You know you are getting old when you come across a book written by someone too young to know how hackneyed his subject was when you were young. Admittedly Mattia Signorini is Italian and Italians were not involved on the Western Front but it seems the Christmas Truce of 1914 was news to him when he was hiking in the Italian Alps in 2019.
Now his short novel has been translated into English (beautifully done by Vicki Satlow) and is seeking the attention of a nation who has had the Christmas Truce rammed down its throat for over a century. Fortunately, Signorini's approach is different and wonderfully effective. We begin with an injured veteran returning to Flanders Field with his young son in 1933. He is German but he tells his boy the story of an English soldier he came across, not in No Man's Land but in Ploegsteen Forest.
We then switch to the Englishman, William Turner, who has volunteered for the war that will be over by Christmas. William is searching for meaning in life by keeping a promise he made to his dying mother to do something to help other people. Like everyone else in this volunteer army he is lost. Fortunately he soon makes friends with Edgar Martin, another misfit, who hopes to make a career in the army - anything being better than the wretched hand to mouth existence which was all he'd known in England.
The whole story is compressed into the single month of December 1914. The misery and horror is all there yet friendship and fellowship somehow rise above it. Both William and Edgar are wounded in that period yet both are back on the frontline before Christmas. The end is not the football match but what happens immediately after, when William walks towards the German Line. What actually happens to him is left ambiguous, the highpoint of an extremely effective novel. Highly recommended.
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