Horrifyingly Powerful – The Futility Of War

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You by Louisa Young is a horrifyingly powerful historical novel that consumed me from the start.

It is set during World War I and perfectly illustrates the futility of war. It is mainly written from a masculine point of view of a soldier, but we also hear of the viewpoints of women too, particularly two nurses and a wife.

World War I was the first ‘modern’ war with tanks, planes and so many horrors on the battlefields. It is the reason why medicine rapidly advanced, especially in the field of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction.

Of the war, a character says: “It can’t go on much longer. Governments will just have to take a look at the hospitals… and they’ll stop.” But governments did not look at the hospitals. Governments didn’t care, and the war went on for another four long years.

Louisa Young has produced a novel that absolutely captures the horrors of war. We see what war does to minds, and to bodies. She does not shy away from descriptions of horrific injuries. Never before have I read such a powerful, graphic description of World War I in a novel. War is not glorious. War is horrific. War is not sanitised as in Hollywood movies, war is dirty. “Flanders had become mud beneath their feet” – and not just mud, but blood and guts too.

We learn that boys went to war and one commented; “I’m so… scared out there every day, every night – and now they’ve made me a… officer.” Boys went to war. They had to walk across No Mans Land or they would be shot by one of their own. 

Boys and men tried various ways to block out the horrors – alcohol, women, or focusing on home – but nothing worked. They numbed their minds in any way they could. “We have horrors, and the worst horror is that before I came away on leave, I no longer saw them. I stopped looking… because I didn’t like what I was seeing.” For some, they found humour in the macabre. “So remaineth these three faith, hope and charity and the greatest of these is a sense of humour.”