The Rough Road

James Marmaduke Trevor, a coddled young aesthete his cousin nicknamed Doggie, has been raised in the cathedral-town comfort of Durdlebury to be gentle, ornamental, and largely useless. When the First World War arrives, the pressure to enlist closes in on him: an anonymous white feather from the girls of the town, a fiancee mortified to see him still in civilian clothes. Doggie fails at officer training and, too ashamed to go home beaten, enlists instead as an ordinary private and meets the war on its own hard terms. Written in 1918 while the fighting still raged, Locke’s novel rests on the notion that the trenches, for all their horror, could remake a wasted man. It reads as a period portrait of pre-war English softness and the ordeal that burns it away.