This one is very hard to rate for me, because two hearts beat in my chest here. As it is it's more of a 3.5* review than one of four.

It would have been a straight 4* or 5*, if it had been simply a Christmas story, maybe a contemporary one or one situated--era-wise--in Victorian time. Maybe even after the Boer War but prior to the Great War. Then everything would have meshed well for me, including the behaviour and stance of these two young men. Nice, clean and sweet story-telling and very British characters.

As it is I have been researching WWI for the past year and part of this has been plowing through countless diaries and letters, medical records and military files, the works of the war poets as well as those of the clean and the revisionist historians, psychologists of the time and today's, and over and over again diaries.

While many men certainly preferred never talking about their experiences, in fact it was typical for Great War Veterans to be silent and not even talk to their closest relatives or wives about what happened, it's absolutely not as if that experience left them in any way unscathed. Some may not have been as self-reflecting as others, especially the artists and poets, but to treat this war the way it is treated in this book, is not just not enough for me, it also is a bit cavalier in my absolutely personal opinion.

Of course this novella was short, and it was apparently meant as a Christmas special. Writing anything in the style of Pat Barker or Marion Husband wouldn't fit that bill, but that's what I do expect of writing of that era. Not just as a backdrop, not just the mere one paragraph of mentioning SADs and shell-shock and one minor glimpse at the injury Matthew suffered. I didn't buy him, I tentatively bought George.

We are still talking about the heyday of eugenics and a phase in England during which disabled people tended to be sent to closed institutions in droves. While most of the invalided veterans showed an outwardly cheerful mien, that was as much a reaction to the expectation of those having stayed home that they "get on with it" and not make much of their losses, as it was theirs to take cover from becoming too notorious. Still, even though amputees were those having the "easiest" lot, regarding public opinion, as loss of limbs was what was regarded as a "manly injury", it can by no means be said that people looked at it and shrugged it away as our PC times see disability.

Matthew in consequence would have been seen as a cripple, and he would have experienced feeling like one. The written character doesn't mirror much of this, if at all. The restraint written here doesn't actually come over as a stiff upper lip, it comes over as an inappropriate lightness not really in line with what is described.

One of the most striking differences of the treatment of disabled, injured and killed soldiers of the Great War between Great Britain, France, Russia and Germany is the practically complete absence of visual art about the battered, defaced, mutilated, shredded and dehumanised male body. All you need to do is compare John Singer Sargent's "Gassed" to Otto Dix' "Wounded Veteran" and think about the fact that Sargent's was a commissioned painting not even meant to be generally and publicly displayed whereas Dix had public exhibitions.

I do recommend this book in spite of the criticism written here. It's not just that I love everything Merrow and am a huge fan, it's also that I much prefer such a comparatively sober storyline--regardless of the minor beef I have with it--over a lot of what current romance offers instead. ( )