Dulce et decorum: ‘The German Ward’ and ‘And in the Morning’

Résumé détaillé

Pip Williams’ constrained yet passionate novel set on the fringes of WWI and Lenny Robinson’s three haunting stories of women and war from the home front ...

There are many startling and beautiful sentences in The German Ward, the new novel by internationally acclaimed writer Pip Williams. One such sentence is this: “I had no answer then, and I have no answer now, but there is confidence in meanness, even if it is momentary.”

Meanness. It is a quiet word but perfectly applied in this novel about the results of catastrophic meanness. The setting is the French seaside town of Étaples, 1916, and the British field hospitals established for the wounded of World War I – including German soldiers. The building where they are housed is known as the German ward.

Tilda Taylor, a Red Cross volunteer nurse, has been sent to the German ward as penance, after a senior nurse noted that: “She is too independent; she does not wait for instructions; she is wont to argue; her hair is barely contained; she wears rouge and occasionally lipstick, against regulation.”

This is a layered novel of women and war, art and desire. The German ward causes moral and emotional conflict to those who work there. In her first day on the ward, Tilda asks the senior nurse:

There is also Tilda’s friend, Iso Rae, one of Australia’s unofficial and largely forgotten war artists. And Eva, a curious young academic in 2025, searching through Rae’s works at the Australian War Memorial museum, attempting to piece together stories behind the pencil marks and brushstrokes Rae has used capture the great encampment. There is also Hugo Henning, a German prisoner and doctor working in the ward with Tilda: “He’d been careful not to touch me but I imagined what the brush of his fingers might have felt like. A phantom touch that prickled my skin and made my limbs soften in a way they hadn’t for a long while.”

The German Ward is a novel about physical, moral and ethical injury. At a time when we are daily witnesses to increasing global violence – obliterated schools, limbless children, cities razed – it feels like a response.

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