D.H Lawrence’s The Fox is set at the end of the First World War. In the whole story, even if the word “war” appears only 4 times, the intelligent reader understands that war is the background of the story.

War is always depicted through indirect textual references. Indeed the reader can make up a general overview only once he has read the whole short story. Right from the first pages of the novella there is a clear reference to  war.

“War conditions, again, were very unfavourable to poultry-keeping.

Food was scarce and bad”.

Lawrence is perfectly able to synthesize the meaning of the war as a time of famine and suffering in only two sentences. “Since the war the fox was a demon”.

In the economy of the text the fox is considered a demon because it represent the issue of the lack of food and the poverty the to young ladies have to face.

Last but not least, war is quoted in Henry’s presentation: Henry is a soldier who has fought in Salonika (now called Thessaloniki), a Greek port where Anglo-French forces landed on  October 5thy, 1915.