Literary Fiction · Historical
The Wrath ofArchie Ellis
A novel of Ypres, 1917
The book is built, chapter for chapter, on the structure of the Iliad: Ellis is Achilles, Eck is Hector.
Publishes 1 October 2026 · ISBN 979-8-9961025-0-1
The novel does not shy away from the violence of the First World War, including combat deaths, but nothing is rendered graphically. There is no profanity and no sexual content.
About the Book
Two officers.
Opposite sides of the wire.
The Wrath of Archie Ellis is a novel of the Third Battle of Ypres, built as a structural parallel to Homer's Iliad: twenty-four chapters against twenty-four books, in four parts that track the poem's own arc from wrath through breach and death to ransom.
Captain Ellis is the Achilles of the Salient: the best officer in it, defined by fury and by a half-conscious certainty that he has chosen the short, glorious life. Across the wire, Hauptmann Eck is Hector: a Cologne engineer who builds bridges in peacetime and holds a regiment together in this one, and the moral centre the novel is built around. The book's argument depends on Eck being as fully alive on the page as Ellis.
The Trojan side gets the same dignity Homer gave it. That is not a gesture. It is the spine of the book.
The novel does not editorialise. It watches. Efficiency and bodies sit in the same sentence, told the same way, and that plainness is the most serious thing the book does. Where Homer's gods intervened, this war runs without them, on paper and on timetables, and what nobility survives has to be found by the men themselves, inside conditions built to strip it out of them.
It ends the way it has to: at 2 a.m., before dawn, in a dugout at B7, in a scene that is almost entirely silence and what two men do with their hands.
The novel runs on these four terms. It never names them. The prose itself leans on Greek-rooted vocabulary throughout, deliberately, word by word.
About This Novel
Homer's Iliad is fifty-one days near the end of a ten-year siege. The Wrath of Archie Ellis is a hundred and three days, the length of the real Third Battle of Ypres, inside the fourth year of a war that by then no one alive could remember the start of. The compression is the same, even where the proportions aren't: both books are asking what a long war does to the men who are still, somehow, fighting it as though it were a short one.
The Homeric structure here is not a decoration laid over a war novel. It is the argument. Each chapter has a counterpart in the Iliad, and each one measures the gap between what that counterpart assumed, an audience for courage, a code both sides observed, a death that meant something to the men who caused it, and what this war actually delivered instead. Some chapters keep Homer's shape. Some invert it. Some empty it out entirely and replace it with a mundane, uncounterparted failure: a supply delay, a training accident, the kind of death that has no Homeric original because Homer's war didn't produce that kind of death.
The novel was written for a reader who has never opened the Iliad as much as for one who has. It should read, first, as a war novel: Ellis and Eck, the men around them, the hundred and three days of Passchendaele. The classical bones are there to be felt underneath that story, not admired instead of it.
For readers of Pat Barker's Regeneration, Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles.
Archie Ellis
Captain, B Company. Victoria Cross recipient. 1912 Olympic gold medalist. Built from two real men: Admiral Nelson supplies the wrath – at Trafalgar he went into battle with four orders of chivalry sewn to his coat, which is how a French marksman picked him out and killed him. Ellis wears his ribbons into action the same way. The finest officer in the Salient – until an order he refuses to follow costs two hundred and forty-seven men their lives.
POV Character
Harald Eck
Hauptmann. Forty-one, a civil engineer from Dresden, fifteen years into building bridges and lock gates when the mobilization orders came. He left his plans on the drafting table, told his wife Clara he'd be back before anything needed deciding, and went. He has known for weeks what's coming. He is holding his regiment together anyway.
POV CharacterThe Ground
Third Ypres, Autumn 1917
The novel follows the real campaign, phase by phase: Pilckem Ridge on 31 July, the Menin Road and Broodseinde through September and October, Passchendaele itself in early November. The battalion's farmhouse headquarters at Vlamertinghe, the forward dugout at B7, the ridge at Zonnebeke – every position in the book sits on ground you can still find on a map today.
- 131 Jul–2 AugBattle of Pilckem Ridge
- 216–18 AugBattle of Langemarck
- 320–25 SepBattle of the Menin Road Ridge
- 426 Sep–3 OctBattle of Polygon Wood
- 54 OctBattle of Broodseinde
- 69 OctBattle of Poelcappelle
- 712 OctFirst Battle of Passchendaele
- 826 Oct–10 NovSecond Battle of Passchendaele – village taken, campaign ends
The Cast
Early reads
A Note from the Author
A note on what follows: I wrote this novel, and the guide that accompanies it, with a classroom in mind – a way to meet a young reader encountering Homer and the First World War for the first time. But the story doesn't belong only to that reader, any more than the Iliad it's built from does. Homer has outlasted every audience he was ever written for. Pride and what it costs the people around it. Grief with nowhere to go. What's owed to an enemy once he can no longer harm you. What a war is said to have accomplished, against what it actually cost. These aren't young readers' questions. They're everyone's.
I've taught thirteen-year-olds about ancient civilizations and the First World War for twenty years. The longer I taught both, the more convinced I became they were the same story: what happens when a world becomes very connected, and then, under pressure, cracks all at once. About the kind of men those worlds produce, and what those men are and aren't prepared for. About honor, and what it costs, and who pays.
One small design choice comes straight from the classroom: every chapter ends with a blank page. It's the kind of space I always wished the books I taught from had – room to write down the thought you had while it was still yours.
You have lived through a pandemic. You've watched wars start in places you'd never heard of a year before, and supply chains break for reasons that seemed to come from nowhere. None of that felt like ancient history while it was happening. It felt like Tuesday.
This novel is about two men on opposite sides of a strand of barbed wire, in a small piece of Belgium, in 1917 – carrying, into an industrial war neither of them was built for, values that belong to a much older one. It is the oldest story there is, and it keeps not staying in the past.
The prose is deliberately plain. No elevated language, no narrator telling you how to feel about a death. That flatness isn't coldness – it's the form the material demands. As Wilfred Owen, one of the war's own poets, put it: the poetry is in the pity, and the pity is in the accuracy.
More to Explore
Teaching Wrath
A full classroom companion: chapter-by-chapter notes, tiered discussion questions, and a standards-aligned unit framework for grades 7–12.
View Companion →The Reader's Companion
The full chapter-by-chapter map to Homer, held back until after you finish, so nothing is spoiled going in. Included when you request an ARC.
Request an ARC →