by Sandra Petersen

Created on: September 17, 2011   Last Updated: September 18, 2011

American author Sherwood Anderson was known for his 1919 novel “Winesburg, Ohio”, but his best literary format was the short story. The story "War" reflects the mood of World War I, a war which Anderson did not serve in but which cast its melancholy shadow over the world of his day.

The Plot
“War” is told by a narrator, but it is not the speaker’s story as much as it is a tale about one elderly woman in a small group of Polish refugees and the German man in charge of them.

The narrative begins on a passenger train transporting the speaker through the Midwestern states of Iowa and Nebraska. A woman seated beside the narrator tells the story of how she and her male schoolteacher companion escaped to America. The story within the story is about the emotional, philosophical and physical struggle between the woman’s mother and their German overseer on a dark march on a muddy road in Poland.

The Main Characters
Anderson focused on developing strong, memorable characters in his fiction and not as much on an engaging plot. The author first gives a visual image of the Polish woman. Her “broad and thick and ugly” nose is her defining feature and she appears to have been beaten at some time in her life.

The Polish woman is a secondary character of “War.” The protagonists of this story within a story are the woman’s mother and their German overseer. The Polish woman telling the story, her male companion and the other members of the group are like spectators to the entire story, watching the battle between the two but seemingly unable to do anything to stop it.

The elderly mother in the woman’s story is a small landowner around the age of 65 years. She is the undisputed leader of the refugee group. She repeats throughout the march that she wishes only to be left alone. Her stubbornness is equal only to her hatred of the German in charge.

He, in turn, hates her. Much of what we know about him comes from the narrator’s speculation of what he was like based upon what the Polish daughter remembers. The man is in his 50s and healthy and fit. He has a beard and is perhaps scholarly.

The German man is a “grotesque,” one of the characters which Martha Curry of Georgetown University said Anderson liked to populate his fiction with. Sherwood Anderson wrote, “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth,

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