Chapters 1-3: Arriving at Craiglockhart

This is an original photograph of the actual Rivers in front of the actual Craiglockhart hospital

Sassoon is introduced

In these chapters, Sassoon arrives at Craiglockhart hospital, where he meets his psychiatrist, Rivers. We learn how he ended up as a patient here: he had written a letter against the war and thrown his medal into the river, and so the government had to do something about him. A friend of his, Robert Graves, persuaded them to admit him into a psychiatric hospital rather than imprison him - although the book makes it clear that he is perfectly sane.

The other inpatients

We see Sassoon's delicate mental state, and learn about his nightmares and hallucinations; and we also encounter some of the other inpatients, including Burns - who vomits whenever he eats, because it reminds him of when a bomb sent him through the air to land, head first, in the exploded intestines of another soldier. Criaglockhart hospital clearly contains lots of living examples of the damage the war has done.

Sassoon's poetry

We also read a few of Sassoon's own poems, which he sends to Rivers as evidence of how he feels and why he has behaved the way he has. This will happen throughout the novel, and Barker allows us to study the character of Sassoon just as much through his poetry as through her own narrative.

Some things to think about:

1. Why do you think Sassoon decided to write the letter and throw away his medal?
2. What do you think Rivers thinks of Sassoon, and how has this changed since he actually met him?
3. What was your response to the other inpatients, especially Burns?
   

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For those of you who want to study the novel in more depth (especially those of you doing your GCSE this year), here are some of the important quotations from these chapters, organised under different thematic headings:

Ghosts and Nightmares

Immediately, he saw lines of men with grey muttering faces clambering up the ladders to face the guns. He blinked them away.

'You can't put people in lunatic asylums just like that. You have to have reasons.'
'They've got reasons.'
'Yes, the Declaration. Well, that doesn't prove me insane.'
'And the hallucinations? The corpses in Piccadilly?'

'It was just that when I woke up, the nightmares didn't always stop. So I used to see...' A deep breath. 'Corpses. Men with half their faces shot off, crawling across the floor.'

'When I woke up, the pavement was covered in corpses. Old ones, new ones, black, green.' His mouth twisted. 'People were treading on their faces.'

Pipes lined the walls, twisting with the turning of the stair, gurgling from time to time like lengths of human intestine.

Nightly, he relived the experience, and from every nightmare he awoke vomiting. Burns on his knees, as Rivers had often seen him, retching up the last ounce of bile, hardly looked like a human being at all. His body seemed to have become merely the skin-and-bone casing for a tormented alimentary canal. His suffering was without purpose or dignity...

Reminiscing about life before the war

He shifted in his seat and sighed, looking out over fields of wheat bending to the wind. He remembered the silvery sound of shaken wheat, the shimmer of light on the stalks.

How Sassoon got his nickname, 'Mad Jack'

'...In the end I didn't know whether I was trying to kill them or just giving them plenty of opportunities to kill me.'

Sassoon's misanthropy and hatred of civilians and people who haven't seen the war first-hand

His voice became a vicious parody of an old man's voice. '"Lost heavily in that last scrap." You don't talk like that if you've watched them die.'

'...The point is you hate civilians, don't you? The "callous", the "complacent", the "unimaginative".'

'You must've been in agony when you did that.'
Sassoon lowered his hand. 'No-o. Agony's lying in a shell-hole with your legs shot off. I was upset.'

Seeing death up close

He remembered...passing the same corpses time after time, until their twisted and blackened shapes began to seem like old friends.