Second World War

The Second World War is the present-day historical frame against which Arthur Hastings remembers his first journey to Styles and the events that shaped his life. Its contrast with 1916 turns the return journey into an act of temporal reckoning: the war Hastings once regarded as the defining catastrophe of his generation has been eclipsed by a second, more desperate one.

The War as a Frame for Memory

Looking out at the flat Essex landscape from a train, Hastings asks how long ago he made the same journey. He recalls that, wounded in the First World War, he had felt that the best of life was behind him. From the perspective of the Second World War, that judgment appears profoundly mistaken: the earlier conflict had seemed to close his future, when in fact his life was only beginning.

The Journey to Styles

The remembered journey had an ordinary purpose. Hastings was going to stay with his old friend John Cavendish at Styles, the country house of Cavendish’s recently remarried mother, expecting only to renew old acquaintances. He did not foresee that the visit would draw him into a mysterious murder—or that he was on his way to meet Hercule Poirot, whose influence would shape and mould his life. The later war gives this recollection its larger perspective, but the remembered events remain rooted in the personal turning point that began at Styles.

Historical Contrast and Narrative Perspective

The Second World War is presented through Hastings’s retrospective voice, not as a separate account of military events. Its importance lies in the compressed contrast between two wars and two versions of the narrator’s future: the wounded young man of 1916, who thought himself old and finished, and the older Hastings, who can see how little he understood about what lay ahead. The war’s appearance therefore enlarges the meaning of the return to Styles without displacing its intimate subject: the beginning of a friendship and of a life shaped by the mysteries that followed.