The previous chapter focused on how various tales of World War One attempt to manage and contain anxieties stemming from war-induced trauma. There, the returning soldiers were often restored to their pre-war selves in the home. This chapter explores representations of ghosts who cannot be so easily plotted within structures that attempt to manage trauma. These are ghosts without homes and so without the domestic ties which restore the soldiers to a semblance of their pre-war lives. Trauma is not eradicated in these narratives, all of which indicate a problem with how to articulate war-induced anxieties. Familial structures and conventional narrative forms respectively fail to cure the soldier or to represent their plight coherently. These are ghosts who retain a disorientating Gothic presence as they wrestle with fears and anxieties which cannot be cast off or lived with.

These tales engage with representations of trauma which are clearly influenced by a Gothic sensibility, centred on divided selves and damaged emotional states. The subjects take on Gothic characteristics as they wrestle with fear and anxiety and struggle to find any narrative form which can express their emotional state. We can read the Gothic as a form that is founded within trauma, which often addresses specific historical concerns. The late eighteenth-century Gothic frequently addresses issues about social and political change generated by the French Revolution, just as the fin-de-siècle Gothic reflects concerns about degeneration, invasion and sexuality. That World War One, as a moment of crisis, would also produce a new formation of the Gothic condition is therefore unsurprising. It is a Gothic which inherits much from the earlier Gothic tradition, but which has a particular focus on figures of depersonalisation, such as ghosts and animals. How to represent this new Gothic sensibility is also closely aligned with forms of narrative expression which foreground the problem of representation.

Samuel Hynes has argued that realism is difficult to apply to soldiers’ accounts of war and suggests ‘battlefield gothic’ as a more appropriate term to make sense of ‘when we observe the dead, or, more precisely, when we observe soldiers observing the dead’ (Hynes 1995: 403 italics in original). For Hynes, what we witness is the often callous way in which soldiers observe the dead of their enemies, but we need to understand that their testimony is Gothic in character due to the very uncanny unreality of the war zone itself.