Chapters 17-18: Ready to go back?

A French trench at Verdun, 1916: this is the experience to which Prior and Sassoon would return, if they rejoined the war...

Yellow

Most of chapter 17 concerns Sarah Lumb, and her efforts to persuade her mother that she knows what she is doing with Billy Prior. Her mother has a view that hardly any men can be trusted, and that women need to know how to get all they can out of men - rather than the other way around. However, Sarah remains convinced that she is safe with Billy - so much so, in fact, that she turns down her mother's offer of a job in her tea room, in order to stay working at the munitions factory, stay 'yellow', and, therefore, stay close to Billy Prior.

Sassoon

Sassoon appears very unstable and 'on edge' in these chapters. It is almost time for the decision to be made - at the 'board' (or medical panel) - about whether or not he is fit to go back to fight in the war. Then he hears his friend, Graves, speaking with shame and prejudice about Sassoon's own homosexuality, which upsets him considerably: a friend of theirs is even being sent for psychiatric 'treatment', to 'cure' him of being gay! And, finally, when the board finally arrives, he gets impatient with being kept waiting in the waiting room - so much so that he even starts to consider whether he will continue his protest - and even take it to parliament...

Prior

Meanwhile, Prior has NOT been passed fit for battle, and is redeployed as a soldier on the 'Home Front' for the rest of the war. Many would be relieved - overjoyed, even - to have their life saved in this way. But Prior is too complex for that, and greets the news with tears, shame and ignominy...

Some things to think about:

1. Why does Sarah's mother want her to stop working at the munitions factory and to be careful of Billy Prior?
2. What upsets Sassoon so much about his conversation with Graves?
3. Why does Sassoon 'bunk' the medical panel?
4. Why isn't Prior happy at the news that he will not go back to the trenches?

* * * * * *

Some useful quotations:

Do you know, you never talk about the future any more? Yes, I know what you're going to say. How can you? Sass, we sat on a hill in France and we talked about the future. We made plans. The night before the Somme, we made plans. You couldn't do that now. A few shells, a few corpses, and you've lost heart. [The war takes everything away from the soldier - including, here, the future.]

...you've got this enormous emphasis on love between men - comradeship - and everybody approves. But at the same time there's always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one of the ways you make sure it's the right kind of love is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are. [This explains the 'double-standards' which existed towards male intimacy: i.e. it was OK to a point, but no further. Remember that, at this time, you could still be put in jail for being gay - and many men were.]

Like everybody else in the hospital, Sassoon's reflexes were conditioned by the facts of trench warfare. [Again, there is no escaping the ghosts of the war...]

Prior didn't answer. Rivers said gently, 'Everybody who survives feels guilty. Don't let it spoil everything.' [Just like in lots of the WW1 poems, so here it is made clear that 'surviving' the war is a complex experience, ridden with shame and guilt.]

Chapters 15-16: Progression or Suppression?

One of the many Martello towers on the barren and wild Suffolk coast, very much like the one visited by Burns and Rivers, and in which Burns hides the night of his unstoppable nightmares.

Progress or Suppress?

What strikes me about these two chapters is the question they raise about PROGRESS, in relation to soldiers suffering from the psychological fallout of the war. If progress requires the soldier to suppress (or, in other words, to ignore and bury, deep within themselves) the pain and distress of their remembered experience - then is this, in fact, progress at all?

Keeping Up Appearances

Burns has, it appears, made immense 'progress'. He has managed to leave Craiglockhart, and then, having returned to London briefly, leave there too - to return to his childhood origins on the Suffolk coast. There he lives a simple life, mixing with the locals, breathing the sea air and going for long walks in the countryside. When Rivers visits him, Burns manages to go most of each day without even mentioning the war at all, and gives the appearance that he has simply 'forgotten' about it.

Trying to Escape

However, the screams and nightmares every night, and his one, nighttime 'escape' to the terrifying, half-submerged Martello tower - these all provide solid evidence that he has forgotten nothing. He is simply trying to suppress the memories - and not very effectively at that. Also, it seems interesting that he is returning to 'childhood' to help him with this - which suggests this is not only suppression, but also regression, neither of which has anything to do with true progress.

Certain Death

Meanwhile, Sassoon's 'progress' takes the form of his decision to go back and rejoin the war. Or, in other words, to go and fight and risk likely death, for King and Country! In the eyes of the government, this would certainly be regarded as 'progress'; but, if it basically means he is putting himself in the hands of death, I fail to see how progressive that can really be felt to be...

Some things to think about:

1. Why does Burns choose to go back to Suffolk to live?
2. What is the significance of the Martello tower?
3. Why has Sassoon decided to go back to fight?
4. How do you think Rivers feels when he hears this news?

* * * * *

Some useful quotations:

He looked like a child trying to remember what it was that grown-ups said to newly arrived guests. He also looked, for the first time, deranged. [Note how the war has stripped him of all social skills, leaving him no more socially adept than a little child.]

Obviously, however hard Burns tried to thrust memories of the war behind him, the nightmare followed. [In other words, for Burns, any attempt at 'suppression' didn't really work.]

Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had 'matured' these young men. It wasn't true of his patients, and it certainly wasn't true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilised schoolboy seemed to exist side by side. It did give him a curiously ageless quality, but 'maturity' was hardly the word. [This is more evidence of "the complete disintegration of personality' effected by the war: the way in which, in one way, they were made old 'before their time', when contrasted with the way in which they were taken, psychogically and for comfort, back to their childhood persona, simply created an 'ageless' mess of a human being.]

