Lord Suffolk never treated Kip as a foreigner but more as a fellow Englishman. This is where Kip started to respect the English culture and took more pride in defusing bombs. This relationship was short-lived however as Lord Suffolk and Lady Mordan died tragically while trying to defuse a new type of German bomb. Kip didn't allow himself to get close to anyone else except for Hana for the rest of the war.
No one has been more affected by the war then Hana. The war took her husband and her father. The worst part is she knows nothing about how they died or where they died. She never obtains a sense of closure after their deaths because she was never able to attend a funeral or a wake. The English patient is burned past any recognition and without any idea of who he is. She initially cares for him so passionately because she believes there is a faint hope that he could be her father. Hana was pregnant during the early months of the war. Once she heard news of her husband's death she decided to get rid of the baby by having an abortion. "I lost the child, I mean, I had to lose it. The father was already dead. There was a war- (Ondaatje, 82). Even her lifelong friend of her fathers, Caravaggio is suffering from the war. He turned into a morphine addict, and lost both of his thumbs when he was caught during a covert operation. He couldn't provide any moral .
or mental support because when he wasn't on a morphine rush he was trying to hit on Hana. "Crippled in the exercise of his filching profession, he is jealous of the patient's hold on Hana. He knew her family in Canada; as a girl, she had a crush on him, and his feelings for her is something more than protective- (Eder, 202).
Hana tends the English patient with supererogatory devotion, washing him, dressing his burns, giving him shots of morphine, listening to his stories, reading to him from the English books she finds in the villa library.