Struggling to Remember
119
Quiet on the Western Front. Readjusting to society, particularly one enraptured
with patriotism and optimism, has had its challenges for Next, but she has
adjusted more or less normally and is climbing the SpecOps career ladder.^
The reader’s next glance at Thursday’s war experience is through a
photograph, which represents an event and a personal memory documented with
technology. Thursday reflects on this photo of a group of ffiends in the Light
Brigade, which in turn trains her thoughts to the single reunion she attended and
the natural reflex she experienced of looking for faces she knows weren’t there.^
In fact, Thursday is flooded with visual images, both present and past, which
draw her back to the traumatic time she spent in the Crimea. The experience is
not easily forgettable and irrevocably alters the way in which Next chooses to
live her life both before coming to terms with her experience as losses, and after.
In our world, for example, Tennyson attempted to describe the horrific
experience of the Charge when he wrote, “They that had fought so well / Came
thro’ the jaws of Death / Back from the mouth of Hell” (lines 45-47). Poems
like this glorify, in part, war and valor, and it is no coincidence that Fforde
chooses to make this fatal battle an enduring one in Thursday’s world.^ The play
on Tennyson’s poem is of primaiv import to one of Fforde’s main themes: the
mutability of time and memory. The unpleasantness of war and loss haunt
Thursday’s return to the home front, and her struggles to control these memories
are frumed by a society that seeks to use her alternately as a hero and an anti-war
exemplar.
Unfortunately for Next, the war is very much alive on the home front.
She is repeatedly approached about speaking for the cause as a returning hero,
against the cause as a protester, and singled out by anti-war demonstrators \vho
recognize her. Next has no desire to participate in any aspect of these
demonstrations. She tells a student who is trying to recruit her to speak at a rally,
“Listen, guys. I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to
forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us” (EA 83). The student
replies, “Not like you Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get
your fallen comrades out. One of the fifty-one. It’s your duty to speak on behalf
of those that didn’t make it.” Next angrily tells the student, “My duty is to
myself I survived the charge and lived with it every single day since. Every
night I ask myself: Why me? Why did I live and the others, my brother even,
die? There is no answer to that question and that’s only where the pain starts""
(83). This instance is only one of several that Next must constantly dodge after
returning home, reflecting a common difficulty for returning soldiers of any war:
curious civilians, war supporters wlio need visual reinforcement and validation,
and anti-war demonstrators who expect veterans to protest alongside them; all of
these things constitute painful reminders of a time and experience most soldiers
would prefer to leave behind. We need only think about Jessica Lynch’s
experience in Iraq, the media glorification of her ordeal and the propagandist