Corpses were everywhere in the trenches. Used to strengthen parapets, to prop up sagging doorways, to fill in gaps in the duckboards. [This goes to show how commonplace death was in the trenches, and how it almost became a 'way of life', to which soldiers necessarily became desensitised.]

A resemblance that had merely nagged at him before returned to his mind with greater force. This waste of mud, these sump-holes reflecting a dim light at the sky, even that tower. It was like France. Like the battlefields. A resemblance greater by night than by day, perhaps, because here, by day, you could see things grow, and there nothing grew. [Another example of the ghosts of the war which haunt those who had contact with it, wherever they go - and even, here, in the quiet, Suffolk countryside, where the tower is described as "like the bones of a skull".]

His surrender, when it came, was almost shocking. Suddenly, his body had the rag-doll floppiness of the newborn. [Here, the REGRESSION is almost total...]

'I couldn't seem to get out of the dream. I woke up, I knew I was awake, I could move and yet... it was still there.' [See above: the nightmares never go away...]

He had missed his chance of being ordinary. [One inevitable consequence of the war was that those who fought in it, like Burns, would NEVER be the same again.]

And finally, if we need clarification of Sassoon's reasons for going back to fight, we need look no further than the poem he gives Rivers:

When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,
They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim charging breakers of the storm
Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,
Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.
They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?
‘From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’
In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain
I think of the Battalion in the mud.
‘When are you going back to them again?
‘Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

Chapter 14: No Escape

It is worth bearing in mind that, alongside all the horror and pain of the REALITY of war, the government propaganda machine was continuously churning out posters and fliers trying to use guilt and emotional blackmail to PERSUADE the young men of Britain to sign up and fight. This poster was perhaps the most famous of all, featuring a very bullying pose by Kitchener, the Minister for War.

Sick Leave

In this chapter, we follow Rivers on his 'sick leave'. He spends some time with his sister and her husband, reminiscing about his own childhood, and, in particular, about his fractious relationship with his father. Next he goes to stay with Henry Head and his wife in London, and Head makes an offer to Rivers of a job in a war hospital in Hampstead - but Rivers doesn't know if he can drag himself away from Craiglockhart.

No Escape

The other episodes in this long chapter concern Prior - who is humiliated by a new doctor with whom he lacks the closeness he has with Rivers - and Sassoon - who is immensely excited by the final draft Owen has produced of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. However, all of these episodes relate to the notion that one cannot escape the brutal reality of war: Rivers is supposedly on 'holiday', but the guns still keep him awake at night; Sarah discovers the room at the back of a hospital where all the disabled soldiers are 'stored', and wonders why society feels so ashamed of them; and Owen and Sassoon are only satisfied when their poetry admits the horror of war. There really is no escape...

Some things to think about:

1. Why does Rivers not want to accept Head's offer of a job in London?
2. Why did Rivers fall out with his father as a child?
   
3. What shocks Sarah SO much about the room at the back of the hospital she visits?
4. Why do you think Prior feels able to show warmth towards Sarah again?

* * * * * *

Some useful quotations:

... the two bloody bargains on which a civilization claims to be based. The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and will be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we're breaking the bargain, Rivers thought All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns. [It might be worth comparing this to the poem in the Opening Lines GCSE anthology, Owen's 'Parable'. Both explore the hypocrisy and madness of sacrificing a whole generation for such tenuous goals.]

The congregation, having renounced reason, looked rather the happier for it and sat down to await the sermon. [Having seen what human beings can do to each other, and how horrid life can be, Rivers finds it impossible to keep a faith in some vague, mysterious 'god', because to do so would be to 'renounce reason'.]

...Genesis was no more than the creation myth of a Bronze Age people. [Like the previous quotation, Rivers lost his faith even as early as when he was a little boy.]

They would never come back, those times. [Before the war, it seems that all was happy, pure, safe. Now those happy days are gone forever. It might be worth reading an 1896 poem by Housman in this context.]

Now the same chicks were scruffy, bedraggled things running in the coops, and the only sound in the room was the roar of flame. [Just like the previous quotation, what once was innocent and beautiful, is now ruined and doomed. :(]

Faintly, over dark hedges and starlit fields, came the soft thud-thud of the guns. [There really is NO escape.]

She was still dazzled by the brightness of the light outside and the relative dimness of the interior, and so she had to blink several times before she saw them, a row of figures in wheelchairs, but figures that were no longer the size and shape of adult men. Trouser legs sewn short; empty sleeves pinned to jackets. One man had lost all his limbs, and his face was so drained, so pale, he seemed to have left his blood in France as well. [Compare this description with Owen's poem, 'Disabled'.]

They stared at her, but not as the men had stared on the other ward, smiling, trying to catch her eye. This was a totally blank stare. If it contained anything at all, it was fear. Fear of her looking at the empty trouser legs. Fear of her not looking at them. [Not only has war taken away much of their bodies, their youth, their hope, their life, but also their sexuality. They have, effectively, been desexualised, or even 'castrated' by the war. Here is a pretty girl, and they feel NOTHING.]

If the country demanded that price, then it should bloody well be prepared to look at the result. [Sarah, too, shares the anger of the likes of Prior and Sassoon about it all now.]

He thought he might buy himself...any little treat that might make him feel better. Less contaminated. [A little hint about another effect of the war on the soldier: it made them feel permanently dirty.]

I get this feeling that the...the crust of everything is starting to crack. [This hints at the complete destruction enacted on the whole world by the First World War, a world which would never be the same again. At A Level of university, you will probably read a poem called 'The Wasteland' by T.S.Eliot, which, written shortly after the end of the war, explores exactly the same idea.]