Writing the unwriteable: the First World War and Pat Barker's regeneration.

Even before the centenary of Britain’s entry into the First World War, I had the feeling of being bombarded by articles in the newspapers - commemoration plans, events, exhibitions, interactive maps, memoirs - and I had the impression that the centenary of the Great War was going to become a casualty of that modern western onslaught - media blitz. A week or so after feeling embattled by that frenzy, I found myself in the Nazi concentration camp at Oswiegin in Poland - a place more widely known by its German name, ‘Auschwitz’. In the course of a harrowing visit that lasted a number of hours - a visit which struck me as a pilgrimage to a site that stood as a memorial or shrine to all the genocide of the twentieth century -1 noticed, on a wall, a plaque quoting the Spanish-American philosopher and novelist, George Santayana, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Santayana wrote that before the First World War but it is an observation which gained in meaning as the twentieth century unfolded. It is a sentiment echoed by Bertolt Brecht in his allegory of the making of Adolf Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Brecht concludes his play thus:

This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

Pat Barker’s Regeneration is set in 1917 when the full horror of the First World War was clear to those who fought in it but was denied by many military and civilian leaders. It was also the year in which soldiers on the Russian front revolted against the Czar and went to join the Bolshevik revolution. Regeneration was written at the very beginning of the 1990s - a period of ruction and revolt in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - but what about in Britain? Why did Pat Barker wish to write this particular novel at that particular moment?

Pat Barker is by training an historian - that is evident in the writing. As an historian, she would be drawn towards a period 70 years before her own. But why write about the First World War at a time when there was not much interest in the conflict? Swiftly, let us consider how the war has figured in various literary forms over the years.

The poems of two of the factual characters in the novel -Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon - appeared during or immediately after the conflict. There followed, during the 1920s, the inevitable spate of memoirs of mediocre quality. Then, in 1928, R.C. Sherriffs play, Journey’s End was produced in London’s West End to great acclaim. A year later, Robert Graves - who appears as a minor character in Regeneration - published Goodbye to All That, the same year in which the American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, published A Farewell to Arms and the German novelist, Erich Maria Remarque, published All Quiet on the Western Front. Then, in 1929, the Australian novelist, Frederick Manning published The Middle Parts of Fortune in a limited edition, followed by an expurgated version in 1930, the year in which Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer appeared. That book ends where Regeneration begins - with Siegfried Sassoon admitted to Craiglockhart Hospital.

It seemed as if - after a decade - sufficient time had elapsed to allow writers who had served in the Great War to begin to come to terms with the conflict. Or had it? In 1932, David Jones finished In Parenthesis, his modernist writing about soldiers in the trenches during the months leading up to the attack on Mametz Wood, an assault which was part of the pointless Somme offensive. The writing of In Parenthesis -extending over a four year period - resulted in the first of Jones’s many war-related breakdowns. Jones attempted to place the conflict within the experience of the average young European male throughout Europe’s bloody history. David Jones’s desire to remain an infantryman throughout the war and avoid any kind of promotion suggests that he was suited to the task. However, the weight and relative obscurity of his learning combined with its sometimes cumbersome articulation (Jones was a painter by profession and an autodidact in literature) resulted in a complex text which in some ways compromised his attempt to present that normal human male. Despite David Jones’s attempt to fit the war into the tradition of the West, his broken, jagged, style revealed that this was not possible. The war certainly stood within a tradition but it also marked a break with the past - something which the sensitive patients in Regeneration who are treated by Dr. Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital - and indeed, Rivers himself - struggle to come to terms with. In the novel, Siegfried Sassoon reveals that in the trenches, he felt part of a venerable past. When he dug up some skulls, he confessed, it was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough’s army than to think they’d been alive two years ago. It’s as if all other wars had somehow ... distilled themselves into this war ... (Penguin, 2008 - p 83).

Ultimately that proved not quite true. The First World War was different. The scale and the futility attested to that.

David Jones’s In Parenthesis was published in 1937 by T. S. Eliot who considered the book to be ‘a work of genius’. With the dislocating effect of its eclecticism it seemed that, as the years passed, writers were able to achieve a more distant perspective on the Great War. The poet, Peter Levi suggested that the ‘crisis of 1914 called uniquely for a remote and distant dimension just because of the completeness of the breakdown’.

