Chapters 12-13: Rivers cracks under the strain

One of the later drafts by Owen of his poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. If you look closely, you can read, in the bottom left corner, where it says "These words were written by SS when W showed him this sonnet at Craiglockhart in Sept 1917".

Losing the Will to LOVE

Prior and Sarah escape to the seaside, and he keeps flitting between warmth and coldness towards her. The end up having sex, but any warmth he felt BEFORE they did so soon disappears AFTER they have finished. Prior is incapable of enjoying any simple affection with her, because of the psychological damage the war has done to him. As a result, he ends up treating her very cruelly and coldly, when, deep down, this is probably the last thing he wants to do. This shows ANOTHER effect of the war on the soldier: destruction of man's capacity for love and affection.

Patient Overload

During Chapter 13, we are given, effectively, a tour of Rivers' patient load, including:

• Burns: on the verge of being discharged, but still vomiting at night;
• Prior: desperate to go back to war, but still passing out, having nightmares etc.;
• Willard: still convinced that he is paralysed, when there is no medical proof of this;
• Anderson: so terrified of the sight of blood, that his roommate's shaving cut almost destroys him;
• Lansdowne: overwhelmed by a claustrophobia which prevents him entering the trenches;
• Fothersgill: "Basically, he was suffering from being too old for the war..."
• Broadbent: delusional, to the extent that he is convinced (wrongly) his own mother is dead.
  

And Rivers becomes so overwhelmed himself by all this mental illness and decay, that he, too, finds himself falling ill, and ends up having to take three weeks' leave. It seems that mental illness, when this powerful and horrific, can almost be contagious...

Look at this!

N.B. There is also a fascinating passage where Sassoon helps Owen redraft his poem, "Anthem For Doomed Youth". Here are the actual drafts which Sassoon helped Owen to produce: draft 1; draft 2; draft 3; draft 4. Have a look at them, and especially at the notes both men have made.

Some things to think about:

• Why does Prior turn so cold immediately after he and Sarah have had sex?
• Why is he so desperate to return and fight in the war?
• What is it that has finally made Rivers break down and need 3 weeks' leave?

* * * * * *

Some useful quotations:

• ‘There’s another reason I want to go back. Rather a nasty, selfish little reason, but since you clearly think I’m a nasty selfish little person that won’t come as a surprise. When all this is over, people who didn’t go to France, or didn’t do well in France—people of my generation, I mean—aren’t going to count for anything. This is the Club to end all Clubs.’ [Like so many of his fellow soldiers, war has given Prior a sense of belonging, and one which he does not want to lose.]
• In his Khaki, Prior moved about them like a ghost. [Prior, like many soldiers, feels an enormous distance between him and those who stayed at home. He feels like a pariah in his own country.]
• Yesterday, at the seaside, I felt as if I came from another planet. [More evidence of Prior's alienation from 'normal' society, as a result of his war experience.]

• He both envied and despised her, and was quite coldly determined to get her. They owed him something, all of them, and she should pay. [Prior feels violently angry towards all civilians, and here can't help seeing Sarah as just 'one of them', so much so that he is almost talking about sex with her as if it were rape.]
• The first time was almost always a disappointment. Either stuck at half mast or firing before you reached the target. He didn't want to think about Sarah like this. [Even when he is talking about sex, he can't help but use a MILITARY metaphor, which shows how big an effect the war has had on his mind.]
• A few grains of sand in the pubic hair, a mingling of smells. Nothing that a prolonged soak in the tub wouldn't wash away. [War has MADE him desensitised to tender human emotion, like love. Although, in Sarah's mind, they have just 'made love', to Prior it is nothing more than how he describes it here.]

• Prior became quite suddenly depressed... "Oh, I was remembering a man in my platoon." [He can't stop thinking about the war.]
• He listened to the surge and rumble of the storm, and his mind filled with memories of his last few weeks in France. [He REALLY can't stop thinking about the war!]

