I’ve had trouble putting this novel down, so forgive me as I share some half-formed thoughts on Not So Quiet. After finishing Chapter VIII, I’m struck by Smithy’s “relationship” with Robin and how essential his character feels to her broader relationship with the war. Up until now, Smithy’s interactions with soldiers have been intentionally distant. She is almost afraid of the men who sit in the backs of her ambulances, as if the reality and destruction of war are written on their faces and bodies. That’s why I wonder if Smithy talks, dances, and even sleeps with Robin because he embodies the kind of soldier she wishes to believe in—the soldier from propaganda posters and patriotic stories, the imagined ideal of strength and honor. He stands in stark contrast to the broken men she drives from the front. Yet, at the same time, Robin represents another truth of war: the youthful, optimistic men sent to die in the name of patriotism. To Smithy, he is not a symbol of hope but of futility—a boy already fated to die, and therefore someone she can only indulge briefly. She seems to pity and care for him in the same way she did for Baynton, both of whom stand apart from the soldiers in her ambulances. Unlike them, Robin and Baynton are untainted, not yet broken, and thus momentarily free from being living reminders of the war.

And because I cannot help myself, I’ll leave one last note I am too heartbroken to fully expand on: much like Paul’s death in All Quiet on the Western Front, I read Tosh’s death as another example of the war’s inevitability—its power to reclaim the narrative for itself. These stories ultimately belong to the war, rarely to the narrators, soldiers, or stepdaughters.