Fragmentation in The Return of the Soldier

The return of the Soldier by Rebecca West does a good job of showing the fragmentation, confusion and the loss of words that come with post traumatic stress disorder, or in this story shell-shock.  War stories, or stories dealing with war trauma often represent a degree of fragmentation.  Sentences often drop off, explanations are often just not given.  It's no different with this story.  Sentences are often short and repetitious, as if spoken by a child, to represent a simple-minded state, or perhaps to bring the reader back to a time when vocabulary was limited and we didn't know enough words to explain what we wanted to say.  For example, "But, Chris is ill," just doesn't even come close to explaining what has happened (pg 17). These words are repeated throughout the short novel.  On page 12 when Mrs. Grey is trying to explain about the letter she has had from Chris, her sentences are choppy and drop off.  She says "I don't know how to put it... He's not exactly wounded...A shell burst..." (pg 12). Each of those are actually short sentences, but they are just tied together with ellipses.  Reading it, you get the impression that there is so much more that the speaker wants to say but doesn't know how to say.  It comes across as fragmented because it lacks the connecting words, and, or, but etc. that we expect to see and hear.
On the other hand, the language used to describe the house, the nursery and the gardens at the beginning of the novel are longer and significantly more descriptive. The reader is able to picture the rooms and the grounds.  There is language of life. Some examples of this are "recovered from antiquity" and "dug from the obscure pits" and also found on the same page are the verbs "preserved" and "nourished" (pg. 6). There is a juxtaposition of life and a sense that time has stopped dead still.  The women and the house seem to represent the somewhat normal day-to-day life of the citizens whereas Chris has stepped back in time and is stuck there remembering nothing of the present. There is a clear discord between life on the front and life at home which again adds to the fragmented feeling.