The Warm Hands of Ghosts

Content Warning: The guide and source material depict graphic physical injuries sustained in war, intense experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder, and discussions of suicide. In addition, the novel features period-typical attitudes toward and language about mental illness, which this guide replicates only in direct quotations.

“Laura had walked past the uncollected dead. Shut their eyes when she could reach them, laid a hand once on a small bare foot. Three years of active service, and she was familiar with the dead. Familiar too with the sight of an overrun triage station, although it was her first time to be met not with soldiers, but with parents clutching their burnt children.”

Laura recalls the wounded she treated following the Halifax Harbor Explosion, comparing the soldiers she treated in the war to the women and children she treated in Halifax. This scene establishes Laura’s expertise as a nurse, her war background, and her ability to remain composed in crisis situations, a trait that many other characters rely on her for. It also introduces the novel’s interest The Impact of Grief and Trauma, as despite her “familiarity” with death, Laura clearly found the devastation of the explosion hard to bear.

“And now: himself in darkness. Buried. Dead and buried, wasn’t that the phrase? The shell must have collapsed the pillbox somehow. Or flipped it. Or killed him outright.

He was trapped.

He composed himself. He didn’t mind dying. Or being dead.”

Freddie wakes up disoriented in the German pillbox and tries to remember how he ended up there. Though he eventually realizes he is trapped rather than dead, his thought that he would not mind being dead underscores his sense of fatalism and hints at his later decision to accept oblivion rather than life.

“She’d describe the pageantry of it: the Four Horsemen, the Beast from the Sea, the devil riven and falling. Fire from heaven, trumpets and thrones, the infallible judgment of God. […]

And you were right, Maman, Laura thought. It caught us up after all. War, plague, famine, death, the sky on fire, the sun black. Aren’t you glad you were right?”

Laura reflects on her mother’s religious obsession with the apocalypse. She considers the ways the war matches imagery from the Book of Revelation in the Bible, developing the theme of War and the End of the World. Though she scoffed at her mother’s paranoia as a child, she now believes the war is proof that the world is indeed ending.