Soldiers’ Pay

This impressive debut novel, published in 1926, concerns an American aviator and his return to his home in Georgia at the end of the war.

The author, William Faulkner (born 25 September 1897), began writing poetry as a teenager but did not turn his hand to fiction until the mid-1920s. He was unable to enlist in the United States forces in 1918 because he wasn't tall enough. Although he was admitted to the service of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the war had ended before he could see active service. Beginning with this novel, Faulkner’s fiction was received with critical acclaim and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

The central character, Donald Mahon, son of a clergyman, has been reported missing and was presumed to have died by those at home, including his father and his fiancée. His father tells a visitor what he understands to have happened to his son:
“That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.”
He shows him a photograph that was placed on the mantelpiece.
“The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair... a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes.”
He tells him that a companion had sent back a few of his possessions:
“from a drawer he took a tin box...and...spread on the desk the sorry contents: a woman's chemise, a cheap paper-covered 'Shropshire Lad', a mummied hyacinth bulb.”

Donald, not dead but an invalid, is brought all the way home by comrades. He lies in bed, largely uncommunicative, not recognising his friends and fiancée, and not recalling what has made him an invalid until the very end, when in his blindness he has a reverie of flying over Flanders:
“And suddenly he found that he was passing from the dark world in which he had lived for a time he could not remember, again into a day that had long passed, that had already been spent by those who lived and wept and died...
He swept the horizon with a brief observing glance, casting a look above, banking slightly to see behind. All clear. The only craft in sight were faraway to the left: a cumbersome observation plane doing artillery work: a brief glance divulged a pair of scouts high above it and above these he knew were probably two more.
Might have a look, he thought, knowing instinctively that they were Huns... No, I guess not, he decided. Better get on home. Fuel's low... Ahead of him and to the right, far away, what was one Ypres, was like the cracked scab on an ancient festering sore... He passed on lonely and remote as a gull. Then, suddenly, it was as if a cold wind had blown upon him... It was that the sun had been suddenly blotted from him... In the moment of realising this, cursing his stupidity, he dived steeply, slipping to the left. Five threads of vapour passed between the upper and lower planes, each one nearer his body, then he felt two distinct shocks at the base of his skull and vision was reft from him as if a button somewhere had been pressed.”