• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1522 0

World War. After a short introduction, the story opens in Devon, England, on a rainy April day in 1944. The opening mood is heavy. The sergeant is intensely lonely, and there is an unspoken awareness that D-Day is only weeks away. Feeling restless, he takes a stroll into town, where he is drawn to a church where children are having choir practice. While listening to the choir, his attention becomes focused upon one member in particular, a girl of about thirteen. Upon leaving the church, he escapes the rain in a nearby tearoom, followed shortly by two drenched children, Esmé, the girl who had intrigued him in the church, and her seven-year-old brother, Charles. Sensing the narrator’s loneliness, the girl joins him, and they engage in a conversation that is both polite and revealing.

Esmé and her brother are orphans. Their mother has recently died (we assume in the blitz) and their father has been killed serving with the British army. In his honor, Esmé proudly wears his enormous military watch. When she confides the loss of her father, she spells out the word s-l-a-i-n, attempting to spare Charles the hurtful reminder. Before leaving the tearoom, Esmé promises to correspond with the narrator. In return, she asks that he write her a short story about “squalor.” Squalor has been her recent experience, but, challenging the devastation to her life, she has resolved to retain her compassion and to protect her brother from descending into bitterness.

The scene fast-forwards to Bavaria in May 1945. This is “the squalid, or moving part” of the story, we are told, and not only does the scene change, but “the people change, too.” Now “cunningly” disguised as “Sergeant X,” the narrator is billeted in an occupied German home along with other soldiers. X is seated at a table in his dark and chaotic room, attempting in vain to read. That very day, he was treated in a hospital for a nervous breakdown. His gums still bleed, his hands shake, his face twitches, and he sits in the dark after vomiting into a wastepaper basket. In front of X lie piles of unopened mail. He reaches into the heap and removes a letter written by his older brother back home requesting “a couple of bayonets or swastikas.”

X tears up the letter in disgust and despair. The silence is broken by the entrance of Sergeant X’s jeep partner, Corporal Clay (also referred to as “Corporal Z”). Adorned in ribbons and medals, Clay belches and makes casually insensitive comments on X’s ravaged condition. He mentions that he has written to his girlfriend, telling her that X has had a nervous breakdown, amd suggesting that the sergeant must have been unbalanced before the war.

When the insufferable Clay finally leaves, Sergeant X is again alone with his depression and the heap of unopened mail. Delving absentmindedly into the pile, he retrieves a small package. The box contains a letter from Esmé, who has also enclosed her father’s watch. Her letter explains that the watch is “extremely water-proof and shock-proof” and that Sergeant X is welcome to wear it “for the duration of the conflict.” At the letter’s end, Esmé expresses her hope that Sergeant X will stay in touch, and Charles has added his own enormous greeting: “HELLO HELLO HELLO … LOVE AND KISSES CHARLES.”

These simple words jolt Sergeant X to the memory of his former self. They prove that Esmé’s love has preserved the innocent purity of Charles against all odds. They offer X the hope that love may have a similar triumph in his own life. After finishing the letter and examining the watch, Sergeant X becomes overcome by sleepiness, but not before assuring readers that he can now find the strength to conquer the squalor of his experiences and reconnect with the values he held before the war.

The story’s primary symbol is Esmé’s father’s watch, its meaning shifting as the story progresses. In the first section, it is symbolic of the girl’s connection with her dead father and calls attention to the tragedy suffered by Esmé because of the war. In the second section, when X discovers the watch enclosed with Esmé’s letter,