The Prussian Officer and Other Stories

Summary

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up. The title story follows a regiment marching through the heat of southern Germany toward the Alps. The Captain, a proud, cold aristocrat of about forty, becomes fixed on his young orderly, Schöner, whose easy physical freedom provokes him; unable to admit what draws him, he torments the youth, kicks him and strikes his face with a belt. On manoeuvres the orderly, bruised and feverish, breaks the Captain's neck in a wood, then wanders in the heat, hallucinating, until he collapses within sight of the mountains and dies in hospital; the two bodies lie side by side in the mortuary. In The Thorn in the Flesh, Bachmann, a young soldier at Metz, is seized by vertigo on a scaling ladder, loses control of his bladder, accidentally strikes his sergeant, and hides with Emilie, a servant in a baron's house, where they become lovers before he is arrested. Daughters of the Vicar contrasts two sisters in a poor vicarage: Mary marries the small, frail, learned clergyman Mr Massy for security, while Louisa chooses the young collier Alfred Durant, whose mother dies of a tumour; Louisa washes his back after his shift, they declare their love, and they plan to go to Canada. A Fragment of Stained Glass is a vicar's tale of a medieval serf who burns his master's stables, flees with the miller's daughter Martha, and breaks red glass from the abbey window; The Shades of Spring brings Syson back to Hilda, the farm girl he left, who now loves the gamekeeper; in Second Best Frances, disappointed in love, kills a mole and accepts Tom Smedley. In The Shadow in the Rose Garden a young wife on holiday discovers that her first love, a soldier said to have died after sunstroke in Africa, is alive and deranged, and her husband learns of her past. Goose Fair sets a hosier's daughter, Lois, against a fire at her fiancé's family factory; The White Stocking turns on Elsie Whiston's flirtation with her former employer and her husband's violent jealousy; A Sick Collier shows Willy Horsepool, injured in the pit, raving during the national strike while his wife fears for his compensation; The Christening gathers a collier family round an illegitimate baby and the old father's prayer. The closing story, Odour of Chrysanthemums, follows Elizabeth Bates waiting for her husband Walter, sure he is drinking, until he is brought home dead from a fall in the pit, and she and his mother wash his body.

Plot or Argument

• The Prussian Officer

  On a summer march the Captain's suppressed obsession with his orderly turns to cruelty; the orderly kills him in a wood and dies of exposure and fever, seeing the mountains.

• The Thorn in the Flesh

  Bachmann's vertigo and humiliation on the ramparts at Metz drive him to desert to Emilie's room, where he finds love and self-respect before the soldiers take him.

• Daughters of the Vicar

  In the poor vicarage at Aldecross, Mary marries the clever, frail Mr Massy; Louisa breaks with her family's pride to love the collier Alfred Durant after his mother's death.

• A Fragment of Stained Glass

  The vicar of Beauvale reads a friend his tale of a medieval serf who, flogged, burns his master's stables, hides in the woods with the miller's daughter Martha, and breaks off a piece of the abbey's red glass.

• The Shades of Spring

  Syson, now married, revisits the farm and woods of his youth and finds that Hilda has given herself to the gamekeeper Pervin.

• Second Best

  Frances, back from Liverpool and jilted, kills a mole as Tom Smedley wishes, and so accepts him as her second-best suitor.

• The Shadow in the Rose Garden

  On a seaside holiday a young wife meets her former lover, an officer broken by sunstroke, in a rose garden; her confession wounds her husband.

• Goose Fair

  During Nottingham's Goose Fair a factory owned by Will Selby's family burns; Lois's love for Will is tested by suspicion and by a goose girl.

• The White Stocking

  Elsie Whiston receives anonymous valentines from her old employer Sam Adams, dances with him at a party, and provokes her husband's jealous blow.

• A Sick Collier

  Willy Horsepool, crippled by a pit accident, frets and raves during the strike; his wife Lucy fears that talk of madness will stop his compensation.

• The Christening

  Hilda Rowbotham, a schoolmistress with heart disease, and her family gather for the christening of her sister Emma's child; their old father prays aloud over the baby and his own failures.

• Odour of Chrysanthemums

  Elizabeth Bates waits with her children for her collier husband, who is brought home dead from a fall of rock; washing his body, she sees how far apart they had lived.

Characters

• The Captain, Prussian officer

  A proud, rigid aristocrat whose half-admitted attraction to his orderly turns into cruelty.

• Schöner, the Captain's orderly

  A young soldier of instinct and quiet freedom who is driven to kill his tormentor.

• Bachmann, young soldier at Metz

  Shamed by his fear of heights, he flees to the woman he loves.

• Emilie, servant girl

  A devout, shy servant in a baron's house who shelters Bachmann.

• Louisa Lindley, vicar's younger daughter

  Proud and passionate, she chooses a collier over her family's respectability.

• Mary Lindley, vicar's elder daughter

  Marries Mr Massy, a frail but wealthy clergyman, from a sense of duty.

• Alfred Durant, collier

  A former sailor and miner whose reserve breaks down after his mother's death.

