The Butterfly Lion

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary: “And All’s Well”

Bertie and Millie meet every Sunday as planned, though they both would be in trouble if they were found out, he for running away from school and she for running away from her home. Over the next two years, they become best friends. Millie now believes that Bertie will travel to France to rescue his white lion.

During school holidays, Bertie stays with his aunt and uncle, so Millie is lonely. She speaks of Africa with her nanny, who says she reads too many books. Bertie eventually stops speaking of The White Prince altogether.

When Bertie goes to college and Millie to a convent school, they both know their friendship has become love. They part, but write letters to one another that continue the rambling conversations of their Sunday meetings. He is unhappy at college, and finds his life dominated by bells that mark the hours. He feels trapped and knows that war is coming to England.

When WWI breaks out, Millie’s father enlists and departs. Millie never sees him again, but she does not know how to grieve a father she’s never really known. She worries that Bertie might also be swept up in the war if it doesn’t end before he graduates. In a letter, Bertie says he will join the war to escape the walls of his college and the bells and to finally be free. He feels he has become a man. He promises to think of Millie always.

Illustrations depict the two children walking down a hill, Millie’s nanny laughing at her stories of Africa, a wooden cabinet holding the kite that brought Bertie and Millie together, a man in uniform standing by a car and looking at a woman in a dress, and one of Bertie’s letters to Millie.

Chapter 9 Summary: “A Lot of Old Codswallop”

The narrative returns to the present. As Millie pauses her story, Michael lets Jack out of the kitchen. The old woman gets the kite that Bertie built to show the boy. Millie is excited about the kite, which Michael finds massive and drab. He asks about the white lion, and what happened to it. Out the window, the lion on the hillside is now white, as Jack the dog chases a throng of blue butterflies off its surface. When Millie claims the lion on the hillside is the same as the one in the story, Michael is confused.

She resumes her story and the narrative flashes back to Bertie’s experiences in the war. Bertie spoke of that time reluctantly afterward, never having understood why others died and he did not.

Bertie is 17 when he enlists. WWI is primarily conducted through trench warfare, with soldiers in small dugout bunkers, alternately hiding and rushing toward gunfire. On his 20th birthday, the Germans attack, and Bertie and his fellow soldiers counter. He is shot in the leg and begins to crawl back to the trenches. He hears a cry for help and rushes to find two men in the mud. He picks up one of them and rushes for the trenches, eventually reaching safety. Bertie returns to no-man’s-land and retrieves the other soldier. Amazingly, the Germans do not fire upon him during his rescue mission: “[I]n the end, both sides, German and British, were up in the parapets and cheering him on” (85).

Bertie wakes up in the hospital with the two men he rescued. He gets the Victoria Cross for bravery, which he calls codswallop, or nonsense. Millie finds him in the hospital.

While Bertie is fighting, Millie lives with her nanny, who is her only comfort and friend. After not receiving a letter from Bertie in three years, Millie decides to do something about her worry and fear. She becomes a nurse and travels to France in the hopes that she might find Bertie. She does not know his rank, regiment, or where he was sent. Behind enemy lines, she works in a hospital healing the wounded men returning from war.

In June 1918, she reads an article about Bertie’s heroism. She recognizes him instantly. He is recovering in a hospital less than 10 miles from her hospital. She rides a bike to find him in the bed.

Illustrations show Jack the dog pawing at the kitchen door, Bertie carrying another soldier through no-man’s-land, Bertie in the hospital with two men, Millie grown up and wearing pearls, and Bertie’s Victoria Cross medal.

Chapter 10 Summary: “The White Prince”

The hospital allows Millie to take Bertie out in his wheelchair for fresh air. She takes him every Sunday, continuing their childhood tradition. Soon, he can use a cane to walk, and they continue to meet every Sunday.

Bertie did not write because he knew death was coming for him; he wanted Millie to forget him so she wouldn’t be hurt when she learned he was dead.

On one of their walks, Millie sees a poster for the circus on a café wall: Cirque Merlot, advertising “Le Prince Blanc”—French for The White Prince. They stare at the poster and Bertie believes it must be his lion. Bertie demands information from the café owner, who shrugs before explaining that it is very sad, what happened to the circus. The circus owner did his best to save the animals, but after the circus was shelled, the circus owner was forced to shoot the animals to prevent them from starving to death. All were killed, save The White Prince. The café owner tells Bertie where to find Monsieur Merlot, who lives only a few kilometers away. Bertie and Millie get a ride to the house. Everything is damaged, but Bertie claims he can smell his white lion.

They go inside, calling for Monsieur Merlot. A man answers in French and they find him lying in a bed in the dark. Bertie re-introduces himself, explaining that they met in Africa. It is then that Bertie sees the lion lying at the end of the bed. The lion runs toward Bertie and Millie. Bertie is unafraid as the lion rubs against Bertie.

