War Taints the Idyllic Blythe Family in Rilla of Ingleside

Last week, I was seized by a sudden desire to watch Anne of Green Gables, the lavish Kevin Sullivan mini-series adapted from the beloved L. M. Montgomery book of the same name. I promptly followed that up with Anne of Avonlea but could not proceed to Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story because when we purchased it as part of a PBS pledge drive, it arrived damaged, and we never got around to sending it back and requesting a new copy in its place.

I did see it once, though. It was before I'd read more than the first two books in the Anne series, so I didn't have an intimate knowledge of Anne's future life to go on, but it seemed out of step with the first two installments. I later realized that Sullivan's sequel had no consistency with the books, nor did it fit their chronology. The Continuing Story is set during World War I and has a just-married Gilbert enlisting, with Anne then chasing him throughout Europe as a nurse and an entertainer. In the books, Anne and Gilbert are in their 50s during "the Great War." It is their children who enlist, and both parents remain behind to fight a different sort of battle on the home front.

A few years back, I started to read the rest of the books in the Anne series, but I'd heard that in the last two, Anne really takes a backseat to her children, so I wasn't as intrigued by those. I still have yet to read Rainbow Valley; curiosity over Montgomery's wartime novel compelled me to skip ahead to Rilla of Ingleside, which begins as breezily as any of the others, with Blythe housekeeper Susan Baker, a spunky precursor to The Brady Bunch's Alice, perusing the paper for the local news: "There was a big, black headline on the front page of the Enterprise, stating that some Archduke Ferdinand or other had been assassinated at a place bearing the weird name of Sarajevo, but Susan tarried not over uninteresting, immaterial stuff like that; she was in quest of something really vital. Oh, here it was–'Jottings from Glen St. Mary.'"

Of course, at the name "Archduke Ferdinand," anyone remotely acquainted with world history must pause and consider that Susan's priorities are likely about to change a great deal. Indeed, in the weeks and months to come, Susan becomes intimately acquainted with European geography and military tactics, thus providing much of the essential historical backdrop as she fervently discusses the headlines. All of the Ingleside women find themselves changed greatly because of the war, none more so than the title character, who goes from being a giddy, rather spoiled 14-year-old to a mature, hard-working 19-year-old by book's end. She is robbed of the gaiety she had expected those teenage years to bring, but in its place she gains wisdom and industriousness.

According to Wikipedia, this was the only Canadian novel written about World War I by a woman in its immediate aftermath. There are several male characters in the novel, but we really are getting the female perspective for the most part. Gilbert is too busy with his medical practice to spend much time around the house, so we only occasionally get his comments. We hear more from Jem, the eldest Blythe who is all gung-ho to go to war and looks on it all as a great adventure, and more still from Walter, the second-oldest son whose sensitivity and idealism lend him an ethereal quality and help cement him as the favorite sibling of Rilla, the baby of the family. But mostly, we see the war from the viewpoint of those who experience it from the sidelines.

Rilla is a terrific character. She may not be quite so memorable as the teenage Anne, but she has spunk enough to get her into some memorable scrapes as well as undertake responsibilities that would have been unthinkable to her pre-war self. Chief among these are heading up a Junior Red Cross and taking in Jims, a "war-baby," even though she has no attachment whatsoever to infants. In fact, though she cares diligently for the child, it is several months before she comes to feel any affection for him. Ultimately, however, the discipline of tending to him and the joy of observing his milestones is an immeasurable comfort as Rilla struggles to endure the atrocity of war.

I also am generally very fond of Susan, though she sometimes can become a tad repetitive with her constant interjections of "Mrs. Dr. Dear" and "...and that you may tie to." She freely offers her opinions on everything, and her outspoken nature means that she is often at the center of comical scenes, particularly Rilla's near-disastrous visit with handsome Ken Ford that ends in her first kiss. An incurable optimist, she plays well off of the gloomy Sophia, her cousin and neighbor, and Gertrude, the schoolteacher boarding with them.

I recalled Walter rather vividly from Anne of Ingleside, which was written later but takes place much earlier in the Blythe marriage, beginning shortly before Rilla's birth. That book contains some fairly explicit foreshadowing of his role in the eighth book, though of course if read in the order of publication, it's simply a reminder of what will occur. Walter reminds me a bit of Fiver from Watership Down. Delicate and oddly precognitive, he is the first to truly understand what lies ahead when news of the war first reaches their little town. "Before this war is over," he warns, "every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it ... feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come–and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over... And in those years millions of hearts will break."

