Timothy Findley's The wars

the long version

The year is 1915. Europe is aflame with the war to end all wars. Robert Ross, a young Canadian, leaves his cloistered home in Toronto and enlists as an officer. Suddenly, his life explodes with the rigors of army training in Alberta, a traumatic encounter in a prairie bordelo, a grisly crossing of the Atlantic on a troopship crammed with men and horses, the tragic events in the mud and snow at Ypres, and the post-Edwardian romance of military leave in England. He is not yet twenty. Robert's story unfolds against a kaleidoscope of scenes that range from his triumphant race across the prairie with a coyote to the fire-storm that follows the first use of flamethrowers on the Western Front and the deadly basin of a land mine crater where Robert and his men are trapped beneath a shroud of poison gas - these scenes and others spring to life with the immediacy and impact of film. The Wars describes a moment when civilization suffered a loss of innocence from which it never recovered. Coming of age on the battlefields of Belgium, Robert Ross is assailed by events beyond his comprehension. In a dramatic and fiery climax, he commits an "act of madness." But the question is raised: What sort of madness? Protest? Or the last sane flicker of light before the new dark age? The Wars delivers a resounding affirmation not only of the human spirit but the spirit of life itself.