If anything, the fragmentation of Jones’s poem, for all its desire to assert continuity, recalls Ezra Pound’s ‘botched civilization’ with its ‘two gross of broken statues’ and ‘a few thousand battered books’. As Pound admitted, in Canto CXV1. ‘I cannot make it cohere’. A broken culture and civilization had been battered and Jones was, as Harold Rosenberg noted, ‘a witness to the actuality of the cultural crisis by embodying the principle of difficulty’ .

In 1963, a new kind of a distance in the treatment of the Great War was established by Joan Littlewood’s Brechtian use of alienation in her collaborative and semi-improvised play, Oh What a Lovely War! Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop in London’s Stratford East, set the entire conflict - from the infamous inevitability of the inflexible railway timetables through to the botched Armistice - in the context of an Edwardian summer pierrot show. A Master-of-Ceremonies, who leads the soldiers and the audience through the conflict, offers ‘songs for you, a few battles and some jokes’. Oh What a Lovely War! was - as its title suggests - an ironic attack on the futility of the conflict. The tatty theatricals of the patriotic pierrot show give way to a bitter and sardonic evocation of life in the trenches which caught the imagination of audiences and anti-war campaigners of the 1960s. However, during the 1970s and 1980s, the First World War seemed to disappear from popular consciousness. In terms of fiction, there was really nothing between John Harris’s 1961 novel, Л Covenant with Death and Pat Barker’s Regeneration.

So what drew Pat Barker to such a theme in 1990? I found what must be an answer to that question towards the end of the novel, in a passage where the central character, Rivers, the neurologist and fledgling psychologist, considers his own regeneration which is - in part - born of his work to rehabilitate shell-shocked soldiers so that they can be sent back to the Western Front to be killed. His uncomfortable duty is to regenerate fighters rather than people and it is a cruel task for a sensitive man who is in the process of calling into question much of what he once held to be true. Siegfried Sassoon’s protest against the war with which the novel begins, along with the attitudes and needs of Rivers’s other patients, compel the doctor to question his role. Rivers negotiates a moral minefield in which he struggles with every fibre of his professional understanding, his compassion and his sensitivity to resolve the dilemma of his patients. But his duty, against his wishes and his better judgement and his knowledge that the war is being run by buffoons, has to be allowed to prevail and this provides Regeneration with its central conflict - one that is emblematic of the later stages of the First World War - duty versus knowledge. It is a conflict shared by the chief protagonists, Dr. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon. The following passage treats Rivers’s selfquestioning but it also addresses itself to Pat Barker’s readership in 1991:

As a young man he’d been both by temperament and conviction deeply conservative, not merely in politics. Now, in middle age, the sheer extent of the mess seemed to be forcing him into conflict with the authorities over a very wide range of issues ... medical, military. Whatever. A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance. Perhaps the rebellion of the old might count for rather more than the rebellion of the young. Certainly poor Siegfried’s rebellion hadn’t counted for much, though he reminded himself that he couldn’t know that. It had been a completely honest action and such actions are seeds carried on the wind, (p 249)

I stated that Pat Barker was an historian - her novel begins with an historical document and is post-scripted by a list of historical sources to help the interested reader sort fact from fiction. By training, Barker is also an economist and she would have been aware - whatever her own politics - of the sacrifice of workers in Britain which resulted from the economic adventurism of Margaret Thatcher. It is a sacrifice which is perhaps even more evident in the landscape of blasted hopes and lost opportunity negotiated by the British youth of today who are desperate to carve out a future for themselves after the implosion of a financial system put in place by Thatcher, Reagan and Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics. Pat Barker’s novel - showing a ‘society that devours its own young’ is pertinent and through that pertinence it regenerates interest in the First World War for a new generation.

The writer, Rudyard Kipling put it succinctly in his poem, Common Form, which I quote in full:

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

At the heart of their lies lay the fact that by about 1900 the European powers had claimed most of the globe and they could only take from one another. An intellectually and technologically progressive Germany was framed as the archenemy of conservative Great Britain by men like William Tufnell Le Queux - amateur spy, traveler and best selling novelist who became obsessed with the German menace. He produced a fictionalized account of the German invasion of the British Isles, predicting that it would take place in 1910. He persuaded Lord Northcliffe to publish it in the ever-bigoted Daily Mail. As a result, circulation soared. In book form, The Invasion of 1910 sold more than one million copies in 27 languages.