• ‘You can’t talk to anybody here,’ Prior said. ‘Everybody’s either lost somebody, or knows somebody who has. They don’t want the truth. It’s like letters of condolence. “Dear Mrs Bloggs, Your son had the side of his head blown off by a shell and took five hours to die. We did manage to give him a decent Christian burial. Unfortunately that particular stretch of ground came under heavy bombardment the day after, so George has been back to see us five or six times since then.” They don’t want that. They want to be told that George—or Johnny—or whatever his name was, died a quick death and was given a decent send off.’ [Prior, like Sassoon, struggles with the conflict between civilians and soldiers. Here, he sees it as a conflict between lies and truth: civilians want comforting, cosy, clean lies; only the soldiers know the horrible truth.]
• 'Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death;/Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland -/Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand...' Precisely, Sassoon thought. And now we complain about the soup. Or rather, they do. [Sassoon is struck by the triviality and stupidity of people complaining about LITTLE things in life, when soldiers have to ensure SO much worse in the trenches.]

Chapters 10-11

This photograph shows a group of female munitions workers involved in the production of shell cases in a Glasgow munitions factory during the first world war.

Willard's Wheelchair

We are introduced to another patient at Craiglockhart: Willard. Further evidence of the 'protopathic' to which Rivers refers earlier in the book, Willard is showing all the signs of paralysis (and, indeed, needs to be pushed around in a wheelchair by his wife), but no doctor can find any actual damage to his spine itself. He has clearly suffered a similar level of trauma - both physical and emotional - to his fellow patients, having had a bomb explode beneath him in a graveyard, causing fragments of tombstone to embed themselves in his buttocks; and Rivers would not blame him for not wanting to go back to that 'hell'. But the thought of 'cowardice' is just not an option to him, and so his body has found another way of staying 'safe'.

Owen's Poetry

An especially fascinating part of the book, here, is when Owen and Sassoon (semi-fictionalised versions of the actual soldier-poets themselves) are discussing their poems. Sassoon - a much more experienced and famous poet at this point, is giving Owen some brutal but sincere advice on the poems Owen shows him, and, effectively, asks Owen to do some 'homework' on them and bring them back to him soon. This 'redrafting' of the poems carries on throughout the novel, and mirrors the actual redrafting that Owen did at Craiglockhart, under the tutorage of Sassoon, over a period of a couple of years. If you are interested in finding out more about this, you can view the actual transcripts, with Sassoon's and Owen's notes and suggestions scribbled over them, by clicking here, and then clicking on the blue links at the bottom of each poem.

And we also continue to follow the development of Prior's relationship with Sarah; but more on that in Chapter 12...

Some things to think about:

• Can you explain, in your own words, why Rivers wishes Sassoon had never been sent to Craiglockhart?
• What do you understand to be Sassoon's criticisms of Owen's poems and his approach to poetry in general?
• What was your response to Willard's predicament?

* * * * *

Some useful quotations:

Willard is an example of how the war can physically destroy its combatants, leaving them totally helpless and humiliated:

By heaving and twisting, he could just manage to drag the wasted legs over, though they followed the bulk of his body passively, like slime trails after a snail.

The young men who fought and the old men who didn't shared a mutual distrust and animosity:

Old men were often ambivalent about young men in uniform, and rightly so, when you considered how very ambivalent the young men felt about them.

Sassoon's overwhelming misanthropy also rears its head a lot here, for example:

He looked at the cloth straining across their broad backs, at the folds of beef-pink skin that overlapped their collars, and thought, with uncharacteristic crudity, When did you two last get it up?

We are also given an insight into the significance of mental illness, as a consequence of the war:

The vast majority of his patients had no record of any mental trouble. And as soon as you accepted that the man's breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue.

As before, Sassoon (like the other patients) is repeatedly haunted by ghostly reminders of his war experience:

I was reminded [of the bayonet] because that boy was doing so well with the carving knife.

Lastly, not only do we find out how war strips soldiers of their physical power and capability, it also strips them of their youth, making them prematurely aged men:

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there.

* * * * *

You have got an extra week now (as I explained at the start of term) so that you can use half term to CATCH UP if you are behind, and also to re-read all the notes so far, and visit any links I've given you... :)

Chapters 8-9: Love and Sex

Although images of dead bodies on the battlefield were often withheld from the public during the First World War, ordinary soldiers and official photographers on both sides did not shy away from taking such pictures. The six dead German soldiers shown here were killed in the fight for Pilckem Ridge (31 July-2 August 1917), a British offensive that gained two miles of enemy ground. It marked the first action in the Battle of Passchendaele (or the 3rd Battle of Ypres), which lasted until 10 November.

