Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of PTSD, suicide, antisemitism, and wartime violence against civilian populations.

The novel opens in 1917 with a philosophical query, presumably floating in the mind of John, a wounded British soldier: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” (3). As John lies alone on the banks of the Escaut River in Flanders after the Battle of Cambrai, he consoles himself with various reflections about death, desire, and the mysteries of life. Uncertain whether he will survive, he reflects upon his first meetings with Helena, his wife. Recalling every detail of her body, clothes, and scent, he basks in his memories of their first meeting at an inn by a railway station, years before the war. Helena had come into the inn by pure chance, after mistakenly disembarking one station too early. Later, she claimed to have felt a dreamlike “inevitability” about their meeting, comparing it to a scene from a fairytale.

As John sprawls on the riverbank, waiting for rescue, his thoughts stray back even further, to his hardscrabble childhood on the coast of England as a sailor’s son. The women in his village were traditional knitters of ganseys (seamen’s woolen sweaters), whose distinctive patterns served the same purpose as dog-tags so that drowned sailors could be identified and returned to their villages.