What happens in Chapter 5 of How Many Miles to Babylon??
Chapter Five marks the turning point the novel has been quietly building toward: the war comes not as an abstract concept but as a pressing, bureaucratic reality. Alec Moore and Jerry Crowe, whose unlikely friendship has withstood the rigid class boundaries of their Irish Anglo-Protestant society, find themselves swept into enlistment together. Alec, pushed by his cold, demanding mother and the stifling expectations of his social class, signs up less out of patriotism and more from a desire to escape—from her, from the Big House, from a life that feels already predetermined and suffocating. Jerry, on the other hand, enlists with a pragmatic acceptance of fate, as the army offers wages and a type of rough freedom that isn't available to a poor Catholic boy in County Wicklow. The two are processed alongside a crowd of other men, the recruitment machinery reducing them to mere bodies and numbers. Johnston depicts the enlistment depot with stark, almost clinical precision—queues, medical exams, the scratch of pen on paper—which highlights the gravity of what’s unfolding. The chapter ends with both young men in uniform, the civilian world already fading away, their friendship now the sole thread of continuity they carry into the coming chaos.
Analysis
Johnston's craft in this chapter relies heavily on intentional understatement. While another novelist might infuse the enlistment scene with dramatic energy or ironic flair, Johnston strips it down to its essence. The prose remains steady, almost devoid of emotion, and this tonal neutrality becomes the argument itself: these men are not heroes responding to a call; they are individuals out of options. The class dynamic, the backbone of the novel, undergoes a subtle shift here. In civilian life, Alec's rank separated him from Jerry; in the army, the uniform acts as a temporary equalizer, though Johnston skillfully illustrates how the hierarchy quickly reasserts itself through the distinction of officer versus enlisted status. The motif of enclosure—the Big House, the estate walls, the mother's emotional grip—transforms into a new form of confinement: military order and the trench that awaits. Johnston also uses free indirect discourse to immerse us in Alec's thoughts without over-sentimentalizing them; his relief at leaving home feels uneasy alongside his guilt, leaving the reader to grapple with both feelings without a clear resolution. Importantly, the war isn't yet in sight—no guns, no mud—which amplifies the chapter's sense of dread. Johnston favors implication over direct statement, a stylistic choice that reflects Alec's own tendency to suppress his emotions.
Key quotes from Chapter 5
“I had never thought of myself as a soldier. I had never thought of myself as anything very much.”
Alec reflects during the enlistment process, his passivity framed as both personal confession and quiet indictment of the class that shaped him.
“We were, for the moment, the same. The same rough cloth, the same bewilderment.”
Alec observes himself and Jerry in uniform for the first time, the sentence's brevity enacting the fragile, temporary nature of the equality it describes.
“She had won, of course. She always won. Even my leaving was her victory.”
Alec's bitter aside about his mother as he departs, collapsing the distance between domestic power and the larger forces conscripting him.