When
his sister, Rowena, dies and his mother orders the death of her pet rabbits, Ross wishes to escape
his feelings of being trapped and guilty. He decides to enlist to fight in the war to save
civilization and leaves home on Good Friday, after the funeral. He hopes to develop the inner
resources needed to achieve his dreams of glory as a war hero. His actions, however, always
show his compassion for others, both animals and men. After nine months’ training, his company
sails for Europe, and he begins to learn that senior officers care little about the condition of their
men or animals. Shortly after arriving in England, Harris, Ross’s closest friend, dies of
pneumonia, leaving Ross to dispose of his ashes. He is assisted in this task by a heroic veteran
from Canada and his constant companion, Lady Barbara d’Orsey.

At the French front, Ross is faced with more violent forms of death as he alternates between
ammunition convoy duty and trench mortar duty. Caught in the open because of a stupid order
by an absent superior officer, Ross helps his few men survive a gas attack, although his knees are
severely wounded. Finally, Ross kills his first enemy soldier, but feels grief, not glory. Then
come the violence and deaths of the fire storms caused by the German introduction of
flamethrowers into the battles. By this time, one of Ross’s men is insane and one has committed
suicide; only four are left alive. It is little more than a month since they landed in France.

During Ross’s leave in the springtime green of rural England, he learns of love and meaningful
sexuality from Lady Barbara. The two lovers spend most of their time together at St. Aubyn’s,
the family’s country estate, most of which Barbara’s mother has turned into a recuperation
hospital. Juliet, Barbara’s twelve-year-old sister, also loves Ross but cannot understand the strain
of cruelty in his relationship with Barbara. Ross, for the first time, shows spurts of uncalled-for
violence but is under control because of the hope for sanity and the future that love has given
him. He leaves to rejoin his company after an almost idyllic two months.

Ross’s exhausting circular journey back to the front foreshadows the absolute chaos and
increased violence of the fighting by late May of 1916. Before he can rejoin his company, he is
raped by a group of Canadian soldiers in a blacked-out changing room at the baths; his own
violent streak is aroused. Then, for six days, without sleep, he escorts convoys continually under
airplane strafing. German artillery shelling of the company positions becomes so accurate that
almost everything is in flames.

The climax of the novel comes when one of Ross’s last men is shot by a senior officer for trying
to help Ross save the company horses from being burned alive; Ross, in anger at the useless
death, shoots the officer just as a massive shell destroys everyone and everything around them.
The sole survivor, Ross wanders, dazed, hurt, and isolated, until he finds a horse, a dog, and a
deserted freight train containing more than one hundred horses. He liberates the horses and
drives them to what turns out to be their death. When the barn to which Ross has led them burns,
Ross and the horses are caught in a flaming inferno. Ross, burned severely all over, unable to
speak or move, is taken first to a field hospital under guard for three months. In August, 1916, he
is returned to England only four months after he left; he arrives again at St. Aubyn’s, this time as
a terminal convalescent. Barbara sees him only once, but Juliet, like her ghostly ancestress,
nurses him personally until his death in 1922 at age twenty-five. Both Ross and Juliet have
defined their compassionate humanity by their actions; both have become what they admired.

The Characters

Robert Ross, the protagonist, a young man of nineteen, undergoes the most harrowing initiation
into adulthood imaginable. He learns that men, stripped of civilization’s veneer, are capable of
utter brutality. His faith in senior officers, in the ideals of glory and heroism and patriotism, is
eroded and lost. He learns that real spiritual and physical love, once experienced, brings with it
an enduring sense of the wonder of life itself.

Ross’s climactic actions, in trying simply to save the lives of the two groups of horses from the
insanity of war, affirm his essential humanity. He feels compassion; he acts to save others; he
accepts the consequences. According to his field nurse and Juliet, in spite of tremendous pain
and loss, he insists on the ultimate significance of life itself, refusing easy ways to death until it
takes him. Robert Ross has become a man, an extraordinary one, in his one year at war.

Timothy Findley is also gifted in creating minor characters who linger in the reader’s mind. Who
can forget Rodwell, the talented illustrator of children’s books, who collects the wounded
animals of the war and tries to nurse them back to health? Rodwell’s sketchbook—full of
drawings of animals and one human, Ross—survives Rodwell’s own suicide to teach Ross a
lesson. In addition, there is the great affirmation of Rodwell’s farewell letter to his daughter: that
nothing ever really dies. Taffler, Levitt, Harris, Devlin—all believable, all memorable, all
destroyed along with millions of unknown others—continue to live because of the author’s gift
in quickly developing minor characters.

