This book has explored how images of spectrality permeated writing about the war from 1914 until the 1930s. The ambition has been to explore how texts from the period drew upon pre-existing Gothic versions of the ghost as a way of managing (or not) the trauma of war. We have seen how ghosts from the Walpolean tradition have influenced formations of spectrality which grant the past an insistent presence that demands, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, to be heard. The anti-Enlightenment impulse associated with these figures is in keeping with the irrationality that many associated with the war itself. The uncanny presence of dead undead models of lost, and often shell-shocked, soldiers permeate these tales, even when the ambition is to bring them back to life through the restorative warmth of the emotionally unconflicted family home. Not all ghosts, as we have seen, can be so easily accommodated and they reflect the ongoing feelings of loss, alienation and confusion engendered by the war. The spectres are various but all address ways in which trauma may, or may not, be overcome. The liminal figure of the ghost provided the means through which a culture sought to make visible its fears and anxieties about the dead of the war that they could not leave behind, and which, at times, seemed to haunt the post-war world terrifyingly with an unappeasable resentment. How these issues become addressed in what we might term the neo-First World War writings of Pat Barker will be outlined here, but it is also important to consider the relationship between the First and Second World Wars (as, indeed, Barker does in her Life Class trilogy), as this too implicates a model of haunting.

Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) dramatises a link between the wars as the ghost of a First World War soldier revisits his former lover in a 1940s blitzed London. The principal protagonist is the forty-four-year-old Mrs Drover, who is visiting the abandoned family home to secure possessions to forward on to her new, safer, blitz-free residence. She finds a letter which indicates that she is expected to keep her promise of an anniversary meeting with her former lover, who was killed in 1916. The letter’s tone is threatening: ‘The years have gone by at once slowly and fast.