Illustrations show Millie pushing Bertie in his wheelchair through nature, and the café owner in the bombed village talking to Millie and Bertie.

Chapter 11 Summary: “A Miracle, A Miracle!”

The lion and Bertie are reunited and the lion clearly remembers him. Bertie talks to the lion and Merlot recalls how in Africa Bertie tried to set the lion free. The White Prince licks Millie’s hand. Merlot has worked hard to save the lion, but they are nearly starving. Bertie promises to find food for both Merlot and the lion.

They wave down an ambulance and all pile in, including the lion. They travel to the village square and sit at the café with the lion at their feet. Bertie rubs the lion’s head and feeds him from the butcher’s shop. A crowd gathers as the four sit and dine. For Millie, it is a surreal and yet somehow inevitable day.

Bertie has an idea about what to do with The White Prince, which Merlot and Millie agree on. The crowd parts as they leave, following behind to see what will become of the lion. When they return to the hospital, Bertie asks a colonel in uniform if Merlot and the lion can stay in the garden adjoining the hospital. The colonel is furious until he realizes Bertie is the famous winner of the Victoria Cross. The colonel wants to shoot the lion, but Bertie points out how damaging this would be to public opinion: “A lion, the symbol of Britain, shot! Not at all good for morale” (108). Instead, Bertie convinces the colonel and eventually the home office that he should be allowed to bring the lion back to England.

When their ship docks at Dover, The White Prince gets off the ship at Bertie’s side. The press is electric with the story of the military hero returning with a lion from the front lines.

Millie marries Bertie, and Nanny Mason lives with them, caring for all three in their home.

Illustrations show the adult white lion, a crowd gathered in the café to gawk at the lion, the colonel saluting Bertie, and a ship docking at Dover.

Chapters 8-11 Analysis

As the story progresses, the setting expands to include France during The Great War, with depictions of bombed French villages, shelled cafés, and destroyed boulevards, as well as muddy trenches and a desolate, corpse-strewn no-man’s-land on the front lines.

Morpurgo highlights the damaging and destructive nature of war, both in the composition of the army and in the fighting itself. Bertie enlists not out of patriotic fervor or obligation, but “to fly free, and this seems to the only way I can do it” (75). Like many young men, the military is less an opportunity for greatness than a means of escaping an unsavory environment—here, the walls and bells of college life that tortured and confined him. Morpurgo’s depiction of Bertie’s enlistment is a commentary on the tendency of militaries to recruit from the young, the desperate, and the disadvantaged with promises of glory, personal development, and rank. This vision turns out quickly to be illusory as the reality of early 20th-century soldiering makes clear:

At seventeen, he’d found himself marching with his regiment along the straight roads of northern France up to the front line, heads and hearts high with hope and expectation. Within a few months he was sitting huddled at the bottom of a muddy trench, hands over his head, head between his knees, curling himself into himself as tight as he would go, sick with terror as the shells and whizzbangs blew the world apart around him (81).

In the novel, war is nonsensical and dehumanizing, though the soldiers crave peace and aspire to acts of humanism. This juxtaposition allows the novel to both condemn the violence and also make sure it is meaningfully Immortalizing the Dead. The pointlessness of war is evident in the description of the predictable and unproductive nature of attacks and counter-attacks: “The whistle went, and Bertie led his men over the top to counter-attack. But as always the Germans were expecting them, and the usual slaughter began” (82). Bertie is fully aware of the idiocy of countering a German attack, but rushes forward when the whistle blows because he has been ordered to. As a soldier, Bertie believes death is certain with a fatalism that belies his youth: “[H]e’d thought that each day at the front might be his last, that he might be dead by sunset. So many of his friends were dead. Sooner or later, it had to be his turn” (93).

However, Bertie does not ever fully let go of his humanity and sense of morality. When he hears two men crying in pain, he rushes wounded to assist them. He manages to save both. Bertie’s act of heroism inspires his allies and foes to suddenly connect as people, ignoring the idea that they are enemies: “[I]n the end both sides, German and British, were up on the parapets and cheering him on as he stumbled back towards his lines” (83). This moment of bravery shatters the illogic of war and briefly unites men on both sides as human beings longing for peace—a theme Morpurgo often infuses into his “many books about war in which a longing for peace and reconciliation is always evident” (Morpurgo, Michael. “The War Poets Were the Reason I Left the Army and Became a Writer.” The Guardian, 18 Nov 2022). Bertie describes the aftermath of his act of heroic bravery as “a lot of old codswallop” (86)—he does not feel worthy of the Victoria Cross medal his actions have earned because he suffers tremendous survivor’s guilt at living through a war that has killed so many of his peers. However, symbols like this medal, and like the plaque at his boarding school in Wiltshire, honor the sacrifices of those who have died in their name during war. Immortalizing the Dead in this way will allow, for example, the young Michael to eventually encounter the plaque and be inspired by Bertie’s bravery and fortitude.