Young men at war are not the only characters who people the world of this novel. Findley is
equally adept in depicting the Rosses and the d’Orseys. Even Ross’s younger brother and the
d’Orsey brothers, Clive and Michael, come alive as full entities. The relationships of the two sets
of parents are fully developed, and Mrs. Ross is complex enough to warrant a novel of her own.
Lady Emmeline d’Orsey is strong enough to find a positive role for herself during the war, but
relies on illusions to protect herself from her husband’s egocentricity. Although the women in
general are nurturers of life, no one is stereotyped, and Barbara, who never likes other women, is
no nurturer. Juliet is especially interesting, for the reader has a chance to hear and see her at two
distinct stages of her life, separated by more than fifty years. There is in this work a richness and
variety of character seldom found in a war novel.

Themes and Meanings

It is an oversimplification of Findley’s book to discuss only one theme, but the title, The Wars,
indicates that he is interested in linking Ross’s experience in World War I with all the other wars
nations send youths to fight, each more destructive, each one’s widening holocausts including
ever more soldiers, civilians, and territory. The silent Indians of Canada passed by Ross’s train
testify to this, as do the other types of wars—between sexes and within families. The primary
comment, however, is on the nature of humanity, the main causers and actors in wars. As the
narrator points out, each war seems to produce a new doomsday weapon—here, the
flamethrower; each time, men deny that any man would invent such a weapon, much less use it
against other men: Then it is employed. History proves the truth of the concept but omits
discussing the ultimate question posed by such inventions: What does this say about the nature of
mankind? This is the primary question addressed by Findley here.

Ironically, the war to save civilization reveals how very thin is its veneer. Findley, however,
dismisses fashionable pessimism. While his chronicle of the horrors of war is unsparing, he
insists on the human potential for good, even in this worst possible milieu. There is the nurse,
offering the grace of an easy death to Ross, and his refusal; the German sniper who does not fire
on Ross or his men; Ross’s burning of his sister Rowena’s picture after the rape; Ross’s freeing
of Rodwell’s toad and his attempts to save the horses. All these are acts of morality and charity,
human acts proving that mankind, reduced to its minimum, can triumph against all odds.
Findley’s technical brilliance and mastery of all the techniques of the novelist reinforce the
power of this theme and others. The irony and bitter symbolism of the vicious rape at Desole, an
asylum built to protect the civilized from the insane, is only one of many examples. The
omnipresent mud, from which man was made, almost kills Ross, a realistic detail with symbolic
meaning. The repeated images of fires and storms not only establish the realistic horrors of war
but also suggest man’s ability to use these forces to purify and help others. The motif of the fall
of man is initiated by the fall which causes Rowena’s death, emphasized by Mrs. Ross’s fears of
falling and continued by Ross’s own falls—after his youthful marathon, on the ship, into the
deadly mud, into the shell crater. It is no accident that Findley has both Rowena and Ross die at
twenty-five. The presence of animals and animal imagery throughout, from Rowena’s pets to
Rodwell’s patients and pictures, the birds that sing during the killings, the horses and the dog that
Ross adopts—all clearly suggest the basic animal nature of man, which he can transcend but not
deny. The collagelike use of flashbacks, jump cuts, foreshadowing, memories, diaries, tape
transcripts, and photographs and the frame are masterfully blended to bring a realistic,
unforgettable emotional and intellectual experience to the reader.

Critical Context

Since Ernest Hemingway wrote the first modern war novel in 1929, only Joseph Heller’s Catch-
22 (1961) has matched it in innovative style and technique as well as in seriousness of intent.
Timothy Findley’s The Wars marks another entry into this select group.

This is not a minor genre, for the first entry would have to be Homer’s Iliad (c. 800 B.C.). The
Song of Roland (c. 1100) and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) are notable
medieval samples of the genre. By the nineteenth century, war novels such as The Red and the
Black (1830) by Stendahl and War and Peace (1865-1869) by Leo Tolstoy set the standards for
all-encompassing, but very heavy and lengthy, narrative tales. Hemingway—and Stephen Crane
before him, with The Red Badge of Courage (1895)—eliminating much narrative, sought to
establish intensity and power by a narrowing of focus, ignoring the home front, families, and
friends. Findley manages, through technical prowess, to combine Hemingway-like choices of
clear moments of searing horror and truth at the battlefront with scenes depicting the effects of
war on the families and lovers of the soldiers. Thus, he achieves the complexities of earlier war
novels without sacrificing economy or intensity.

Some of the techniques which make this possible clearly reflect Findley’s background in writing
for television and the stage, but here such techniques are fused by his experience in writing two
previously published novels and confirmed by his performance in the equally innovative,
provocative, and acclaimed novel on World War II, Famous Last Words (1981). The Wars
deservedly has achieved tremendous popular and critical success. Findley makes one see, feel,
and hear anew, leaving indelible images and reverberations in the reader’s mind and heart.