Pip Williams’ WWI novel is beautiful – but I wish it wasn’t
In The German Ward the horrors of the Western Front are smoothed over by a frictionless romance.
Like so much contemporary WWI fiction, The German Ward is terribly beautiful, even as it tries to be honest. When it comes to the Western Front, there’s a stubborn smear of Vaseline across our cultural lens. We look at the carnage and keep spotting love stories.
Some readers will find this reassuring; humane, even: a reminder that gentleness has its place in ungentle times. Others will bristle at yet another romance plucked from the fetid mud. Both can be true.
In a way, that’s Williams’s point: the tension between what we choose to see and what’s there. How our perspective shifts and warps depending on where we stand, what uniform we’re wearing and who we love. To make the point, she gives us double vision: two women looking at the same story from opposite ends of a century.
In 1937, an unexpected letter prompts Tilda Taylor to open a box of relics she has kept in the attic for 20 years, among them her wartime diary. It begins in August 1915, with her assignment to the titular German ward, where wounded enemy soldiers were sent to recover before being transferred to prison camps. “We had tried to kill them but they didn’t die,” Tilda’s diary reads, “so now we try to save them. How insane.”
In 2025 art historian Eva LaMotte is in the archival quiet of the Australian War Memorial, studying the work of Iso Rae, an Australian artist who was based in Etaples during the war but denied a formal commission. Rae’s work carries a quiet defiance: “Someone had said no to Iso – the war is not yours to paint; it is not your story to tell – but Iso had done it anyway.” What did she see, Eva wonders, that the men did not?
Only a handful of Rae’s sketches survive but some of the most tender feature the same unnamed nurse. Eva senses a story hiding in these intimate lines. As she imagines that story, Tilda remembers it.
(Williams has conjured the tale from a real-life encounter in Rae’s archives.)
And so we have a novel where everyone is looking at someone who is looking at someone else. Looking, longing, sketching, interpreting. The war churns on and on, breaking bodies. And we watch them all, watching – bearing witness, bearing suffering. It could be a great, unruly tangle. But Williams knows precisely what she is doing. We can feel it: the precision, the control. The mystery of Tilda’s unopened letter; the question of Eva’s anonymous nurse. The past and the present moving towards one another like two lovers reuniting.
