I loved this book. Barker is brilliant. Now for my mental health I need to not read about war or death for a good long while.
Sassoon survived. Owen died. Rivers lived only a few years after the war. But, Billy! Barker's character:
As the book ends, Billy is shot and loses consciousness. His survival is ambiguous. Caught up in the emotion of reading, I longed to know if he lived or died. A few hours later, I reflected that ambiguity was the right artistic choice. Billy is an Everyman, and as such, he needs to have both options available to end his story arc.
Lots of men came back from the war, and their survival and the struggles and recoveries and tragedies of the post-war stages of their lives are important and interesting. So that had to have happened to Billy the Everyman. He married Sarah and fathered some children, probably. He's a pretty f-ed up guy. Would his parenting challenges have been defined mostly by his war recovery, his having survived so much abuse in his own childhood, or by a combination of those, or another factor, such as his relationship with Sarah? Would a settled-at-home Billy be faithful to Sarah? Would Rivers' strategies to "cure" Billy enough to get him back to France stick with him and help him heal post-war?
But so so so many men died in that battle or of their wounds. Billy Everyman had to have died then too. It was an interesting choice that Barker wrote Billy's story as his journal when he returned to France (and not before). It's an echo of Wilfred Owen, leaving his poetry and his letters home to tell his war story. Billy at war is doomed (anthem for doomed youth); he is "mate", Rivers' Melanesian friends' word meaning dead though not dead yet. Billy is one of the titular ghosts.