A nice passage from Ian McEwan’s short story, “The Use of Poetry,” in the December 7 New Yorker – about a character who served in World War II, a “meat-and-two veg man who despised garlic and the smell of olive oil,” and who became a non-demonstrative father after the war ended:
He had had a long war, serving as a junior officer in the infantry in Dunkirk, North Africa, and Sicily, and then, as a lieutenant colonel, in the D Day landings, where he won a medal. He had arrived at the concentration camp of Belsen a week after it was liberated, and was stationed in Berlin for eight months after the war ended. Like many men of his generation, he did not speak about his experiences and he relished the ordinariness of postwar life, its tranquil routines, its tidiness and rising material well-being, and, above all, its lack of danger—everything that would later appear stifling to those born in the first years of the peace.
(Hat tip: Jewish Current Wife)