Chapters 6-7: Prior starts to talk

A patient being loaded onto a hospital train at a Casualty Clearing Station, for transport to a larger Stationary or General Hospital farther back the Somme, October 1916. Casualty Clearing Stations were usually located next to railway lines to allow patients to be evacuated by train.

Prior starts to talk (a bit)

Prior's ability to speak comes back, but he still finds it almost impossible to 'open up' in his sessions with his psychiatrist, Rivers. He is suspicious of Rivers, and resents the impersonal nature of the sessions, referring to talking to Rivers being like talking to 'empathic wallpaper'. He wants Rivers to open up too, so that they can interact as human beings; he also wants to undergo hypnosis, to unearth and discover the horrid memories which are causing him such unbearable nightmares every night - but Rivers believes that, if Prior will only admit it, he knows what those memories are already.

Empathy, sympathy and cruelty

We are also introduced to some of the other characters with influence over the lives of Prior and the other patients. Firstly, we meet Prior's father, a tough, bully of a man, who is embarrassed by the emotional wreck his son appears to have become; and Prior's mother, who is just as embarrassed by her husband! And we sit in on a meeting of the psychiatrists, when Brock, Bryce, Ruggles and Rivers chat about their different cases, but, especially, about Sassoon. Rivers sees it as his duty to get Sassoon back to the front - but the others question whether or not this is actually the right thing to do.

Some things to think about:

1. Why is Prior so reluctant to open up to Rivers and confide in him?
2. Why is Prior's father so ashamed of his son?
3. Why do you think Rivers sees it as so important to get Sassoon 'fit' for battle again?

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Some quotations:

The lack of sympathy in people like Prior's father in response to the psychological damage of warfare:

• He's get a damn sight more sympathy from me if he had a bullet up his arse...

The naive and romantic view of war shared by many people on the home front or in power:

• ...they really do believe the whole thing's going to end in one big glorious cavalry charge... [This is in reference to the 19th Century poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', to which Prior cynically refers in this chapter himself.]
  

We see two different views on the 'camaraderie' of soldiers on the front. Firstly, Prior, in his extreme misanthropy, hates it all:

• The men are pack animals.

Whereas Sassoon quietly admits his own homosexuality, a sign of the warmth which grows between men in such circumstances:

• Probably just as well. My intimate details disqualify me for military service.

And lastly, we learn more about the indifference of the folks back home to the horrors being played out on the Western Front:

• He wasn't even old enough to enlist. And nobody gives a damn.
• ...it doesn't even put them off their sausages! Have you ever sat in a club room and watched people read the casualty list?
  

And what does 'protopathic' mean?
Feeling or sensing pain that has no specific cause (i.e. emotional, psychological); primitive; primary...
The psychiatrists are debating how seriously to take EMOTIONAL wounds as opposed to PHYSICAL wounds. Their very profession demands that they take them with the utmost seriousness, but the pressure from the government and the army is to 'cure' soldiers of such weaknesses as soon as they possibly can...