Struggling to Remember
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armored personnel carrier makes wiien hit. [She] could even taste the dust, the
cordite and the amatol in the air, the muffled cries of [her] comrades, the
directionless sound of the gunfire” (267). She relives the charge over and over in
her dreams in slow motion, seeing and hearing the battle piece by piece, almost
as if the soldiers are actors performing dramatic dialogues; she remembers
feeling “something large pluck at my vehicle and the roof opened up, revealing a
shaft of sunlight in the dust that was curiously beautiful. The same unseen hand
picked up the carrier and threw it in the air” (267). She sees the bloodied face of
her brother as he helps the wounded and hears him tell her to come back for
him. The phone, ringing both on the battlefield and in her room, pulls her out of
her guilt ridden rest before she watches him die again, as she did in the Crimea.
Thursday’s memories and dreams are fi-equently cut short thus; her subconscious
cannot bear to face her brother’s death again, so it suppresses the whole charge
as well as it can, and Thursday avoids reflecting on or talking about the war.
The memories of battle, fear, and loss are always with Next. In The
Eyre Affair, during her final battle with Acheron Hades, she is again flooded
with memories of the Crimea. As her nemesis is gloating over the genius of his
plan, he salutes Thursday as his greatest adversary, complimenting on her
consistent refusal to negotiate. Barely listening, Thursday again thinks of the last
time she saw her brother:
He had called for me to come back for him, but I never did.
My APC was hit by an artillery shell as I returned. I had to be
forcibly restrained fi*om taking another vehicle and returning
to the battlefield. I never saw him again. I had never forgiven
myself for leaving him. (342)
As Thursday listens to Hades ramble on and on, she calmly comes to terms with
her own impending death. She thinks to herself:
At the height of any battle some say that there is a quietness
where one can think calmly and easily, the trauma of the
surroundings screened off by the heavy curtain of shock. I was
about to die, and only one seemingly banal question came to
mind: Why on earth did Bertha’s scissors have such a
detrimental effect on Hades? (342)
This “moment of calm” exemplifies the type of poetic disjunction Wilfi-ed Owen
and Isaac Rosenberg echo in their trench poems. Despite the noise, smells, and
adrenaline that permeates a battlefield, the mind continues to process often
trivial details. It is this very calm that allows Thursday to center in on the
weapon that enables her to kill Acheron. Unfortunately her ability to function in