H.E. Bates Companion

Young boys excitedly play at battle during World War I in an industrial town like Bates's Rushden (see The Vanished World 73-74). Having vanquished the enemy and "killed" a prisoner of war, the narrator comes home to face a real death, that of a eighteen-year-old neighbor in battle. Baldwin (199) cites a letter in which Bates names this and two other tales as his favorite selections from the collection. In Argosy (December 1958), The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E.Bate's (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), H.E. Bates (1975), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).