The Warm Hands of Ghosts

“And now: himself in darkness. Buried. Dead and buried, wasn’t that the phrase? The shell must have collapsed the pillbox somehow. Or flipped it. Or killed him outright.

He was trapped.

He composed himself. He didn’t mind dying. Or being dead.”

Freddie wakes up disoriented in the German pillbox and tries to remember how he ended up there. Though he eventually realizes he is trapped rather than dead, his thought that he would not mind being dead underscores his sense of fatalism and hints at his later decision to accept oblivion rather than life.

“She’d describe the pageantry of it: the Four Horsemen, the Beast from the Sea, the devil riven and falling. Fire from heaven, trumpets and thrones, the infallible judgment of God. […]

And you were right, Maman, Laura thought. It caught us up after all. War, plague, famine, death, the sky on fire, the sun black. Aren’t you glad you were right?”

Laura reflects on her mother’s religious obsession with the apocalypse. She considers the ways the war matches imagery from the Book of Revelation in the Bible, developing the theme of War and the End of the World. Though she scoffed at her mother’s paranoia as a child, she now believes the war is proof that the world is indeed ending.

“You’ll have your bare hands all over those wounds as they go bad. It’s all farmland, the battlefields; they’ve been spreading manure since the Middle Ages. If you’ve so much as a paper cut, or a blister on your own hand, well, that goes bad too. Over and over. It hurts very much. It scars. Do you want your hands to look like this?”

Laura tries to convince Pim not to go to Belgium with her and Mary. In focusing on the physical pain and scarring, she also tacitly implies the deeper emotional/mental scars she suffers from. This does not, however, deter Pim.

“Laura bit her tongue before she could say anything else. Like Don’t you understand? The world ends with high explosive, not trumpets, and even if an angel existed, it would be shot from the sky like an aeroplane.”

The women discuss rumored angel sightings on the battlefield and whether these sightings are proof of God’s involvement. Laura believes that if angels were real, they would merely be further proof that the world is ending. Additionally, the violence she has witnessed in the war indicates to her that men would only kill any angel they saw rather than treat it with reverence.

“Freddie’s mind spun in circles. He couldn’t be sane. A sane man wouldn’t be in this hole, under this sky. He wished he could crawl into the foul earth and never come out. But he’d promised to keep Winter alive.”

After Freddie kills the Canadian soldier to save Winter, he crumbles under the mental strain of his guilt. Trauma was poorly understood at the time, so Freddie himself believes he is going “insane.” Significantly, the only thing that motivates Freddie to keep standing is his need to save Winter, a single-minded desire that motivates him throughout the novel.

“He was playing a violin, flawlessly. Silky, grave, strangely familiar, the music poured like water from between his fingers and seemed to banish everything outside itself. Even the rustle of Laura’s strained breathing was lost as the room filled like a cup with melody.”

This scene introduces Faland, the primary antagonist. He is depicted as a charming man who plays music so beautiful and arresting that it halts all listeners in their tracks. The magical quality of his music is a recurring motif.

“His very soul rebelled. He’d left all the rest of himself out there somewhere, in the blood and water and darkness; he refused to leave Winter to his fate. He imagined it: going off to fight again while Winter died by inches, alone. He couldn’t do it. He’d go stark, screaming, staring mad.”

Freddie realizes that, with the aid station already overrun and lacking staff and supplies, Winter will not receive the treatment he needs and will die. Freddie’s identity has become so entangled with Winter’s that he cannot leave him to such a fate, so they run again, making Freddie officially a deserter and fugitive.

“If Freddie believed in one thing in this strange world, he believed in Laura. […] Laura would find a way to help them. She’d put Winter in with the prisoners, she’d feed them both. She’d see that Winter got surgery, that he was properly nursed. She’d save his life.”

Freddie retains an unshakable belief in Laura’s compassion, composure, and competence. His belief that she will know what to do to save Winter’s life gives him the hope and motivation to keep moving as he and Winter wander through Ypres. This is an important element of the familial love and support Freddie and Laura share, which is a driving force of the plot and develops the theme of The Resilience of the Human Spirit.

