In Memoriam
Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last works. It tells the story of American psychologist Dick Diver and his wife, the rich and unstable Nicole. Set largely in France between the years 1925 and 1935, the book portrays a cast of wealthy, idle, sophisticated and "troubled" characters. Given that this is the Europe of the interwar years, Fitzgerald also addresses the Great War. Part Three, "Casualties", opens with a scene "beneath the dingy sky" of Beaumont-Hamel, where Dick, Rosemary and Abe North, have come to view the battlefields. Because two empires had left their dead "like a million bloody rugs" on the Battle of the Somme landscape, Dick tells Abe that Europeans will never again commit such slaughter. He says:
"This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and the Italians weren't any good on this front. You have to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée and little cafés in Valance and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the marie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers.""General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five."
"No he didn't — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Württemberg and Westphalia. Why this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle."
After departing the battlefield, they wait for the train to Paris, standing in "faded weather like that of an old photograph", and leave "infinitesimal sections of Württembergers, Prussian Guards, Chasseurs Alpins, Manchester mill hands and Old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain." Note: The Somme offensive ended on 18 November 1916. British and French forces gained 12 kilometres of ground, the taking of which resulted in 420,000 British casualties, plus a further 200,000 French casualties. German casualties were estimated to run at 500,000.