Cause for alarm was understandable. In 1910, Britain imported steel from the Ruhr valley whereas, forty years earlier, British steel production had been four times that of Germany. Culturally and politically, Germany was going from strength to strength. German universities and thinkers were the envy of Europe. Women’s rights were an important topic for debate, homosexual emancipation was a hot issue and the country boasted the largest Socialist party in the world. Northern European writers and artists such as Strindberg, Ibsen and Munch were better received in Germany than at home. The German art scene was vibrant. While scare-mongering sensationalists like Le Queux merely titillated the fears and fantasies of a middle-brow British readership, the German artist,

Ludwig Meidner, was painting the apocalypse before it happened. The Russian artist, Vassily Kandinsky, then living in Bavaria, was producing proleptic images full of explosion and ‘engulfment’.

In Regeneration, the predicament for Rivers and the men under his care was - as the military historian, Sir Michael Howard put it - that the Great War ‘had to a remarkable extent been regarded as inevitable and even desirable by the generation that fought it.’ Knights in battle, chivalric struggles and virile sporting metaphors were part of the imagery deployed by Britain’s empire-staffing public schools and the jingoistic popular verse and journalism of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. The male population were cajoled into fighting by the spirit of poems like ‘Play up! Play up! and play the game.’ That is what Rivers was up against when he tried to regenerate the British spirit:

In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing, (p. 48)

The problem for Rivers and the men who came to him -men such as David Burns ‘who’d got his head stuck in the belly of a dead German soldier’ - is the tension between Rupert Brooke’s patriotic call of 1914,

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with his hour, and the later testimony of - say -ее cummings who served as an ambulance driver

I have seen death’s clever enormous voice which hides in the fragility of poppies or lines by Wilfred Owen whom we encounter in the act of regenerating his poetic voice in Barker’s novel -

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

or Sassoon’s hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in the mud. О Jesus, make it stop!

The major problem in dealing with a subject as horrific as the Great War is the difficulty of describing the indescribable. How does one capture or honour the magnitude of the horror with the resources of a tired and used language? Pat Barker sets herself a difficult task inasmuch as she gives a voice to and quotes from Wilfred Owen, one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. In the novel, we see Owen struggling to overcome ineffectual cliches and inadequate metaphors in order to produce a handful of the most haunting poems treating ‘War and the pity of War’. Owen is, from the point of view of describing the indescribable, difficult company to keep. How could a modern writer evoking the patients at Craiglockart compete with Owen’s vision in his poem Mental Cases?

their eyeballs shrink tormented

Back into their brains, because on their sense

Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black; Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.

- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.

Despite the improbability of matching such lines, by including powerful writers and some of their writing in her narrative Barker makes an appeal to the interest of the modern reader by involving some of the established brand names of British culture including Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who would - most likely - be known to the British reader of Regeneration. Few people who would pick up such a novel would have escaped poems such as Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ or "Dulce et Decorum Esf at school, or be oblivious to the fact that England’s foremost twentieth century composer, Benjamin Britten, juxtaposed the poems of Wilfred Owen with the Latin Mass for the dead in his chilling War Requiem - commissioned for the inauguration of the new Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, a replacement for the one flattened by German bombs. Intending his Requiem to mark peace and reconciliation, Britten wished the solos to be sung by a German bass, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, an English tenor, Peter Pears and the Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya. Wilfred Owen is clearly part of Britain’s cultural heritage - an A-list poet on whom Pat Barker can rely to spark interest. What is more, by including Owen, she invites the reader to be party to an exciting mystery - how a poem comes to be written. Her readers have the chance to observe something which many of them won’t have seen since they left university -a little critical commentary and analysis in the passages where Sassoon and Owen struggle to achieve one of Owen’s most memorable lines: ‘What passing bells for these who die so fast?’

No.

What passing bells for these who die in herds.

Better.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle.

Yes.