“‘[B]ut what they all say, every story, is those who’ve drank with him, heard the music, seen what he shows you, and then come back out here—’ He spat out to the leeward side of the lorry. ‘Well, they’re always pining for it. […] But you only see it once. You can’t get back. They say men have gone mad. Looking for the fiddler. Like they can’t ever be happy again.’”

The women hitchhike with a group of soldiers to reach Couthove. The soldiers share rumors about Faland’s magical abilities. From this moment, Pim becomes obsessed with finding Faland again, while Laura fears that Pim, like the pining soldiers, is losing her grip on reality.

“Freddie was alone. The purpose that had driven him off the Ridge left him suddenly; he swayed like a puppet with cut strings.

[…]

He had nothing. What future waited for him but to lie down in the mud and let the drowned man take what was his? ‘I’m already dead,’ he whispered.”

Once Freddie successfully gets Winter to safety he loses all sense of purpose and succumbs to despair. His previous belief that he would be better off dead now resurfaces, fueled by renewed horror and guilt. Faland takes advantage of his moment of weakness to gain control of Freddie and his memories.

“Bed, he thought. Walls. Floor. Air. His feeling of choking eased. He tried to get up. But he couldn’t move. Shell-shock. Laura had patients who couldn’t move after they were shell-shocked.”

On the first night of Freddie’s stay in Faland’s hotel, he experiences nightmares and wakes fearing that he is once again trapped in the pillbox, alone and dying in the dark. Freddie realizes he has “shell-shock,” the WWI-era term for what is now called PTSD. This sensation of paralysis, literal and figurative, contributes to the theme of grief and trauma.

“It was an endless, day-dreamer’s longing, satisfying in itself, with no need for fulfillment. The people in the mirror could not disappoint in any way, and he would never fail them, or lose them, or mourn them. It was easier so. He had only to watch and yearn. And tell Faland a story.”

Freddie gives in to his feelings of hopelessness and fear, choosing to hide from the world rather than face his trauma and the consequences of his actions. Freddie avoids both his problems and his own desires in Faland’s hotel not because it is right but because it is easier.

“‘Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils’—his voice turned wry—‘and I am the lesser.’”

Faland suggests that Freddie is too cowardly to return to the world and that the slow oblivion he offers is the “the lesser evil” in comparison. Freddie does not argue, underscoring his trauma and the things he is willing to give up in the name of relief from his pain.

“But Winter had been there in the dark. There was no way to separate the horror from the memory of Winter’s voice, his courage. He could not bring himself to let that memory go. It seemed wrong, disrespectful to the thing they’d shared, to let it go.”

Freddie struggles with the decision to tell Faland about Winter, which would allow him to forget the terror of the pillbox but would also mean losing his memory of Winter. Even as Freddie relinquishes his other memories, however, he keeps hold of the memory of Winter. Over time, it becomes clear that he loves Winter and that this love, intertwined as it is with Freddie’s trauma, will give him the courage to face reality.

“A man once told me, in great earnest, how he saw his brother, dead three years, in his dugout, leading him away just before the heavy came down. Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world. I remember nodding like a ninny. Still, now, whenever I touch a man’s cold fingers, I catch myself thinking, Well, he’s not a ghost yet.”

Kate tells this story of a soldier she once treated to explain why she believes Winter’s claims about Freddie. If she believes a story about a ghost, then Winter’s story is not so far-fetched by comparison. This passage complicates the symbolism associated with ghosts in the narrative—their “warmth” suggests humanity and even love—and provides the title of the novel.

“The music, its familiarity, the reason it hurt to hear. It was himself. His loves, his flaws, the way his world had ended. His deep, ruinous anger. His memories weren’t gone. They were there, in Faland’s moving hands, at his service. In that moment, Freddie understood Faland’s power at last; he’d shared it once. It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.”

