YHB was just looking for a bathtub book, but it turns out that Justice Hall was a good choice for Memorial Day weekend. I’ve always thought of Memorial Day as for WWI, for no very good reason. I have no close relatives or friends who have fought overseas, so the day is not a memorial for any particular person, and as a crazy anglophile, the Great War always caught at my imagination.
A few years ago, I happened to pick up Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914-44, due mostly to Lady Violet’s having had a (weakish) connection to Sir Harold Nicolson (who is, as Gentle Readers should be aware, one of my particular interests). Lady Violet is interesting in herself, but the thing that really struck me was the letters from the young men of her class as they waited to be sent overseas. She was, at that point, the daughter of the Prime Minister, and her circle was quite glittering indeed. A dozen or so young men all presumably destined for greatness wrote to her, expressing their eagerness to go, some from patriotism, some from high spirits, some from love of adventure, some from boredom. They went. They died.
At one point, a foolish fellow, loose-lipped as he shouldn’t have been, tells her he’s off to the Dardanelles, and he’s looking forward to the sun. Dead.
Justice Hall is one of the goofy series of Mary Russell novels featuring an older Sherlock Holmes and his young American Jewish feminist sidekick through the postwar years. This one centers on a young fellow destined to be the flower of his generation who went to France and didn’t come back. He wasn’t directly killed by the Germans, but by the stupidity and incompetence of the English command. Well, and murdered. But if Gen. Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett hadn’t been in charge, it wouldn’t have been so easy to murder the boy.
,
-Vardibidian.