Young men – and young women – are intended to go into the world and do things. In a time of a popular, modern war, they go to war as soldiers, or as workers. Unless they have extraordinary courage. In this coming of age novel, written from the viewpoint of a 68 year old man, this is the experience of one such young man during World War II. A young man without that courage. And one young girl with exactly that courage.
Only as serving as a soldier in Europe during World War II does the young man understand the young girl. It is the old man who remembers and tells the story.
The story starts in the industrial city of Pittsburgh in 1939. The pollution and dirt of this city are carefully evoked in a few sentences.
The first hint of crises is an announcement by the then 15 year old protagonist’s father, who is a university physicist. He reports that German scientists have split the atom. This news, which will mean so much to the future, is a small event that will start unraveling our protagonist’s life. At the time, at the tail end of the depression, the feared announcement would have been that the father was out of work.
A little more that two years later and the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. The protagonist, John Dante, is 17, but he has friends old enough to enlist. At about that time his father is called away to California to work on a classified war project. John's mother goes to work in a Pittsburgh factory which is re-tooled to do war-related manufacturing. Then John has not a clue at the importance of his father's work. Only later does be understands that his mother has given up her artistic career in the hope of winning the war production contest on the home front so that her son will not be called to serve in the war.
Amidst this turmoil, John becomes involved with the slightly younger Ginny, who, although he does not yet understand it, is a voice of reason in the war-mad world. It is Ginny who suggests that John make the courageous choice to become a conscientious objector. Ginny does not believe the war propaganda and sees things for what they are. Life being more important than death. Of course, John can not follow her advice. He is a young man, and for a young man, war in a time of war is all important. Just as he has he has missed the full impact of the war on his father and mother, he does not grasp its effect on his sister, who, in a different way than Ginny also reaches out to young men made insane by war. These failing are those of both youth and war.
After one brief sexual encounter with Ginny, he goes to war. John enlists at 18 only a few months before he would have been drafted anyway. He is sent first Georgia and then North Carolina to train, and then overseas to North Africa to take part in the invasion of Sicily – where he sees a castle - Italy, and then southern France. Surviving against long odds, he finishes the war somewhere in Germany. Even before he left the United States he had lost contact with Ginny. The clash between his required belief in the righteous of what he is doing, is impossible to reconcile with Ginny's greater understanding of the truth.
In 1945 John is a combat survivor, older by a few years than when he enlisted, and older beyond measure in wisdom. He has seen all kind of violent death, and seen the haphazard ways death is dealt out on the battlefield. His own actions, the right ones at the time, have led to directly to the deaths of fellow soldiers. Looking back at the end of the war in Europe, the 21 year old John thinks about the truth he has learned, “Boys will to the fighting because they are young and still possessed of the best faith. Only the young can be persuaded to die for each other. Only the young can be persuaded that this is the best way.” John also thinks hard about the coming invasion of Japan, in which he may be ordered to serve and expects to die. “And then: Hiroshima.”
In 1945, John is aware of the wisdom of Ginny whose advice he of necessity ignored before he enlisted. Home from the war, back in a Pittsburgh he no longer likes, John makes only a trivial effort to find Ginny, whose family has left that city. John think to himself, “I wanted to tell her she had been right. I wanted to explain about my friends – the ones I couldn't save, the ones I didn't bring home – and I wanted forgiveness for my sins.” But instead John exiles himself back to Europe to be with people who have experienced war first hand.
He starts as a laborer in France, eventually attending a French university, then living in England and Greece. Teaching at small schools while looking for “solitude and silence”. John thinks himself too tainted by the war to make a real effort to find Ginny, the one person who he knows would have forgiven him. Forgiveness he does not think he deserves. So John Dante makes a new life for himself, an exile from America, making an occasional visit home to see his family. The wars in Korea and Vietnam he tries to ignore.
Five decades later John, remaining an exile, lives in Toronto and still thinks of the wisdom of Ginny and the love she would have given him.
For anyone who like I Had Seen Castles, I can can recommend two nonfiction books about boys making war during World War II in Europe, And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat and Doing Battle, Making of a Skeptic by Paul Fussel. Both are about the authors coming to terms with their own fear of death and the luck that determines survival in combat. Mowat experienced combat first in Sicily and then in Italy like the John Dante of this novel. Both authors emphasize in their wartime memoirs the false promises that led them to the battlefields.
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