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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• The Thorn in the Flesh

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

• 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.

• The Shadow in the Rose Garden

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

• Odour of Chrysanthemums

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