As Sassoon comments in the novel, ‘I see we got to the slaughterhouse in the end.’ With help and encouragement from a more experienced poet, Owen captures the abattoir of the Western Front. And Sassoon and Owen, through their particularly regenerative activity, writing, take up the fight to shape, inform, and share. They enlist in a struggle in which, as Owen puts it, each proud fighter brags

He wars on Death - for lives; not men for flags.

Barker also describes in some detail a Biblical tale which Owen used in his Parable of the Old Man and the Young - apt in a novel in which Rivers realizes that the present dilemma of the war should force a ‘the rebellion of the old’. It occurs at the beginning of Part 3 when Rivers - on leave from his ‘Front’ at Craiglockhart - attends a Sunday morning church service during which, with some irony, he notices on a stained glass window the image of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son ...

The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns, (p. 149)

Owen put it somewhat more forcefully,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, And builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretched forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Powerful stuff. And Barker’s novel is full of Owen references. Sassoon’s impatience with ‘All those Calvaries at crossroads just sitting there waiting to be turned into symbols’ -is a sly wink at Owen’s ‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part.’

Pat Barker chooses a clever and quiet strategy to tell her tale. The war takes place, as it were, ‘offstage’ - except when it erupts, often with considerable violence in the arena of the patients’ memories and nightmares. Indeed, the violence of those scenes is made more powerful by the fact that they occur in the relative calm of the albeit ‘gloomy’ Craiglockhart Hospital - far from the Western Front. They insist that the war is not out there in no-man’s-land between such and such a date - but rather trapped inside the patients for as long as they live. It is a portable conflict, an unavoidable war, a never-ending onslaught. One of Rivers’s patient’s, David Burns, reveals, T couldn’t seem to get out of the dream. I woke up, I knew I was awake, I could move and yet... it was still there.’ (p. 180) When, late in the twentieth century, post traumatic combat stress disorder was acknowledged, Barker’s evocation of Dr. Rivers’s early fumblings with the problem was assuredly fascinating for Barker’s readers.

Burns’ particular case makes the war horrifically vivid. Burns had been thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he’s had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh. Now, whenever he tried to eat, that taste and smell recurred.

The flat, almost clinical, matter of fact way in which the neurologist considers the incident make the horror appear even more appalling.

For the soldiers of the First World War - despite exceptional doctors such as Rivers - there was no adequate agency to deal with their agony - witness the plight of Septimus

Warren Smith in Virginia Woolfs brilliant novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In the case of David Jones, his ‘neurasthenia’ was politely dismissed by his friends who dubbed it ‘old Rosy’ - for neurosis, or ‘the old misrubs’ - hardly adequate responses to someone who was suffering from insomnia, nervous depression and who, when he registered for Industrial Service in the Second World War, was given this review of the state of his health by his doctor:

In 1932, Jones had a nervous breakdown and developed symptoms of mental depression - a depressive psychosis. The condition was severe.

The course has been marked by improvement with relapses. He has been unfit for consecutive work in his own profession for nearly ten years. He is unstable, and under stress of duty would relapse. He is, in my opinion, quite unfit for routine service...’

The condition persisted. Jones was treated by several doctors in the late 1940s. One of them dismissed his repeated attempts to make light of his time in the trenches, commenting, ‘You must have been a bloody sight more frightened in the First World War than you realized at the time.’ But there was no adequate cure - not in the pastoral care of Jones’s adopted religion, nor through medicine and psychology. The poet and painter underwent electric shock treatment which Rivers’s unsympathetic and arrogant foil, Dr. Yealland, uses in Regeneration. And Jones continued to live - until his death in 1974 - on a toxic cocktail of pills to the detriment of both his art and his personal life.

Much of Regeneration is told through dialogue - or duologue to be more precise. This endless stream of one-to-ones leads to a certain monotony of structure - but that is relieved by the diversity, liveliness and psychological drama of the exchanges. If the diction seems, at first, to be a little stilted this results from Barker’s attempt to achieve a period feel - a rather stiff and more formal manner of speaking than we are used to today. It is a formality exacerbated by the fact that many of the exchanges are professional or doctor/patient interviews. Surprisingly, Barker avoids much of the soldiers’s slang from the war - expressions which often remained part of a combatant’s everyday vocabulary for decades after the war. She does, however, dip into the lexical pool of her chosen poets, ‘grey muttering faces’ on p. 5 could almost be Owen or Sassoon.

