The Warm Hands of Ghosts

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is steeped in the historical context of World War I. Britain joined the war in August 1914. As such, all of Britain’s imperial holdings also joined, including Canada, India, and Australia. The United States, by contrast, remained neutral for the bulk of the war and did not officially join the effort until April 1917.

The novel takes place during and after the Third Battle of Ypres in November 1917. This occurred at one of the most contested sections of the Western Front: Flanders, Belgium, between the cities of Ypres and Passchendaele. The Allied forces held the Ypres Salient (a salient is a fortified section of terrain pushed forward into enemy territory like a peninsula, with the enemy surrounding it on three sides) for most of the war. In the Third Battle of Ypres in November 1917, the Allied forces charged over Passchendaele Ridge to overtake the German lines at enormous cost. However, between March and April 1918, the Germans began the counteroffensive Operation Michael, forcing the Allied troops to retreat.

One historical tragedy that indirectly resulted from the war serves as the backstory for the novel’s protagonist, Laura: the Halifax Explosion of 1917. The explosion resulted from the collision of the SS Imo and the SS Mont-Blanc, the latter of which was transporting TNT and other volatile munitions. The blast, which caused more than 1,700 deaths, was at the time the largest explosion caused by human activity and has since been surpassed only by nuclear blasts.

In the novel, the unprecedented scale of the Halifax Explosion’s devastation introduces the broader trauma of WWI, which was similarly unparalleled at the time. The conflict witnessed the first systematic use of chemical warfare, including toxic agents such as mustard gas, as well as the introduction of machine guns and tanks. These technological developments contributed to a death toll that decimated the population of young men in many European countries; during the Battle of Somme, one of the war’s bloodiest episodes, more than 50,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in a single day. All told, more than 8 million combatants died, and the civilian death toll was likely even higher—around 13 million. This carnage had a profound impact on the public psyche, leading many to feel the war represented a total rupture with prior human history. Arden nods to this with her exploration of War and the End of the World, showing how people of the time might have processed such cataclysmic events.