• Elizabeth Bates, collier's wife

  The central figure of Odour of Chrysanthemums, waiting for her husband and then laying him out.

• Walter Bates, collier

  Elizabeth's hard-drinking husband, killed underground.

• Willy Horsepool, injured collier

  A once vigorous young miner made helpless and wild by injury and pain.

• Elsie Whiston, young wife

  Lively and vain, she provokes her husband Ted with the white stocking.

• Hilda Rowbotham, schoolmistress

  An ailing elder daughter who tries to keep her family respectable.

Lessons

• Authority and the hidden passions

  In the title story the Captain uses his rank to act out a feeling he will not name, and the orderly, who has no words for what is happening, answers with violence. Lawrence shows how a passion denied can become cruelty, and how cruelty in a rigid hierarchy has no outlet but disaster. The doctors' silence at the end extends the concealment beyond death.

  • What in the orderly provokes the Captain, and why can the Captain not admit it?
  • Why do the doctors say nothing about the bruises?
  • Does the story present the orderly as guilty, as a victim, or both?

• Marriage seen too late

  In Odour of Chrysanthemums Elizabeth has spent the evening angry at a husband she believes is drinking; when he is carried in dead, washing his body shows her that they had never truly known each other. Lawrence makes the laying-out of the dead an act of recognition. The flowers that marked her wedding and his drunkenness now fill the room where he lies.

  • How does Elizabeth's anger in the first half of the story prepare for her grief in the second?
  • What does she realise as she washes Walter's body?
  • Why does Lawrence give the mother-in-law a different grief from the wife's?

• Choosing life over respectability

  Daughters of the Vicar sets two kinds of marriage side by side. Mary chooses security and duty with Mr Massy and holds to it with stern self-sacrifice; Louisa chooses a working man she loves and defies her parents' pride. The story weighs both choices seriously.

  • Why does Mary marry Mr Massy, and how does Lawrence present her sacrifice?
  • What happens between Louisa and Alfred in the scene of washing his back?

• The mining country

  Half the collection is set in Midland pit villages: the colliery headstocks, the Union pay at the chapel, the danger underground, the compensation money, the strong Nottinghamshire dialect. Lawrence, a miner's son, renders this world from within, with both its hardness and its tenderness.

  • What do A Sick Collier and Odour of Chrysanthemums show about what a pit accident meant to a family?
  • How does dialect change the way you hear the characters?

Context

The stories come from the years just before the First World War. Lawrence grew up in the Nottinghamshire coalfield and taught school in Croydon before turning to writing full time; in 1912 he went to Germany with Frieda Weekley and spent time in Metz, then a garrison city of the German Empire, and in Bavaria, which gave him the setting of the two soldier stories. A Sick Collier refers to the national coal strike of 1912. The collection appeared in the first months of the war, in which the Prussian officer had become a figure of British wartime feeling.

Composition

Odour of Chrysanthemums, the earliest in conception, was published in the English Review in 1911 after much revision; the title story appeared in the same magazine in 1914 as Honour and Arms. Lawrence revised nearly all the stories again for the book, which Duckworth published in late 1914; Edward Garnett, his editor and adviser, chose the title The Prussian Officer.

Reception

Reviewers noted the stories' intensity and physical vividness, and some objected to their frankness. Odour of Chrysanthemums and The Prussian Officer are now among the most anthologized English short stories of the century, and the collection is read as an early landmark of modernist short fiction, close in date to Joyce's Dubliners (1914).

Comparisons

• joyce-portrait-of-the-artist

  Joyce and Lawrence, born three years apart, both wrote in 1914-16 out of provincial upbringings, Dublin Catholic and Midlands Nonconformist, and both pressed fiction toward inner consciousness.

• all-quiet-on-the-western-front

  Remarque's German soldiers suffer the tyranny of the drill-corporal Himmelstoss; Lawrence's Captain shows a peacetime version of the same abuse of rank.

• the-metamorphosis

  Kafka's Gregor Samsa and Lawrence's Willy Horsepool are both breadwinners made helpless, and both stories watch the family's fear of what the invalid will cost.

• woolf-to-the-lighthouse

  Woolf and Lawrence both render a marriage from inside the wife's mind, though Woolf's Mrs Ramsay reaches understanding in life and Elizabeth Bates only at her husband's death.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The heat, thirst and distant mountains in The Prussian Officer, and the orderly's last sight of them in Part III.
• The scene on the ramparts at Metz in The Thorn in the Flesh, and how Bachmann's shame changes in Emilie's room.
• The scene in Daughters of the Vicar where Louisa washes Alfred's back.
• The chrysanthemums in Odour of Chrysanthemums, from the garden path to the parlour where the body lies.
• How often a character's body tells the truth that speech conceals, in the title story, A Sick Collier and Odour of Chrysanthemums.

Key terms and names

Orderly

A soldier assigned as personal servant to an officer; the title story turns on this close and unequal relation.

Collier

A coal miner; most of the English stories are set in Nottinghamshire mining villages.

