Character guide

Sylvia Tietjens

major

Also known as Sylvia, Tietjens, Private Smith

Sylvia moves through the war's home front as a force of elegant, patient malice, so thoroughly in command of gossip that even General Campion's judgment of her husband seems bent by her influence. She is estranged yet never absent, refusing divorce, refusing release, and refusing to let Tietjens be understood by anyone but her. Her power is the novel's quiet engine: she makes his honor look like guilt, and his silence look like confession.

Valentine Wannop

major

Also known as Valentine, Wannop, Val

Valentine stands between two worlds on Armistice Day: the emptied school where she teaches and the seething city beyond, where she intends to find Tietjens and make a life with him. Her longing has refined her face and hardened her nerve; she is willing to be called "marital" by gossips and to battle a houseful of voices to reach him. She matters because she is the future Tietjens is trying to walk toward, and the reason he finally refuses to be a perpetual second-in-command.

Christopher Tietjens

major

Also known as Tietjens, Xtopher Tietjens, Tietjen, Major Tietjens, Fat Man Tietjens

Tietjens commands a ragtime battalion with the same exacting conscience he once brought to his estate and his marriage, watching a marksman fire into invisibility with a mathematician's calm while his own reputation is picked off from behind. He is a Younger Son, a Hamlet of the trenches, and a man who has decided at last that he wants something and is prepared to take it. His early arc is the slow, painful conversion of a man of duty into a man of desire.

Edith Ethel Duchemin

supporting

Also known as Edith Ethel, Ethel

Edith Ethel has married her way into a title and now traffics in the social verdicts that decide who is respectable and who is finished. She is the source of the rumor that Tietjens and Valentine have had a years-long liaison, a story that follows him from drawing room to trench. She matters because she shows how the war's home front wages its own campaigns, and how a well-placed sentence can do what shells cannot.

Nancy Truefitt

supporting

Also known as Nancy, Tietjens

Nancy moves through the novel's domestic and social spaces, close enough to Sylvia to see how the Tietjens marriage is managed from within. She is young, observant, and not yet hardened, which makes her a useful witness to the ways the family's women maneuver around Christopher. Her presence sharpens the sense that the war's battles are fought as much in drawing rooms as in trenches.

General Lord Edward Campion

supporting

Also known as Ted, Campion, old Campion, General Campion

Campion is a superb regular soldier and a political force, the kind of man whose reorganisation of an army is impeccable and whose personal judgments are not. He dresses Tietjens down in a communication trench on what may be Sylvia's word, then handsomely takes it back while quietly denying him the decoration and command that would have restored him. He matters because he embodies the establishment that Tietjens serves and that Sylvia can bend, and because his favor is as dangerous as his displeasure.

Captain Mckechnie

supporting

Also known as Mckechnie, the Colonel

Mckechnie belongs to the battalion's officer world, the mess and dugout hierarchy where reputations are made by gossip as much as by competence. He is the source of the rumor that the Colonel hates Tietjens, yet the Colonel himself treats Tietjens with monumental deference and quiet professional respect, leaving Tietjens to revise everything Mckechnie told him. His unreliability as a witness matters early, because it forces both Tietjens and the reader to distrust the easy story and read the men themselves.

Miss Wanostrocht

supporting

Miss Wanostrocht runs the girls' school where Valentine teaches physical instruction, and she sits at the center of the small storm of gossip that follows Valentine's name. She once sat at the feet of Valentine's father and holds Valentine in real esteem, yet she is also the person who relayed Lady Macmaster's talk of a long liaison and of Valentine intending to live with Tietjens 'maritally.' Her hesitation and her hooked, old-fashioned hands make her a barometer of respectable opinion — the pressure Valentine must decide whether to defy.

Lieutenant Aranjuez

supporting

Also known as Aranjuez, little Aranjuez

Aranjuez serves under Tietjens in the emptied, over-tidy trenches that feel to him like Pompeii — square-cut, silent, and dead. Frightened out of his life from the first, he has fastened onto Tietjens as a child clings to an omnipotent father, and Tietjens, who needs that worship, lets him. His small flame Nancy Truefitt waits in a teashop at Bailleul, and his fear of losing his eyes — of becoming a man no girl would look at — gives the battalion's abstract war a boy's very particular terror.

Lady Macmaster

supporting

Also known as Macmaster

Lady Macmaster moves through the novel's drawing rooms and corridors as a woman who has married her way up and intends to keep climbing, trading in the currency of other people's reputations. It is she who tells Miss Wanostrocht that Tietjens and Valentine have had a liaison for years and that Valentine means to live with him 'maritally,' a report that reaches Mrs. Wannop and shapes how the world reads the lovers. Her gossip is not idle decoration; it is the mechanism by which private feeling becomes public judgment, and it shadows Valentine's every step.

Sir Vincent Macmaster

supporting

Also known as Vincent Macmaster, Vincent, little Vincent Macmaster

Macmaster is the friend from before the war — the man of letters who has made his name, married Edith Ethel, and accepted the knighthood that Tietjens' world would find faintly absurd. He is one of the few names that comes to Tietjens when he wonders who could be talking with Valentine for so long, and Tietjens trusts that Macmaster would not harm her. His respectability and his social ascent throw Tietjens' own stripped-down position into relief, and his presence in the novel's background keeps the pre-war world of letters and ambition alive against the trenches.

Lance-Corporal Duckett

minor

Also known as Duckett, the boy Duckett

A young soldier in Tietjens' battalion.

Lieutenant Constantine

minor

Also known as Constantine

A junior officer in the battalion.

Sergeant Cutts

minor

A non-commissioned officer in Tietjens' company.

Mrs. Wannop

minor

Valentine's mother, a widow and intellectual.

Cockshott

minor

A minor character, possibly a soldier or servant.

Brother Mark

minor

Also known as Brother

A religious figure, possibly a monk or brother.

Notting

minor

A minor character, possibly a soldier.

Captain Gibbs

minor

Also known as Gibbs

An officer serving alongside Tietjens.

Gerald Duckworth

minor

Also known as Duckworth

A publisher and acquaintance of the Tietjens circle.

Pettigul

minor

Also known as Pettigul One

A soldier in Tietjens' unit.

Perowne

minor

An officer and acquaintance, often mentioned in passing.

Terence

minor

A minor character, possibly a servant or soldier.

General Puffles

minor

Also known as poor old Puffles

An elderly general, a figure of mild ridicule.

Miss Eleanor

minor

A teacher or governess in the Wannop household.

Sister Anne

minor

Also known as Nancy

A nun or nurse, possibly a minor religious figure.

Old Mr. Tietjens

minor

Also known as Mr. Tietjens

Christopher's father, a traditional Yorkshire gentleman.

Slocombe

minor

A minor character, possibly a soldier.

Bemerton

minor

A minor character, possibly a soldier or officer.

Miss Wannop

minor

Another daughter of Mrs. Wannop, Valentine's sister.