First World War

The First World War is a defining point in Arthur Hastings’s personal chronology: he remembers being wounded in 1916 and mistaking the end of his youth for the end of his life. Recalled from the perspective of a later, more desperate war, that earlier journey becomes the beginning of his friendship with Hercule Poirot and the violent events at Styles.

The war as a measure of time

Looking out at the flat Essex landscape from a train, Hastings asks himself why certain words can move a person so profoundly. His thoughts turn to a journey he had made long before, when he was a young wounded man returning from the war. At the time, he had felt—ridiculously, as he later judges it—that the best of life was over. The First World War remained, for him, simply the war, even as a second and more desperate conflict had since overtaken it.

The contrast is not only between two wars but between two understandings of the same life. In 1916, Hastings had thought himself old and mature. From the later vantage point, he sees how little he understood: his life was only then beginning. The memory reframes his youthful despair without denying the wound that produced it; what he had taken for an ending became the threshold of a much larger personal history.

The journey to Styles

Hastings recalls that he did not know where the journey would lead in the deeper sense. He thought he was going to visit his old friend John Cavendish, whose recently remarried mother had a country house called Styles. He expected only the pleasant renewal of old acquaintanceships. Instead, the visit soon drew him into the dark entanglements of a mysterious murder.

The First World War therefore stands at the start of a chain of events that Hastings could not foresee. His recollection links the wounded young man of 1916 to the later narrator who understands that the journey to Styles also brought him into the orbit of Hercule Poirot, whose influence would shape his life. A familiar train journey and an ordinary visit acquire their significance retrospectively: Hastings had set out expecting a reunion, not the beginning of a lasting partnership or an encounter with murder.

The war recalled at Styles

The memory is not confined to Hastings’s later reflections on the train. During his stay at Styles, Nurse Craven asks whether it is true that he had been there long ago, in the first war. Hastings confirms that it is, and she lowers her voice. Her question makes the earlier wartime visit present within the later setting, connecting the house not just to the murder that now occupies its guests but also to Hastings’s history as a wounded young man.

Taken together, the recollections give the war a double place in the narrative: it is a historical rupture that Hastings carries in memory, and the beginning of the personal path that leads to Styles. The later war sharpens that perspective, while the return to the same place makes the past recur in conversation. What Hastings once saw as the close of life becomes, in retrospect, its beginning.