At best - when not simply informing the reader or setting up the story - the dualogues are groping explorations, a fencing or skirmishing, in which doctor and patient search for trust and test for honesty. At best, they allow Barker to include an enormous amount of raw information without appearing to burden the reader, they admit the ‘offstage’ war into the consulting room and include a lot of back story. The British playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, warns that if something happens offstage, the audience get the irritating feeling that they’re in the wrong place. Too much back-story - Ayckbourn suggests - also gives them the feeling they’re in the wrong place - and even worse - at the wrong time. Pat Barker overcomes these potential pitfalls with considerable skill.

The strength of the novel derives to a considerable extent from Barker’s complex portrait of Rivers. At the very end of the first chapter, we see the doctor watch from a window as Siegfried Sassoon arrives at Craiglockhart Hospital:

Nobody arriving at Craiglockhart for the first time could fail to be daunted by the sheer gloomy, cavernous bulk of the place. Sassoon lingered on the drive for a full minute after the taxi had driven away, then took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.

Rivers turned away from the window, feeling almost ashamed of having witnessed that small private victory over fear. (p. 9)

- an interesting sentiment for someone whose job it is to pry into the secrets of the soul. Barker revealed in interview that she found the historical Rivers, ‘very humane, a very compassionate person who was tormented by the suffering he saw and very sceptical about the war, but who, at the same time, didn’t feel he could go the whole way and say, no, stop.’

Rivers is particularly adept at letting his patients have a good deal of freedom and power - he skilfully allows them to feel that can get the better of an exchange even as he’s contouring their response and behaviour. Furthermore, his method changes with each patient. When he’s confronted with Sassoon, Rivers is seemingly more casual than when he is with the working / lower-middle-class shipping clerk, Billy Prior. When we first meet Prior, he can’t speak and writes combative and unhelpful phrases on a pad during each interview with Rivers. He misspells one of the curt messages he writes in the course of a medical examination, Rivers seizes the opportunity to humiliate Prior out of his stubbornness:

Again the pad came out. ‘THERE’S NOTHING

PHYSIC ALY WRONG.’

Two 1’s in physically, Mr. Prior. Open wide.’

By their next meeting, Prior has regained his speech and tries to manoeuvre himself onto an equal footing with Rivers by countering questions with questions. When the doctor observes that he enjoys teaching, Prior replies:

I noticed. “Two 1’s in physically, Mr. Prior.” ’

What an insufferable thing to say.’

I thought so.’

I’m sorry.’

Prior didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his hands and mumbled, ‘Yes, well.’

But Prior is made of strong stuff and plays things back at Rivers. When discussing why Prior couldn’t speak, the subject of stammering occurs and Rivers explains:

It’s usually thought that neurasthenic stammers arise from the same kind of conflict as mutism, a conflict between wanting to speak and knowing w-what you’ve got to say is not acceptable.’

Certainly the tension between Rivers’s sensitivity and his sense of duty might explain his own stammer. But he is a ‘lifelong stammerer’ and, as he says, nobody knows the cause. Prior, locating an explanation in what he intuitively guesses may be the cause of the doctor’s stammer - ‘a conflict between wanting to speak and knowing what you’ve got to say is not acceptable’, rounds on Rivers:

Prior smiled. ‘Now that is lucky, isn’t it. Lucky for you, I mean. Because if your stammer was the same as theirs - you might actually have to sit down and work out what it is you’ve spent fifty years trying not to say.’

‘Is that the end of my appointment for the day, Mr. Prior?’

Prior smiled.

