All this changes with the arrival of the war, which suddenly makes all their reveries about love and art seem childish and naive. Paul ends up in Belgium working as a medic, tending to the wounded, and Neville ends up in a nearby town, driving ambulances.
Elinor, alone, remains committed to "an iron frivolity," determined to pursue her painting and ignore all news of the war. She visits Paul in the small Belgian town near the front where he is serving - one of the novel's few sequences that feels improbable and forced - and the two promptly start squabbling about the proper role of art in wartime. Paul argues for an art that would bear witness to the wounds of war - "it's not right their suffering should just be swept out of sight," he says of the wounded soldiers - while Elinor declares that art should only depict "the things we choose to love," not things "imposed on us from the outside."
In depicting the effect that World War I has on her three young protagonists, Barker takes care never to sentimentalize them. Although she writes effectively from each of their points of view, communicating their hopes and fears and dreams, they emerge as rather selfish, unsympathetic individuals, who have all cultivated a certain emotional detachment in the service of their art. That detachment helps Paul and Neville survive the horrors they witness during the war, but it also cuts them off from genuine emotional connection.
Elinor's determination not to think about the war comes off as narcissistic denial. Neville's celebrated success in London with his war paintings feels perilously close to war profiteering. And Paul's "learning not to care" about the wounded soldiers he tends to sometimes seems less like a defensive survival mechanism than a solitary man's rationalization of his own difficulty in feeling.
As she did in her Regeneration trilogy, Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of the war and its fallout with meticulous precision. Grievously injured soldiers crying out for morphine that does not exist; field surgeons tossing bits of damaged flesh into buckets; civilians scurrying for safety as bombs torpedo their homes and gardens; columns of rain-drenched men marching toward the front in "gleaming capes and helmets, like mechanical mushrooms" - such images and the ineradicable memory of these sights are captured with unsparing clarity by Barker in these pages, as are the less visible scars they leave on the psyches of soldiers, doctors and witnesses alike.
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