Chapters 4-5: Four Damaged Men

An Army surgeon operating on a wounder soldier in the trenches

Anderson

Anderson, another patient, confides in Rivers about a recurrent nightmare where he is tied up with ladies' corsets, locked in a coffin, and then encounters Rivers dressed in his post-mortem apron - a nightmare from which Anderson always wakes up vomiting. Anderson was a medical doctor before he came to Craiglockhart, and he is haunted by his memories of the war, including one where a dying man simply wouldn't stop bleeding. But now he is afraid that he is becoming less of a man because of what has happened to him.

Burns

We also follow Burns on a trip out of Craiglockhart. (Hardly any of the patients are kept there against their will.) Burns takes a bus into the countryside, and runs through the fields until he finds a tree which is being used by hunters to hang and dry out dead animals. He is drawn to this tree, as he is drawn to the idea of death, and strips naked to lie on the ground in the middle of the animal corpses. However, he is still drawn, irresistibly, back to the comfort of the hospital at the end of the day.

Prior

Prior is a particularly angry and difficult patient, who, for whatever reason, is not able (or willing) to communicate through speech. So, instead, he uses paper and pen to utter his short outbursts. He reveals very little about what he is feeling, and appears very hostile to everyone else. BUT we are given a clue as to the torment beneath his antisocial behaviour when we find out that his nightmares are SO disturbing that they are trying to find a way for him NOT to have to share a room with anyone else.

Rivers

Finally, we learn of Rivers' experience as a younger doctor, experimenting with the boundaries of pain alongside a fellow doctor/medical student, Henry Head. Rivers, too, like the patients, is not immune to nightmares - and the one he describes harks back to experiments he and Head undertook on each other, cutting open nerve endings on their own bodies, applying pain and other stimuli, and then studying the nerves' own process of REGENERATION (i.e. healing). He is troubled by the fact that, in trying to 'heal' his own patients, he ends up pushing them to new levels of emotional pain beforehand.

Some things to think about:

1. Lots of the men seemed to be concerned about the idea of 'emasculation' (i.e. having their maleness taken away by the war). Why do you think this is? And what evidence are we given of this?
2. What are your first impressions of Prior? He is to become very important in the book as a whole, and so his first appearance is even more crucial.
3. Why do you think Rivers is SO troubled by his own nightmare? What does it show us about how he is feeling?
4. How do you account for Burns' trip into the countryside? Why do you think he behaves in this way?

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Some quotations:

Ghosts and Nightmares - the mind keeps taking them back:

• A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.
• Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching thighs remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells.
• And for a second he was back there, Armageddon, Golgotha, there were no words, a place of desolation so complete no imagination could have invented it.
  

Death - they have come so close that it is all they can think about:

• ...there was nothing I could do. I just stood there and watched him bleed to death.
• When all the corpses were on the ground, he arranged them in a circle round the tree and sat down within it, his back against the trunk. He felt the roughness of the bark against his knobbly spine. He pressed his hands between his knees and looked around the circle of his companions.
• This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.
  

Misanthropy - especially towards those who have never fought:

• Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it difficult.
• He threaded his way through the crowds on Princes Street. Now that Robert was gone, he hated everybody, giggling girls, portly middle-aged men, women whose eyes settled on his wound stripe like flies. Only the young soldier home on leave, staggering out of a pub, dazed and vacant-eyed, escaped his disgust.
  

Emasculation - the effect of war seems to steal from them their 'maleness':

• A pair of lady's corsets. They fastened them round my arms and tied the laces. [Anderson's nightmare]
  
• If this is leading up to a joke about ladies' choirs, forget it. I've heard them all.
• The boy - he couldn't have been more than nineteen - had a neat little hole too. Only his was between his legs.
• The change he demanded of them - and by implication of himself - was not trivial. Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.
  

Camaraderie - the army provides a sense of belonging:

• I think the army's probably the only place I've ever really belonged.
• Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he realized he'd come back for this.
  

The reality of war - as Rivers is trying to present it to his patients:

• ...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...