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?

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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.

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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... :)