Freddie experiences the magic of Faland’s violin music, reinforcing the fantastical elements of the plot while also making clear the connections between stories and Faland’s strange abilities. The motif of music appears again and again, transmuting Freddie’s pain and trauma into a wordless language.

“And then her mother’s bleeding ghost was right in front of her. She bit off a scream, afraid for her sanity. Or was she hoping for absolution? There was nothing, again, but that pointing finger. Following the line of it, Laura saw neither Pim nor Faland nor Freddie but a man, a stranger, crouching in a doorway, watching the madness with startlingly blue eyes.”

Laura has seen her mother’s ghost many times over the novel, haunted by the guilt she feels for not saving her mother’s life. However, when she sees the ghost in this chapter, she suspects that her mother is not trying to punish her but to help her. This supposition proves true later.

“This time it wasn’t fear that Faland conjured. It was rage, close kin to madness, unleavened by understanding or sorrow. […] It was the worst thing he’d ever heard. It conjured it all, true as life: The sounds the soldier made as he died, the color of his face, the smell of the rain, and Freddie’s entire existence shrank to that one moment, to that one wretched self—murderer. That was all he was. All he would be, forever and ever, amen.”

As before, Freddie experiences the magic of Faland’s music. In the first incident, Faland invoked fear and panic. Now, his music invokes pure, unadulterated rage, inciting all who hear it to riot in Poperinghe. This demonstrates the power of both the music and Freddie’s anger.

“Faland fixed him with a faintly smiling gaze. ‘And afterward, Wilfred, you will tell me at least about the darkness, and how you came to love that man.’”

Though Freddie’s feelings have long been implied, this is the first time the narrative explicitly acknowledges that Freddie is not merely loyal to Winter but in love with him. It is only for this love that Freddie is willing to relinquish his final memory and his entire identity; the same love later helps him regain both.

“His voice was perfectly flat. ‘I wanted you to see it. He was one of ours and I killed him.’

She didn’t touch him. She thought he’d flinch away. ‘You didn’t mean to.’

‘Oh, I did,’ Freddie said. They were still looking through the doorway, where, in the memory, Freddie was crawling up the ice-slick slope of the shell hole. Winter caught him around the shoulders before he could fall, and put a canteen to his lips. They were staring at each other. As though they each contained the other’s entire world.”

Freddie wishes for Laura to understand the depth of his shame and guilt over having killed one of his own men. However, Laura does not focus on the murder itself but rather on the depth of connection she sees between Freddie and Winter.

“A hand brushed hers. Warm fingers, a little rough with glass. Ghosts have warm hands. She didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t dare. Looking would burst her fragile soap-bubble of belief. She didn’t look even when the familiar hand wound its fingers with hers, and pulled her forward. Holding on to Freddie, she walked.”

The scenes in which Laura is haunted by her mother’s ghost culminate in this moment when Laura and Freddie have escaped Faland’s hotel only to be lost. Laura calls out to her mother’s ghost for help, at last accepting rather than running from the memory. She is rewarded for this acceptance as her mother successfully leads them to safety.

“Freddie knew what she was doing. He felt a surge of jealousy. He’d chosen the new world, chosen Winter, chosen Laura, chosen the wasteland of his life, with whatever green shoots he could coax out of the parched terrain of his soul. He saw that the woman had made the other choice, to go into the dark with the stranger, and allow herself oblivion.”

Freddie and Pim are two sides of the same coin. Freddie chooses to face his trauma head-on despite the many challenges that will pose, while Pim is unable to live with her trauma and chooses oblivion. Though Freddie is momentarily jealous of her, he still makes the conscious choice to move forward, demonstrating his love and resilience.

“Winter moved forward, sharply, and kissed him, his body warm, his grip almost bruising. It was shocking. It was inevitable. It was home. It was the first time Freddie had felt alive in his own skin since the night he went up Passchendaele Ridge.”

Winter and Freddie acknowledge their feelings for each other. This moment of tenderness and connection rewards the characters for their strength and resilience in the face of overwhelming trauma and gives the overall narrative a sense of hope for the future.