What happens in Chapter 6 of How Many Miles to Babylon??
Chapter 6 of Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? explores the tense relationship between Alec Moore and Jerry Crowe against the harsh realities of the Western Front. The narrative shifts between the monotonous routines of military training — drilling, inspections, and the small tyrannies imposed by non-commissioned officers — and their first raw encounters with trench life: the mud, the awful smells, and the ever-present threat of death. Alec, now an officer, finds himself distanced from Jerry by the rigid class structure enforced by the army, which is even more unforgiving than what they experienced in civilian Ireland. Their brief, stolen conversations grow shorter and heavier with meaning. The chapter concludes with a quiet moment between the two men, highlighting, without any sentimentality, the growing gaps — social, physical, and moral — that are forming between them, even as they remain just a few yards apart within the trench.
Analysis
Johnston's craft in this chapter showcases a careful compression. She allows the army's institution to achieve what Alec's Anglo-Irish household always threatened: to make the friendship between officer and enlisted man structurally impossible. The training sequences are depicted in clipped, unemotional prose — with orders barked and bodies moving in formation — and this tonal flatness serves a purpose: the language reflects the dehumanizing rhythm it describes. Johnston then disrupts that flatness with sudden lyrical intrusions, moments where Alec's inner voice emerges in longer, more complex sentences, indicating that consciousness still exists beneath the uniform.
The trench setting introduces Johnston's key spatial theme: enclosure as both a means of protection and a trap. The trench walls that keep men alive also uphold the hierarchies that undermine friendship. Here, mud serves not just as a realistic detail but as a leveling force — it covers both officer and private — yet Johnston carefully illustrates that even mud cannot erase rank.
The chapter also furthers the novel's exploration of loyalty: to class, to friendship, to oneself. Alec's passivity, his typical failure to act, is presented not as cowardice but as a kind of paralysis stemming from conflicting obligations. Johnston chooses not to judge him, and this choice is where the novel's moral complexity resides.
Key quotes from Chapter 6
“We were all frightened, but we had been trained not to show it, and that, I suppose, is what they call courage.”
Alec reflects on the first days in the trenches, undercutting the rhetoric of heroism with quiet, devastating irony.
“Jerry looked at me across the space between us, and it might have been the Irish Sea.”
Alec registers the social gulf the army has formalised between them, translating class distance into geography.
“The mud was impartial, at least. It had no interest in the pips on a man's shoulder.”
One of Johnston's rare moments of dark levity, immediately undercut by the chapter's surrounding mood of entrapment.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 6
- pips
- Small metal badges of rank worn on a British Army officer's shoulder to show his grade. Here they stand for the whole system of military class distinction.
- impartial
- Treating everyone exactly the same, without favouring one side or person over another. The mud of the trenches does not distinguish between officers and ordinary soldiers.