Fly Away Peter
Chapter 14
The Chapter opens and closes with rain pouring on Flanders fields (clue: Flemish) creating an expanse of mud. Abruptly the chapter launches into Jims thoughts on the war and explores Jim past experience with violence and cruelty. The two experiences that Jims thinks about are the death of his brother and trapped kestrel, a type of bird. Jim’s younger brother fell backwards into a harvester while he was supervising. Even in this gruesome retelling birds manage to find a way into young Jim’s life, his younger brother’s scream though akin to, a new kind of bird. This tragedy is never talked about in the family. This is the first time explicitly we venture into Jims past and it shows that Jim is no stranger to violence. The second recount is of Jims favourite topic birds. Whilst freeing a kestrel trapped by the key of a sardine can the kestrel keeps pecking at Jim, unable to differentiate between “kindness and cruelty”. After being released it was only able to flop around. An Jim muses that even in this sunlight, in a positive place that violence and cruelty can occur . He then goes on to question what can stand against this violence and cruelty both found in everyday life and war. A poignant part of the chapter is when Jim thinks rather depressingly about the war prophesising that it will take a new name and cover the world, eventually consuming all the young men of the world moving onto those whom they are shielding from the war, the elderly, women and children. The chapter then starts to reflect Jims old life. An old man is drawn as a parallel to Ms Harcourt, their refusal to accept that the situation is limiting inciting familiarity from Jim. This makes Jim begin to cling to his old life via the birds on the battle fields. We see a variety of birds including Greylag Geese. He continues to document them throughout the chapter. Time jumps forward to October, in autumn where once again the mud bookends the Chapter.
Analysis
Jim is filled with "a fearful vision" when he begins to believe that the war "would go on forever'. That it would adopt a "different name, (and) would go on growing out from here till the whole earth was involved'. The war and the cruelty seem to be endless to him which mirrors the violent death of his brother that has been a life long chip on his shoulder that he can never shake. We can believe that he ultimately fears that the same will happen with the effects of the war, that they too will be never ending, and over time the world has recovered from war but its causalities and the cruelty are still reflected on and carried in history today.
The event with his brother enables him to resist defeat as he is forever trying to right that wrong that he has so heavily carried with him all this time. His mother always blamed him for what happened and could never look at him the same, their relationship was completely damaged after the accident.
"He had need been able to talk to her of it and had died looking past him to the face of the younger boy; and still they hadn't talked."
The Kestrel holds and interesting meaning for Jim, as he projects all his sorrow and pain into this situation of the bird who had been submitted to such cruelty. As he tries to help the bird is hands were 'torn by the bird, which couldn't distinguish between kindness and more cruelty, and afterwards when it flapped away he had sat with his clouded hands between his knees and thought of his brother.'
Jim accepts the wounds as a sort of punishment, believing that he has to endure it all to make up for the purely violent death his brother unfortunately suffered. This instance sparks his desire to never accept defeat especially in cases where he can help the less fortunate, as we can believe he is trying to correct as many wrongs to try make his own right again.
Chapter 15
The chapter describes Ashley's life on the front line as an officer and his observations of the crumpling civilisation that they pass through. "There were so many worlds. They were all continuous with one another and went on simultaneously". This sentence describes the split within a nation and ultimately the globe during the war time. It gives the sense of a great distance that Ashley and his troops have traveled and puts into perspective how the war effected such a vast number of people in such extreme ways.
What is interesting is much like the previous chapter, Ashley also see a local preparing for life beyond the war, resinating questions in Ashley as to if this man believed 'the coming battle was the end and that he night soon need of hoe?". The concept that these people believe there is life after the war, that they have this hope, even whilst they live in broken villages surrounded by violence puzzles him. But unlike Jim, Ashley remains very calm, he takes the time to absorb his surroundings and further reflect on his and his troops purpose in the broader scheme.
The chapter then takes a turn "The men, scarily believing they could be walking upright at last, and in daylight, in a place where they had always gone on their bellies by night,…"
Nicknames in the war are a way of reinventing yourself. As all the men, from different backgrounds 'cattlemen, clerks, plumbers', came together over a common desire for survival, the unify was important. He sees that 'it was't simply the uniform' that each man's 'personal qualities had been removed' and this was because 'it was a guarantee that they would, one day, cease to be soldiers and go back to being…' their old selves.
Even Ashley had found that he had taken on a new persona of the officer, keeping his head and 'an eye out for his men'. Over his time in the war, he had seen many men 'whose luck wasn't as good as his own, go down', he looked after them as best as he could but he knew that they were part of 'some general's larger place, 're-enforcements', and would soon be 'casualties'.' The use of these military terms in quotations add this indication of mockery as Ashley knows that the men in his troop are being sent out to die and these terms are used by the men in charged to dance around the truth because in all honesty, they knew it all was majorly inhumane.
Despite his rank, he comes to this understanding that all men involved in the war share the common factor that it will change all of them. The war had "remade' him, and like the others, it was 'not forever, but in a way he would never entirely outgrow.'