Love and Sex

These are two very difficult chapters, which explore love and sex in an uncomfortable and challenging way. On the one hand, we have Billy Prior failing to have sex with Sarah, a girl who shares his doubt about whether love is really possible at all. And, on the other hand, Prior admits to feeling an almost sexual excitement when faced with the danger and panic of the battlefield. What is increasingly clear is that the mind of a soldier is a scary and messed up place, and Prior is no exception. On the other hand, there is a far more natural, warmer affection that grows instantly between Sassoon and his new visitor (and fellow patient AND poet), Wilfred Owen.

Gore and Gobstoppers

We also read of some details about the reality of combat, for example:

• going 'over the top' invariably consisted of walking, slowly and in full view of the enemy, over 'no man's land', facing a shower of machine gun fire as you did so!
• death was so commonplace that soldiers were expected to think nothing of routinely cleaning up the trenches by digging up and throwing away any mess (including body parts, charred bone and burnt flesh).

And we read something of the final straw which led to Prior's eventual breakdown, when he found a human eye resting, solitary, between the makeshift floorboards in his trench. His disbelief and shock are so intense that he pretends it is a gobstopper, because the alternative is simply too horrible for his mind to deal with.

Some things to think about:

1. Why does Prior insist on going out into the city on his own, and without his Hospital Badge on?
2. What do you find interesting about Rivers' opinions about mutism, and the different effects the war seems to have on officers and on privates?
3. What do you think are Prior's motives with Sarah, and what is she trying to achieve too?

* * * * *

Some useful quotations:

The military strategy of the war seems ludicrous to Prior:

"You're describing this attack as if it were a - a slightly ridiculous event in -"
"Not 'slightly'. Slightly, I did not say."

It seemed hard to believe in a 'god' amid such slaughter and carnage, and one soldier takes this anger (and sense of betrayal) out in a very dramatic way:

Whenever he saw an undamaged crucifix, he used it for target practice. You could hear him for miles. "ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, Bastard on the Cross, FIRE!"

There is something 'ancient' about the war - something too powerful to withstand. No wonder they called it 'The Great War':

It's as if all other wars had somehow... distilled themselves into this war, and that makes it something you... almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice saying, Run along, little man. Be thankful if you survive.

Like many soldiers, Prior just wanted to 'escape':

It was worth it, though, just to sit quietly, to listen to voices that didn't stammer, to have his eyes freed from the ache of khaki.

One of the more subtle effects of the way was the destruction of language, and linguistic communication:

Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, the Somme. Arras.

One way to avoid the closeness of 'love' was to treat SEX as just sex. The women talk about using it to get pregnant, and, thereby, benefit from the man's war pension if they are killed:

"You should have fixed him while you had the chance..."

Whereas Prior talks about sex as something more primal, almost just a physical release from all the pain:

He would have preferred not even to know her name. Just flesh against flesh in the darkness and then nothing.

This is how Prior describes his first attack of mutism:

All present and correct, but how they combined together to make sounds he had no idea.

Prior also explains how EMPTY the war has left him feeling - how NUMB to physical and emotional feeling:

Like the speechlessness, it seemed natural. He sat on the bench, his clasped hands dangling between his legs, and thought of nothing.

Like in some of the war poems we are studying, this moment shows how the war can make men into little more than animals, stripped of their humanity by the pain of it all:

This was not an attack, Rivers realised, though it felt like one. It was the closest Prior could come to asking for physical contact. Rivers was reminded of a nanny goat on his brother's farm, being lifted almost off her feet by the suckling kid.

We also learn a great deal more about the way the war has EMASCULATED men, stripping them of what made them 'male' before the war complicated everything:

• He didn’t know what to make of her, but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed 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.
• One of the paradoxes of the war - one of the many - was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was...domestic. Caring. As Layard [a traumatised soldier Rivers hadn't been able to help] would undoubtedly have said, maternal.
• The war that promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.a traumatised soldier Rivers hadn't been able to help] would undoubtedly have said, maternal.

And, finally, we learn just how damaged Rivers himself is by the whole experience, so much so that, at times, he would dearly love to be dead in a trench somewhere too:

Rivers pulled the curtains to, and settled down to sleep, wishing, not for the first time, that he was young enough for France.