“As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote suck music. . . Why had modern life brought forth these horrors that make the old tragedies seem no more than nursery shows?” (63)

 

I find this quote compelling because it is the first instance in the novel where Jenny truly begins to grasp the effect that the war has not merely on her brother, but on all of them, on the world collectively. In this scene, Jenny and Kitty have just finished reminding him that all the people he believes to be alive, are dead, dying long before the war, even. The world that they shared together is gone. For Kitty and Jenny, the blunt of those losses was overshadowed by the horrors of the war and the distance and time. For Chris, delivered to him in one fell swoop with his loss of memory, it is shattering. For Chris, those deaths are not nursery rhyme tragedies because he is living a version of himself from the past. But for Jenny and Kitty, living in the present reality of the war, those deaths are nothing compared to the bloodshed on the battlefield and what it has done to the world.

 

Jenny goes on to set the scene around them: Kitty lounging by the fireplace, Chris standing by an open window, she at the piano. What would have been a standard evening before Chris left for the front is not completely and totally different. Even the sky is different, and the grass, too. In understanding that scenes of everyday life will never be the same again, that even though reunited they are not together as they were before, Jenny begins to grapple the true devastation of the war and how it has reached her.