The memories that haunt the battlefields

What is the cost of war? Writers and artists have been exploring that question for millennia, weighing the goals of conflict against the toll they inflict on those who wage it. In her latest novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden takes readers back to the First World War for a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of a woman desperately searching for her brother and the forces that they each have to face in order to escape.

The First World War casts a dark shadow in the world's collective memory: over the four years that it raged on, tens of millions of people were killed in pointless engagements or by illnesses. It's seen as one of the first major modern conflict, with armies utilizing new forms of kinetic and chemical weapons while strategists and theorists directed the action from afar. It's in this environment that the world saw a clash between longstanding traditions and norms of warfare and the brutal hard numbers of an industrial environment.

Arden opens this story in the aftermath of one of the war's most horrific moments: the explosion of the Mont-Blanc in Halifax, Nova Scotia on December 6th, 1917. The cargo ship, loaded with TNT, exploded when it collided with another freighter, leveling the city and killing more than a thousand people. The resulting explosion is one of the largest non-nuclear accidental explosions ever recorded. It's in the immediate reconstruction in which we meet Laura Iven, a nurse who had recently returned home after a stint on the front lines in France. To compound the tragedy of her parent's deaths in the incident, a box containing her brother Freddie's personal effects reached her from his unit on the front lines.

Laura is convinced that there's a chance that Freddie is still alive; while she received his belongings, she didn't get an official notification, and the women she's caring for insist on communing with spirits to try and get an answer: they relay that he's dead but alive, and that she must find him.

Freddie, meanwhile, is alive: trapped in the remains of a pillbox with a German soldier named Hans Winter. Together, they work to escape from their hellish prison, but escaping from a potential grave is only the beginning of their problems. If found, either could be considered prisoners or deserters and would be dealt with accordingly. As they attempt to escape the battlefield together, they encounter a fiddler named Faland, who leads them to the hotel that he runs. The establishment is a cozy, warm place with wine and music for the patrons, a far cry from the horrors of the battlefield.

It's there that the pair encounter a new terror; Faland himself, a supernatural entity that subsists on the memories of those he ensnares with his music and wine, leaving his victims a husk of their former selves. Winter recognizes Faland for the danger he represents, and is able to escape, but Freddie is left behind and has to resist the fiddler's demands for his stories. Through a delicate chain of actions, Laura learns that her brother survived, and has to navigate her way through the broken landscape to find him before his will dwindles to nothing.

Throughout the book, Arden deftly paints a picture of the hellish, battle-torn environment, from the descriptions of Freddie's initial experiences in the bombed out trenches and the destroyed, apocalyptic landscapes, to Laura's encounters with hospitalized soldiers who beg to be put out of their misery. Those moments spell out a horrific setting, but it's Faland who really pushes the horror over the top as a nice bit of allegory for why the First World War really stands out in our collective imagination.

While reading the book, I was reminded of an image that I'd come across years ago of a British soldier crouched in a trench, staring wildly into the camera during the Battle of the Somme. He was suffering from shell shock (a type of disorder what we now call PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a series of symptoms that soldiers began reporting while on the front lines, the result of brain trauma from the fighting and explosions that they were experiencing.

These were soldiers who might not have been touched by the advanced chemical and kinetic weapons, but who came away from the war damaged all the same, changed by their experiences during the war. Faland's introduction gripped me because he embodies what makes war so terrifying: a Faustian presence that shakes and changes a person to their inner core. He seems to haunt the battlefield, luring in the unwary to not only ensnare them, but to tempt away what is most precious to them: their stories, their desires, the elements that make them who they are.

It's a terrifying prospect, and Freddie, once trapped at the hotel, is first wooed and then threatened by the spirit, which chips away at his soul little by little. Faland is hungry for the connection that Freddie shares with Winter, and is desperate to consume him. There's some element of horror in the idea of one being corrupted or changed by some external force, especially when someone's unaware of the full extend of what's being asked by them, leaving them helpless when the bill comes due.

In many ways, it feels like Arden has laid out a story that gets to the heart of warfare and to the experiences of the First World War: a Faustian bargain that saw an entire generation of young men crippled and damaged after being enticed into it by the claims of honor and glory that their superiors made. It's not a story that's limited to the experiences of just that terrible war a century ago either: every modern conflict since has left its mark on the people who fought them, their wounds lingering long after the guns have fallen silent.

Despite the novel's bleak and horrifying trappings, Arden imbues the book with some optimistic flavors. Laura, despite every indication to the contrary, finds a way to believe that her brother is still alive, and Freddie, even in his darkest and loneliest moments, finds comfort in the love that he's discovered for Winter, two strands that help push both forward, even when the path forward seems hopeless. It's a point that elevates this novel into greatness: a recognition that we aren't fated by our circumstances; that we have the agency and ability to push against our surroundings in the dimmest of circumstances to forge a new path forward. In a period of time where we're battered from all sides by news of war and violence, that's a lesson that I find heartening to be reminded of.