Re-assessments
Prisoner of war
Simon Raven
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston Siegfried Sassoon (Faber £7.95; £4.95) The Sherston Trilogy', as it is sometimes called, is an autobiographical novel. Siegfried Sassoon made several alterations in place, time, names and circumstances, to very little end that I can make out, as most of his characters are clearly identifiable (e.g. 'David Cromlech' as Robert Graves, 'Thornton Tyrrell' as Bertrand Russell). On his own person he performed one fundamental excision: `Sherston' is Sassoon the man minus Sassoon the poet. The explanation for this must be that he did not wish to obscure or complicate his most important theme (the evil of war and the obligation to take part in it) by an irrelevant factor, to be mistaken as saying (for instance) that there are special rules for poets. And in one exceptional case he has deliberately not altered the name of a brilliant and substantial member of his cast: the psychologist Rivers, famous then and later as a 'British and common sense version of Freud' and also as an ingenious analyst of dreams, is called, baldly, Rivers, and occasionally referred to as Captain Rivers, RAMC, his status during 1917 when he was involved with Sassoon.
All this said, the story of Sherston is the story of Sassoon. The first volume of the trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox hunting Man, takes Sherston-Sassoon from his childhood and adolescence into early manhood through a leisurely sequence of years (like a series of agreeably hazy 19th-century aquatints) spent hunting or playing cricket in Kent or Sussex, with occasional interludes of golf. A small private income sustains the modest expense of this idyll —which is interupted only by the call of the bugle in August 1914. Sherston is an Englishman and a gentleman: Sherston follows the call. He is duly commissioned into the 'Flintshire' Fusiliers and for a time does very well in his new (and first) profession, achieving a reputation for perverse individual daring and being awarded a Military Cross.
But by the time we are two-thirds or so through the second part, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, things are turning sour. After a long bout of dysentery and a very nasty wound in the throat, after the cruel death of many friends (of all ranks), Sherston begins to have doubts. He is Persuaded that the war could be stopped by negotiation, were it not for a powerful and greedy clique of men who wish to prolong it for their own ends and on the fraudulent excuse that certain essential but deliberately undefined war aims have not yet been attained. Encouraged by a well known editor of the day and then by TyrrellRussell, he overstays his leave, forwards a written protest against the war to his Commanding Officer (copies to Tyrrell, dissident MPs, et al.), and eventually returns to his Regimental Depot, when absolutely ordered to do so, expecting to be arrested on sight and court-martialled.
But none of the conspirators has foreseen 'the friendly tolerance' with which Sherston is now treated by the senior officers of his regiment. First they arrange a Medical Board for him; this he cuts, having torn up the order to attend and incidentally thrown his MC riband into the Mersey. Then, after a certain amount of good-natured tut tutting, Cromlech-Graves is wheeled in to talk Sherston out of it. This, up to a point, Cromlech contrives to do. He tells Sherston, untruthfully, that he can never be court-martialled, never made a martyr (It's all been fixed with the high-ups at the War Office'), so that he may just as well agree to go before the Medical Board — which, having been once again fixed up by his seniors and emotively fibbed at by Cromlech, pronounces that Sherston has shell-shock and sends him to a kind of military mental hospital near Edinburgh.
We are now approaching the crisis. At the beginning of the third part, Sherston's Progress, the situation is spelt out: Sherston knows that he is sane and that his protest against the war (though he was later to admit it was premature) issues from an underanged mind; Cromlech knows this too, and so, more or less, do 'the friendly and tolerant' senior officers; so, above all, does Rivers, the specialist into whose care Sherston is now consigned. At the very beginning of their acquaintance Rivers declares that Sherston is most certainly not suffering from shell-shock but appears to have 'an anti-war complex'. Although this last phrase is a joke on Rivers's .part, its implications would be no joking matter to the authorities. In short: Cromlech and Sherston's other friends have eased Sherston off the hook by lying and fiddling for him out of sheer personal loyalty; and he is now sitting in a safe and cosy pre-war hydro under totally false pretences.
He has, it seems, two choices. Either he can insist on his sanity, on the validity of his protest, and strive to be taken seriously as an intelligent dissident; or he can simply consent to go along with the fiction of his `shell-shock' and submit to the cushy regimen of the hospital. He begins by adopting the first alternatiVe, vociferously claiming (without, in my view, convincing himself or anyone else) that he still believes every word he said about the war and that he is still a candidate for martyrdom. But Rivers, whether from personal liking for Sherston or from dislike of throwing his patients, however fake, to the lions, quietlywaives all this away and remarks that if it goes on Sherston will simply be confined in the hydro till the end of the war.
At this stage it would appear that Sherston can now do nothing save adopt the second, alternative and settle down to be indulged with all the shattered and genuinely ill men around him. But that, as Rivers tells him, would be his ruin. He would be deserting and disowning his friends, both alive and dead. He has only one honourable course, only one practicable course, only one course by which he can, as a human and mortal entity, hope to survive: he must go back to the front. Just as his illness has been faked by others, so the 'cure' can be faked by Rivers and himself. This last observation Rivers does-not make in so many words; but it is a pretty fair summary of the procedure by which Sherston consents to be assessed and is found fit once more for General Service Abroad.
So • Sherston rejoins the regiment, and shortly afterwards is wounded yet again, whereupon he is finally and honourably disqualified from fighting. Rather a moving story, so far. The man who returned to his comrades in the line, against his intellectual convictions and all for . fellowship. The trouble is that this was not the end of it. The whole thing went on and on and on for the rest of SassOon's life. Unlike Graves and the rest, Sassoon did not greet the Armistice as a happy release and dance away to pastures new; he stayed put in his marshy and stinking patch of No Man's Land (so to speak) and positively wallowed in it. The Memoirs of George Sherston were not enough, for him: he also made a strictly autobiographical treatment of the same story.
Why was he so obsessed? Others told their tale of the war once or not at all, thanked God they had survived it, and got on with the peace (at least of the next 20 years, that is). Sassoon went on writing about the war, quarrelling about it, brooding about it, corresponding about it, dining and drinking about it, making issues of forgotten battles and analysing the motives of forgotten men. One gets the impression that for Sassoon the war went on for ever, and that however much he hated it he wanted it, he needed it, to go on forever.
Perhaps assiduous readers of the Memoirs, in the old editions or the new, may now find out why. My own view is that he was a man of limited intellect and of limited interests. His interest in literature was dilettante, neither wide nor deep, and at times he seems more concerned with elegances or eccentricities of binding, printing or format than with text or theme. Outside literature, his only interests seem to have been golfl, cricket and foxhunting. From all of which it follows that, although he could turn powerful verses and pen moving prose, he was short of matter. Golf, cricket and foxhunting (none of which, in any case, he really understood very well) he disposed of in the first three quarters of Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man and in The Weald of Youth (the second volume of his straight autobiography). What was left? The war. And then the war. And then of course, the war.
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