Pit

The coal mine, whose dangers kill Walter Bates and cripple Willy Horsepool.

Compensation

Payment to an injured worker, which Lucy Horsepool fears will be stopped if her husband is thought mad.

Laying out

The washing and dressing of the dead at home, done by Elizabeth Bates and her mother-in-law.

Dialect

The Nottinghamshire speech of Lawrence's miners and their families, such as the forms dunna and canna.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does the Captain mistreat his orderly, and how does the orderly finally respond?
2. Comprehension What does Elizabeth Bates believe about her husband's absence at the start of Odour of Chrysanthemums, and how is she proved wrong?
3. Comprehension Why does Mary marry Mr Massy, and why does Louisa refuse that kind of marriage?
4. Interpretation What does the title story suggest happens to a feeling that a person refuses to acknowledge?
5. Interpretation Why does Lawrence end the title story with the two bodies side by side?
6. Interpretation In Odour of Chrysanthemums, what does Elizabeth mean by seeing that she had refused her husband as himself?
7. Big Question Can two people share a home and a family for years and still not know each other? What would it take to know another person?
8. Big Question When authority is used to satisfy a private passion, who is responsible for the harm that follows?

Faith Connections

• 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 (Scripture)

  Lawrence takes the title The Thorn in the Flesh from Paul's account of a weakness given to humble him; Bachmann's vertigo is a bodily weakness that shames him and leads him to a new kind of strength.

• Genesis 2:24 (Scripture)

  They shall be one flesh: Elizabeth Bates discovers over her husband's body that their marriage never became the union it was meant to be.

• 1 Corinthians 15:26 (Scripture)

  The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death: Lawrence's last sentence names death as Elizabeth's ultimate master, which Paul declares will itself be overcome.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Across the stories, people live by roles, as officer, vicar's daughter, respectable wife, provider, while their deeper feelings go unspoken. When the role suppresses the feeling, it returns as cruelty, illness or estrangement; when it is acknowledged, as with Louisa and Alfred, it brings a harder but truer life. Therefore the collection argues that the truth of a person must be recognised, often too late, and sometimes only in death.

Rhetorical device: symbolic motif. In Odour of Chrysanthemums the flowers recur on the path, in Elizabeth's apron and in the parlour, and her daughter's question about them leads to her speech on her wedding and his drunkenness.

Debate: Resolved: that Louisa makes a wiser choice than Mary in Daughters of the Vicar.

Memory Work

She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.

Writing Prompts

Essay: In the title story and in Odour of Chrysanthemums a death reveals the truth of a relationship. Compare what each death reveals and to whom.

Comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front: Compare the Captain's treatment of his orderly with Himmelstoss's drilling of Paul and his friends. What does each author suggest about authority in the German army?

Medical Lens

Several stories turn on the body under strain. The title story traces heat exhaustion, fever and delirium in the beaten orderly, with a detailed sequence of dissociation and hallucination before collapse, and ends with the hospital doctors' silence over his bruises. In The Thorn in the Flesh, Bachmann's vertigo and involuntary loss of bladder control on the ramparts are rendered as a physiological panic that becomes a public shame. A Sick Collier gives a close account of a pit injury, weeks of pain in bed, delirium and violent raving, and the family's fear, under the compensation arrangements of the time, that a diagnosis of madness would end their payments. The Shadow in the Rose Garden describes an officer left deranged after sunstroke in Africa and living under a keeper. The Christening's schoolmistress has heart disease, and the vicar of Beauvale has a partial paralysis from an early illness. Odour of Chrysanthemums is a careful portrait of a mining death, probably suffocation after a fall of rock, and of the home laying-out of the dead by wife and mother. Modern labels for these conditions would be interpretive.

• The Prussian Officer, III-IV

  The orderly wanders feverish and hallucinating in the heat, collapses, and dies in hospital; the doctors notice the bruises and say nothing.

  Altered States WAR Wounds Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• The Thorn in the Flesh

  Bachmann's vertigo on the scaling ladder and his loss of bladder control before the company.

  Neurosis Anxiety
• A Sick Collier

  Willy Horsepool's pit injury, six weeks of pain, and his raving outburst during the strike; his wife's fear for the compensation.

  Pain Madness Psychosis
• The Shadow in the Rose Garden

  The former lover, deranged after sunstroke, recognised by the wife in the garden where his keeper watches him.

  Madness Psychosis
• Odour of Chrysanthemums

  Walter Bates is brought home dead from the pit; his wife and mother wash and dress the body in the parlour.

  Death Dying Grief Alcohol

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Mark every reference to heat, sun and the mountains in The Prussian Officer and explain how landscape carries what the characters cannot say.

• Essay

  Compare Elizabeth Bates in Odour of Chrysanthemums with Lucy Horsepool in A Sick Collier as two miners' wives facing disaster at home.

• Fiction

  Write the conversation between the two hospital doctors after they see the orderly's bruises.

Further Reading

• Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

  The mining family of Lawrence's youth in novel form.

• Dubliners, James Joyce

  The other landmark story collection of 1914.

• D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912, John Worthen