‘You know one day you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’re in this hospital because you’re ill. Not me. Not the C.O. Not the kitchen porter. You.’ (p. 97)

But Prior, in a gentler mood, has already shown he understands Rivers in a way that Rivers’s profession demands he understands his patients:

Prior stared intently at him. “You know, you do a wonderful impression of a stuffed shirt. And you’re not like that at all, are you?’ (p. 66)

Prior’s inability to talk reflects the larger notion of society’s unwillingness to speak of the unspeakable and touches on the isolation of those who returned from the war unable to communicate to those who have no inkling about the horrors of the front. Furthermore, Prior is developed - in later books of the Regeneration trilogy - as a bisexual, and so his silence perhaps suggests another cause of vexation which runs through the novel - homosexuality. Sassoon and Rivers discuss Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s first lover and a man who helped the homosexual poets Sassoon and Owen. They also discuss Edward Carpenter who was closely associated with the Uranian Poets who proclaimed the homo-eroticism which permeated British cultural life during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. When Rivers and Sassoon consider the slight improvement in attitudes towards homosexuality before the war, Rivers is cautious:

But it’s not very likely, is it, that any movement towards greater tolerance would persist in wartime? After all, in war, you’ve got this enormous emphasis on love between men - comradeship - and everybody approves. But at the same time there’s always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love?’

He goes on to refer to the historical figure of the extreme right-wing Member of Parliament, Noel Pemberton-Billing who crusaded against the German blackmailing of ‘47,000 highly placed British perverts’ - an impressive figure even by the standards of the early twentieth century British establishment.

When Rivers treats Sassoon his approach is necessarily supple. One of his tactics is to treat the poet with complete honesty - ‘You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neurosis ... You do realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to change that?’. ‘The trouble’ writes Barker, ‘was Rivers respected Sassoon too much to manipulate him. He had to be convinced that going back’ to the front ‘was the right thing to do.’ (p. 119) That is the crux of Rivers’s dilemma.

Craiglockhart embraced all the petty, neurotic interpersonal exchanges which mark closed communities - in this case, intensified by the overstrung condition of the patients. For the reader, they offer the welcome relief of humour. Sassoon’s roommate asks Rivers

Don’t think he’s a German spy do you?’

Rivers gave the matter careful consideration, ‘No, I don’t think so. They never call themselves Siegfried.’

Or Sassoon’s take on his own name:

No-o, I’m called Siegfried because my mother likes Wagner. And the only thing I have in common with orthodox Jews is that I do profoundly thank God I was born a man and not a woman. If I were a woman, I’d be called Brtinnhilde.’

Or Rivers’s reaction to institution food

Mrs. Cooper, her broad arms splashed with fat from the giant frying-pans, greeted him with an embattled smile. ‘What d’ y’ think of the beef stew last night, then sir?’

I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.’

There is mordant humour about the absurdity of what has befallen the patients:

Willard lay face down on the bed, naked. His thighs and buttocks were trenched with purple scars, some just beginning to silver. These injuries had been sustained when his company was retreating across a graveyard under heavy fire, and several tombstone fragments had become embedded in his flesh. ‘You want to try it,’ he said, ‘Lying two months on your belly in a hospital with Requiescat in Pace stuck up your arse.’

If the First World War was emotionally interpreted by the British establishment as a struggle to preserve the status quo, then it is ironical to note that it acted as an instrument of some social change and limited cultural transformation. In one of the combative exchanges between Prior and Rivers, the doctor suggests that people will get ahead without going to Oxford or Cambridge, things will be freer after the war. If only because hundreds of thousands of young men have been thrown into contact with the working classes in a way they’ve never been before.’ (p. 135)

While that was true, Prior, earlier in the novel, qualified the degree of change during the war:

The only thing that really makes me angry is when people at home say there are no class distinctions at the front. Ball-oks. What you wear, what you eat. Where you sleep. What you carry. The men are pack animals.’ (p67)

As to the changes to women, Prior reflects

They seem to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.’ (p. 90)

Perhaps it is Ruth Head, the wife of one of Rivers’s colleagues who best expresses the changes effected by the conflict when she says that T get this feeling that the crust of everything is starting to crack.’ In the course of River’s work with Siegfried Sassoon, Rivers uncovers the conditioned man -that sense of duty and courage run more deeply than an informed, intellectual and moral hatred for the war. Although Rivers’s own crust has started to crack, in his final act of the novel, he reconciles compassion, understanding and responsibility by realizing that he must ‘Discharge Siegfried Sassoon to duty.’

Happily, Sassoon survived. River’s far more gifted patient, Wilfred Owen, did not.

Plot- and character-making, narrative art, etc. are analyzed in the article about Pat Barker’s treatment of the First World War in her novel, Regeneration.