The Boy I Love

Stephen, aged nineteen, and Danny, a year younger, are passionately drawn to each other during military preparations out in France for the doomed battle of the Somme in 1916. Stephen is a second lieutenant, recently wounded but now back with his regiment, and Danny is a cheerful private. They both experience needless aggravation inflicted on them and their companions by the superiors on their own side. Their chief bugbear, complete with evil black moustache, is Captain Beddowes. A bully and trouble-maker, he also suspects that there is a growing relationship between the two younger men and is intent on revealing their secret.

William Hussey spent three years writing this book, and his grasp of detail never falters. The final battle scenes are justifiably gut-wrenching with one more spiteful domestic action after the fighting is over yet to come. Describing homosexual love in young adult fiction at that time and place is still comparatively rare, and readers will learn a lot about what now seems quite unexceptional but which at the time was considered by many worse than death itself.

So much, so admirable. But this is also quite a long story, and while its earnestness is never in doubt it can be rather heavy going.  The two men have all the emotions of youth but when together can sound positively middle-aged.  Their surrounding comrades never quite come to life, and Captain Beddowes is too repetitively villainous by half. Prose inevitably struggles to get across the full horrors of combat compared with the way that film can now bring it to such unforgettable life. But on the credit side this novel remains achingly sincere, and anyone reading it will certainly learn much more about a disastrous war.