The image of the Piper is one that recurs throughout the novel, eventually inspiring a poem Walter pens when he finally joins up after enduring months of disdain from those who see any healthy young man who does not volunteer for military service as a disgraceful slacker. Adoring Rilla never sees him that way and is merely relieved that it initially seems he will not follow in Jem's footsteps. Walter despises war, yet he feels himself a coward for not wanting to participate, even though he fears the killing more than the dying. Montgomery sympathetically shows his deep struggle with the morality of war, but she ultimately uses him as a rallying cry, even proclaiming that he wrote the greatest poem of the Great War. It does seem a bit presumptuous to place such a distinction on a nonexistent piece of writing when there are several real poems by soldiers that had a profound impact. Perhaps she ought to have limited its influence to Glen St. Mary. At any rate, I was disappointed that we never get to see this poem, though I suppose it never could live up to her description of it. Readers are left to take what they know of Walter and thereby try to imagine the poem's contents.

Up until the time when he enlists, Walter strikes me as a borderline conscientious objector, but there's only one character who protests the war and Canada's participation in it throughout the novel. That distinction belongs to Mr. Pryor, the man whom Susan nicknames Whiskers-on-the-Moon and easily my least favorite aspect of the book. Mostly, his exploits are just mentioned in passing; we rarely get to see him directly, and only once do we really step into his perspective for a moment. It's not all that uncommon in Anne books for our impression of characters to change as the novel progresses, and I felt sure that this was a character who would find some vindication by the time the war was over. Montgomery lets the characters spit "pacifist" out like it's a dirty word, but after four years of misery, I thought that Susan, his most vehement detractor, or at least Rilla would come to understand where he was coming from. If Montgomery had waited another ten years to write this, I wonder if she would have approached it any differently, knowing that the hard-won peace would prove sadly ephemeral.

As I read, I found myself often reminded of The Green Fields of France, a folk song written in the '70s and recently recorded by Celtic Thunder about a soldier who died as a teenager during World War I. Toward the end, the speaker wonders, "Did they really believe when they answered the cause, / did they really believe that this war would end wars?" Clearly, the Blythe boys and all of the other young men who march off to war in this novel do believe just that. As Walter writes to Rilla, "It isn't only the fate of the little sea-born island I love that is in the balance–nor of Canada nor of England. It's the fate of mankind. That is what we're fighting for. And we shall win–never for a moment doubt that, Rilla." He is only one of many characters to paint the war in apocalyptic terms, with an implication that after all the horror is ended, it will pave the way for a new world in which war will no longer be a possibility.

Nonetheless, though the book ends on a note of jubilation as the war ends and most of the local lads return home, Montgomery keeps a realistic tone. She acknowledges that life will never again be quite the same in bucolic Glen St. Mary; the evil effects of the war remind me of what happens to the similarly idyllic Shire in The Lord of the Rings, while the impact on individual soldiers recalls the experience of the hobbits who go off on their grand adventure so naive and return forever changed by their sobering experiences. Knowing that Tolkien fought and lost several close friends in World War I, the comparison seems all the more apt, particularly in the case of Walter, who, like Frodo, is an innocent who leaves his home with the desire to preserve it, but not, as he comes to understand, for himself, "for it could never be beautiful for me again," he writes. I also found it interesting that Montgomery, like Tolkien, associates death with "the west," as well as referring to the veil that is such a prominent metaphor for death in J. K. Rowling's fifth Harry Potter novel.

While death has played a part in all of the Anne books, it is much more omnipresent here as Rilla and the others spend each waking moment in dread of a phone call or a mail delivery bringing news of a casualty. Even without having read Rainbow Valley, I think I can safely say this is by far the darkest of the Anne books. But there is still some room for less oppressive elements, like schoolgirl squabbles and romance. Rilla must contend with Irene, a haughty young woman who can be quite as insufferable as Josie, Anne's schoolyard nemesis, and she learns first-hand that having two beaux is not nearly as thrilling as it sounds. Unfortunately, her courtship with Ken, the true object of her affections, isn't anywhere near as satisfying as Anne and Gilbert's. While Green Fields of France is my favorite song on Celtic Thunder's new album, my least favorite is Happy Birthday Sweet 16, and that's what kept running through my head whenever Ken showed up. Their relationship seemed very frivolous to me, with Rilla having a longtime crush on him and Ken finally falling for her simply because it had been a while since he'd seen her and suddenly she was pretty. They don't really seem to have spent any time together, and Ken's condescending attitude and Rilla's fawning don't do much to engage me. I was much more concerned about the fate of Jem and Walter than Ken. Then again, he's a more interesting character than Shirley, the youngest Blythe boy whose existence I'd half-forgotten by the time he left college to enlist.

While none of the later books has ever managed to charm me quite as completely as Anne of Green Gables, I've enjoyed them all, and Rilla of Ingleside is no exception. It's a unique installment in the Anne series, since the tone is much more serious for the most part, but it's interesting to read about World War I from the perspective of a woman who so recently lived through it. Though I think she could have fleshed Ken out some more and done away with Whiskers-on-the-Moon entirely, I otherwise found this eighth volume in the Anne series to be quite a satisfactory conclusion.