Strange Meeting (book)

Strange Meeting is a novel by Susan Hill about the First World War. The title of the book is taken from a poem by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen.

Part I

• “He thought I want to go back for there was nothing for him here”

• “Then he thought that he could hear the thudding of the guns. But there were so many noises now, imagined or remembered”

• “He tried not to count over all the possible ways in which, after tomorrow, he was going to die”

• “She was like the others. Understood nothing”

• “He knew that when he left here, he would not be able to believe that it would all continue to exist”

• “…pieces of a past belonging to some stranger”

• “There is no one that knows. Don’t go”

• “He thought, we need him, he has something that none of us have”

• “He was almost beside himself in a rush of dread on Barton’s behalf”

Part II

• “Had seen that Barton has appalled by the sight of Feurvy, as he had not been by the sight of the dead pilot in the crashed plane”

• “We can imagine it thats all”

• “But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen?”

• “But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly”

• “They seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago”

• “John says one of the most difficult things is getting used to new faces, new faces ”

• “Oh it was like meeting ghosts”

• “This agony of feeling on behalf of someone else was entirely new to him”

• “His initial excitement had gone long since”

• “He wanted to take the body … and dig a grave for him… for would that have been more purposeful, would he have done the first thing of vague since coming into this war?”

• “Isn’t that why you read him to try and make some sense of all this?”

“The War? I shouldn’t think that’s possible”

• “I’ve been trying…give it a point and purpose when there are none”

• “That day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing. I’d become entirely callous”

• “You can’t feel everyman’s death”

• “I’m afraid of myself, of what I’m becoming”

• “I love you John”

Part III

• “We are drones not fighting men”

• “John says he may have a head to lose but certainly not a heart”

• “He can’t wait to get his bayonet into someone, which I find very chilling, and more so because he is basically a nice chap”

• “the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth”

• “It is the constant possibility of accident which erodes ones courage most of all”

• “There will never be another war”

“Men could never be so stupid, John! After all this!

• “We had better not start building castles in Spain”

• “The letters were so full of formal expressions of love and sympathy”