Battlefields: Dear Billy - Part 1
Jan. 30th, 2014 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scans_dailyWhen writing about a subject that interests him, you can tell a marked difference in the style of Garth Ennis' comics. Less toilet humour and shocking things for the sake of being shocking, for example. As such a lot of his books based on military history tend to be a lot less "Ennis" than, say, his superhero work.
As such, I thought that I'd post some of his recentish series Battlefields, which revolves around various parts of the world during the Second World War. This story, 'Dear Billy', is a kind of love story about a British woman and a RAF pilot, the war crimes that befell them, and her... unhealthy means of coping with what happened to them.
The story is narrated by Carrie Sutton in the form of a letter to her lover Billy, and begins shortly after the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Carrie recounts how she and some other women were captured while trying to get to Java by boat, only to get captured, gangraped and machinegunned by Japanese soldiers. Carrie is the only one to survive, thanks to some passing airmen seeing her body floating in the ocean.
What follows is what happens when 1940's British values clash with PTSD, and it isn't pleasant.
Later, while making her rounds, Carrie overhears Billy describing what landed him in the hospital. It turns out that while he was out returning to his base on Java after a bombing run on some Japanese ships, he found out that the Imperial Japanese army had already advanced across the island... leading to his "gippy tummy" via getting bayoneted a dozen of so times in the stomach, thighs and arse. "Very nasty experience. Not recommended at all", as he puts it.
Billy then attempted to play dead until the soldiers left, before staggering to his base's medical unit in a dazed state, only to find that the rest of his squadron, wounded and nonwounded alike, had already been killed earlier by the Japanese soldiers. He was later rescued by a Dutch patrol, and after getting patched up he started flying raids against them again, only his insistance on doing it before he'd fully healed lead to his stomach trouble, hence his not appearing to be in as serious as condition as the other patients there.
Naturally hearing that Billy had undergone a similar event to her, even though he'd never told her due to wanting to "shield" her from the horrors of war, affects Carrie deeply. Making her think that Billy, out of all the people she'd met since her attack would understand what she's going through, that she wasn't alone.
Carrie begins to fall for the pilot, and wishes him well as he heads off to fight once again. Shortly afterwards, the guards are stepped up in the hospital as they've received an unexpected patient...
She smothers him.
As such, I thought that I'd post some of his recentish series Battlefields, which revolves around various parts of the world during the Second World War. This story, 'Dear Billy', is a kind of love story about a British woman and a RAF pilot, the war crimes that befell them, and her... unhealthy means of coping with what happened to them.
The story is narrated by Carrie Sutton in the form of a letter to her lover Billy, and begins shortly after the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Carrie recounts how she and some other women were captured while trying to get to Java by boat, only to get captured, gangraped and machinegunned by Japanese soldiers. Carrie is the only one to survive, thanks to some passing airmen seeing her body floating in the ocean.
What follows is what happens when 1940's British values clash with PTSD, and it isn't pleasant.
Later, while making her rounds, Carrie overhears Billy describing what landed him in the hospital. It turns out that while he was out returning to his base on Java after a bombing run on some Japanese ships, he found out that the Imperial Japanese army had already advanced across the island... leading to his "gippy tummy" via getting bayoneted a dozen of so times in the stomach, thighs and arse. "Very nasty experience. Not recommended at all", as he puts it.
Billy then attempted to play dead until the soldiers left, before staggering to his base's medical unit in a dazed state, only to find that the rest of his squadron, wounded and nonwounded alike, had already been killed earlier by the Japanese soldiers. He was later rescued by a Dutch patrol, and after getting patched up he started flying raids against them again, only his insistance on doing it before he'd fully healed lead to his stomach trouble, hence his not appearing to be in as serious as condition as the other patients there.
Naturally hearing that Billy had undergone a similar event to her, even though he'd never told her due to wanting to "shield" her from the horrors of war, affects Carrie deeply. Making her think that Billy, out of all the people she'd met since her attack would understand what she's going through, that she wasn't alone.
Carrie begins to fall for the pilot, and wishes him well as he heads off to fight once again. Shortly afterwards, the guards are stepped up in the hospital as they've received an unexpected patient...
She smothers him.
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