War the Creator

In 1914, Frank Gelett Burgess watched his young French friend Robert go off to war a boy and returned a stranger. Wounded, transformed, haunted by something the trenches had given him, Robert could no longer be reached by the civilian world that loved him. Driven by friendship and something like guilt, Burgess set out to learn exactly what those two months had done: how a gentle, unsuspecting boy became a hard-eyed man who spoke of killing without flinching. This is not a war history. It is something rarer and more unsettling: a psychological portrait rendered by someone who knew the subject before the killing started, and could therefore measure exactly what was lost. Burgess reconstructs his friend's transformation through conversations, memories, and the unbearable gap between who Robert was and who the war made him. The result is a slim, piercing account of how modernity's great catastrophe manufactured men overnight, and what it cost the people who loved them.