What happens in Chapter 7 of How Many Miles to Babylon??
Chapter 7 begins with Alec Moore waking up to find that Jerry Crowe has disappeared from their shared billet. The absence is immediately noticeable — Jerry's bunk untouched, his boots missing, and no message left behind. Alec goes through the morning routines of the front, feeling an increasing unease he can't quite express, scanning the faces in the mess and along the trench line. Officers question him with thinly veiled suspicion; the unspoken belief that Alec must know something, given their close friendship despite their different backgrounds, looms over every interaction. By the end of the chapter, Jerry has been officially marked as absent without leave, and Alec realizes, with chilling clarity, that the wheels of military discipline have already started to turn. The chapter concludes not with action but with stillness — Alec alone, gazing at the vacant bunk, the war continuing its indifferent din beyond the walls.
Analysis
Johnston uses the missing-person theme not just as a thriller element but to slowly reveal moral truths. Jerry's absence creates a void filled with the perceptions of others — the officers interpret it as desertion, the enlisted men view it as solidarity, and Alec feels the unbridgeable gap between his love for Jerry and his inability to protect him. The class motif, woven throughout the novel since the two men's childhood at the Moore estate, becomes more pronounced in this chapter: Alec faces interrogation specifically because cross-class friendships are seen as suspicious, a categorization the army struggles to understand.
In Chapter 7, Johnston's writing is notably sparse, focusing on what's absent and unspoken to evoke dread. The empty bunk emerges as the chapter's central image, a domestic detail that gains a near-sacred quality through its repetition. The tone gradually shifts from the mordant irony found in earlier chapters to a more elegiac quality, indicating that the novel has reached a point of no return.
Time, usually tense in Johnston's WWI fiction, is depicted in a tangible way here: the rapid bureaucratic reclassification of Jerry from soldier to absentee reflects the war's industrial mindset — men being processed, categorized, and discarded. Alec's stillness at the end isn't mere passivity but a form of witnessing, with the novel emphasizing the necessity of acknowledging Jerry's disappearance against the backdrop of military paperwork.
Key quotes from Chapter 7
“His boots were gone. That was all I could think about. His boots were gone and the war went on making its usual noise outside.”
Alec registers Jerry's disappearance through the single concrete detail of the missing boots, the mundane made devastating.
“They looked at me as if friendship itself were a court-martial offence.”
Alec reflects on the officers' interrogation, crystallising the novel's class-and-loyalty theme in a single ironic sentence.
“I sat on the edge of his bunk for a long time. There was nothing useful in that, but I did it anyway.”
The chapter's closing lines, in which Alec's vigil beside the empty bunk stands as the novel's first fully elegiac moment.