The best WWI love stories

I believe that good war stories are also good love stories. That’s why I so loved this one. I came of age during the Vietnam War and watched many young men–my cousins, their friends, our neighbors–go off to fight.

I remember my cousin David having to leave his fianceé behind. She planned the wedding alone, and I was one of the cousins who shopped for bridesmaid’s dresses and shower presents while David was in Vietnam. When he returned, he was too traumatized to go through with the wedding and called it off.

Although Alice Winn writes about the great tragedy of WWI, the novel focuses more on the love between two young boys who attended the same British boarding school. I was especially moved by the lists of the boys' names from the school who were killed or wounded in the war that begin each chapter. Unfortunately, young boys and wars go hand in hand. 

I love this book because it is a war novel without a single battlefield or battle, except the one for Siegfried Sassoon’s sanity. I became fascinated by WWI as a teenager. I can’t say why this war caught my imagination, but it did, and that fascination has continued for my whole life.

I gobbled up books, movies, and history about the war, and I especially loved the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, a noted poet and war hero who publicly refused to continue fighting in 1917. When I re-read his poetry fifty years later, I found a kinship with that refusal and the boys around me who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

I was a dreamy, romantic teenager, which is why Sassoon’s words pierced my heart: “Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.” Oh! How I cried over his poems and the injustice of his stay at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where doctors worked to send him back into the trenches. I cried again when I read this book, which brings that time to life on the page.

Although it’s not a love story, per se, as a kid who loved poetry, it is like a love song to words.

I can clearly remember where I was when I first read this anti-war novel: my bedroom in my small hometown of West Warwick, Rhode Island, with the slanted ceiling, yellow and white checkered bedspread, white and gold fake French Provincial furniture.

I bought the paperback–black cover with a stark white hand making a peace sign–at the Waldenbooks at the mall, came home, and went upstairs to read. I did not look up from that book once. I just read it straight through, all three hundred pages, horrified, mesmerized, angry, saddened. In WWI, Joe Bonham loses his ears, eyes, mouth, and limbs and is trapped in his body with his thoughts and shattered dreams.

I had a peace sign pillow on my bed and a 'Make Love, Not War' poster on the wall across from me. This novel brought the consequences of war right into my childhood bedroom. When the new day nurse writes Merry Christmas with her fingertips on Joe’s chest, I thought it was the loveliest act of love I’d ever read.

I love all things Irish. I would venture a guess that more than half of what I read is by Irish writers. Every year, my family visits Ireland–from Dublin to Dingle to Donegal. I am intensely interested in Irish history as well as literature.

This book checks off all these boxes for me. Young Willie Dunn leaves his family and the girl he loves to fight in WWI in 1914. On the Western front, it’s the letters from home and the other Irish soldiers who keep him going through the horrors of battle. Willie is able to return home, only to find Ireland itself on the brink of a civil war.

I give this book to anyone I know who, like me, is charmed by the magic of Ireland, to history buffs and lovers of Irish literature, and to those who seek love stories that happen in WWI. I cried over what happened to Willie and his girlfriend. I cried over the horrors of the war. I was swept up in the events in Dublin in 1914.

Several years after I read it, my family went on a historical tour of Dublin. When the guide showed us bullet holes in the post office on O’Connell Street, my son, to who I’d gifted the book, blurted, “Mom! Willie Dunn!” I love when a book suddenly becomes real.

I love a good detective series. I love even more a good detective series that takes place in the UK and has at its center a flawed detective. Set the series in or around WWI, and that’s about as perfect as it can get for me.

This is the first of twenty-four Ian Rutledge mysteries, so it started me on many hours of happy reading. Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard is shell-shocked from WWI. His wife Jean leaves him when he returns from the war after five years, and Rutledge is lonely and barely holding on when he is put on a murder case where a war hero is the chief suspect. Although Rutledge doesn’t have a love interest in this first book in the series, his broken heart makes him even more fragile and has me rooting for him even more.

As the books progress, I watched him come close to love and even got to glimpse him in love before the war. I love taking these books on trips. It’s like time-traveling to the days before, during, and after WWI, following a man’s heart through the years, with a good dose of murder for fun.