First World War

The First World War is a crucial part of the novel’s remembered past: it disrupts families and employment, and it enters the present through Alexander Bonaparte Cust’s account of a head wound, seizures, and lapses in awareness. The war gives context to these consequences, but the narrative does not present it as a complete explanation of either Cust’s condition or the crimes for which he is suspected.

Family disruption and loss

A conversation about Alice Ascher’s past recalls the difficulties she and Franz Ascher faced during the war. Alice later left him permanently in 1922, when they were living in London, and returned to Hampshire to escape him. Her separation is one example of the war’s place in a longer history of domestic hardship, though the account does not detail precisely how wartime conditions affected their marriage.

Mary Drower’s family history also carries the war’s losses. Of Alice’s nine siblings, only three lived to adulthood; Mary says that her uncle Tom was killed in the war. Her uncle Harry went to South America and was never heard from again, while Mary’s mother had died. These details make the wartime past part of the small surviving family circle around Alice, rather than a distant historical backdrop.

Cust’s account of service and illness

Cust describes his experience of the war in markedly different terms from the young man who dismisses wars. He says he enjoyed the period of service he experienced because, for the first time, he felt like a man equal to others: everyone, as he puts it, was in the same position. The sense of belonging ended when he received a slight wound to the head. According to Cust, the military then discovered that he had fits and discharged him.

Cust says he had already known of occasional lapses in which he was unsure what he was doing, and that he had fallen down once or twice. He nevertheless believes that his symptoms did not justify his discharge. Afterward, he worked as a clerk. He says he earned reasonably well for a time, but was repeatedly passed over for promotion and struggled increasingly, especially when the economic slump came. He eventually accepted a stocking-sales job offering salary and commission because his clerk’s wages had scarcely been enough to support him while maintaining the appearance expected of his work.

The war as an explanation—and a contested one

Cust’s war service becomes part of how he explains himself to others. In one conversation, he agrees hesitantly when a young man suggests that some people have been unwell since the war, then says that the war unsettled him and that his head has never been right. He describes severe headaches and says that at times he hardly knows what he is doing. The novel presents these as Cust’s own statements, not as an independent diagnosis of what caused his condition.

The distinction matters when Dr Thompson and the investigators consider whether Cust could have committed acts without knowing about them. Thompson confirms that Cust is epileptic and discusses the possibility of an epileptic person acting during somnambulism without awareness, while also noting the qualification that such an action must not run contrary to the person’s waking will. He rejects this as an adequate account of the murders, however: in his view, the letters show premeditation and careful planning. The narrative thus separates a medical possibility from the evidence of deliberate preparation.

Historical period and narrative function

The war’s effects are neither confined to the battlefield nor identical for every character. For the Aschers, the account links wartime difficulty to a troubled marriage and eventual separation; for Mary Drower’s family, it includes the death of an uncle. For Cust, service briefly offers a sense of equality before a head wound and the discovery of his fits lead to discharge, followed by constrained civilian prospects.

That history also complicates the reader’s assessment of Cust without resolving it on its own. His reported lapses and seizures help explain why he is vulnerable to suspicion and why questions of awareness arise, while the letters, as Thompson argues, point toward planning. The First World War therefore supplies essential personal and social context, but the novel leaves the question of responsibility to the evidence surrounding the murders rather than treating wartime illness as proof of innocence.