How do we build love when the guns stop firing?

Wartime conflict doesn’t end when the guns stop firing, as laid bare by a new book set in the aftermath of World War One, following the Diggers who came home.

The term post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is today an all-too-familiar expression.

But it wasn’t around during the Great War. Back then, the psychiatric condition that stems from the experience of severe trauma or a life-threatening event, was referred to as shell shock, soldier’s heart or war neurosis.

War, love and PTSD … Siobhan O'Brien’s new book is set in the aftermath of the First World War. Picture: Richard Miller

It wasn’t until 1980 that the expression PTSD was coined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. However, knowledge of it has been in existence since the world’s earliest conflicts. The first case was reported in the account of the battle of Marathon written by Herodotus in 440BC.

The psychological impact of war is one of the themes in my recently published novel All the Golden Light. The book isn’t set in a war zone, but in a fictional town on the south coast of New South Wales in the final months of World War I. It explores what happened to the soldiers when the guns stopped, returning home to Australia with the sound of shells still ringing in their ears. How did these men deal – or not deal – with their internal scars? What impact did peacetime and a new normality have upon those who welcomed them back?

What lies behind their smiles? … Australian soldiers share stories in a dugout at Ypres, on the Western Front, pictured in 1917 by the famous war photographer James ‘Frank’ Hurley.

Many novels and screenplays set the denouement at the end of the war. Birdsong. All Quiet on the Western Front. A Long Long Way. In All the Golden Light I did the reverse. Why? Because I wondered: We had peace again. But did we really?

For newcomers, here’s a speed-date precis of the book: Adelaide Roberts accompanies her father to a nearby island to deliver much-needed supplies. While loss and deprivation has decimated the country, Adelaide is determined to live a life of purpose and hope, and dreams of living an independent life. On the rocky outcrop she meets lighthouse keeper Emmett Huxley, an outsider haunted by his service in France, taking refuge from the damage of the war. Adelaide and Emmett are drawn together, but plans have been made for Adelaide and the decorated returned soldier Donal Blaxland, a local landowner with a large tobacco plantation. Soon Adelaide is forced to make a choice about her future, and discovers that Donal harbours terrible secrets of his own.

Welcome home … an Australian soldier gets a kiss from his wife as he returns home to Sydney in 1919; but it wasn’t that easy for all couples reunited, or meeting for the first time, after WWI.

The seeds for my novel germinated long ago. My maternal grandfather was a raconteur who fought in World War II, recited Banjo Patterson’s The Man From Snowy River by rote on his 80th birthday and lived to 101 years. I grew up with Pop telling stories about his war years spent in Papua New Guinea, the privation he and his family endured as a child, and the time, many years later, when he and Nan took returned soldiers into their home to care for them. As a young girl I didn’t know how to verbalise these things but I palpably felt the events were there in the room and they became part of my inner fabric.

Fast forward a few decades and I witnessed my father unravel from emotional and financial tragedy. He was an avoidant who learned from an early age that inner wounds weren’t spoken about or acknowledged. People from his era – the returned soldiers included – were expected to get on with things. He became angry, bitter and turned to addiction to try to ease his pain which became like a blocking point in his brain and psyche. Now he is no longer here to change the narrative.

Long slog to peace; and after that, to recovery … soldiers of the 1st Australian Division on a duckboard track on the Western Front, near Hooge, Belgium, in October 1917. Picture by James ‘Frank’ Hurley.

The impact that this has upon those within the sufferer’s orbit has far-reaching consequences. Enter Ada stage left. Even though she, her father and their community live in a seemingly remote location on the other side of the world far from the battlefield, they can’t avoid becoming entangled in the effects of it. Adelaide witnesses the impact of trauma on a daily basis in the convalescing home where she works, grapples with it because her brother has had a catastrophic injury that’s left him paralysed and experiences the hardship that the war has on day-to-day life.

Then she meets Emmett and Donal who return from the war zone with differing ways to deal with what they’d seen and done. But in the early 1900s there was no proper treatment for what they had. The flashbacks, nightmares and hypervigilance. These men, and countless others like them, were indelibly changed. They couldn’t recapture what they’d left or undo what they had witnessed. And the loved ones who awaited their homecoming were unable to understand the atrocities they’d endured, much less soften the blow.

Human stories behind the scars … All The Golden Light by Siobhan O'Brien.

The Great War was not the war to end all wars as was said at the time. There have been innumerable conflicts since and now we are grappling with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the horrors in Gaza. And while 1918, when the war ended, and 2024 seem like two different galaxies, there is a link: we are human beings who suffer the scars and trauma of human existence.

All the Golden Light by Siobhan O’Brien is out now, published by HarperCollins.

Share your favourite historical fiction at The Sunday Book Club group on Facebook. And check out our Book Of The Month, What Happened To Nina? by Dervla McTiernan. You can get it at Booktopia for 43 per cent off the RRP.

Originally published as How do we build love when the guns stop firing?