The South African
Military History Society

---

Die Suid-Afrikaanse Krygshistoriese Vereniging

Military History Journal
Vol 7 No 3 - June 1987

Horror Recollected in Tranquility:
The Classic Memoirists of the Western Front
- Blunden, Graves and Sassoon

No less than the poetry, the autobiographical works generated by the Western Front mirrors the anguished response to the hitherto totally unimagined character of industrialized war. For the majority, if not all, of those who sought to come to terms with this traumatic epoch in their lives, it remained the central landmark in their psychological landscape. To this extent, the autobiographies of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon bear eloquent testimony to the observation of Guy Chapman, whose work, A Passionate Prodigality (published 1933) is one of the finest records of personal experience in World War 1. Publisher, historian, academic, man of letters, he symbolized the kind of intelligent and sensitive youth who inhabited the inferno of the Western Front. Serving in a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, he survived one 'great show' after another, to emerge, in 1919, as second-in-command of the battalion, with the OBE and MC. In the above quoted book he writes:

'There grew a compelling fascination. I do not think I exaggerate; for in that fascination lies War's power. Once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her. Every writer of imagination who has set down in honesty his experience has confessed it. Even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell. They rise from her embraces, pillaged, soiled, it may be ashamed, but they are still hers.'(3)

The obvious physical threat which these writers constantly faced was counterpointed by the no less feared spectre of neurasthenia (the term commonly applied to battle fatigue, or shell shock, but in actual fact meaning nervous breakdown; deriving from 'neuron' - nerve - and 'asthenia' - weakness). Graves was on the verge of thus succumbing, whilst Sassoon probably suffered a total nervous breakdown (c.f. below). The dominant motif which emerges from a study of the autobiographies of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon is the desperate search for psychological defences against such a condition; a search which was probably most successful in the case of Blunden, and least so in that of Sassoon. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that, in the majority of instances, the poetry and prose relating to the Western Front was produced by junior officers. Thus, to extreme personal stress was added the heavy burden of responsibility for the men under their command. (Owen interpreted this role in terms of the priesthood, and there is little reason to doubt that his fellow officers took their responsibilities no less seriously.)(5) In many instances failure to counteract the threat marred the remainder of the lives of those who served on the Western Front. The poet and composer, Ivor Gurney, for example, was driven into madness, spending the rest of his life (between 1922 and his death in 1937) in mental institutions. (The certificate which committed him speaks of 'manic/depressive psychosis'. Minds, no less than bodies, were destroyed on the Western Front). During the formative years of their lives (Blunden was only 19 years of age when he joined the Army and Graves the same age) the customary psychological defences to which men have recourse were thus subjected to this tremendous pressure. As will be discussed below, the autobiographical works which emerged a decade following the Armistice were essentially motivated by therapeutic considerations.

The following article adopts a certain patterned approach to these works. First, the emphasis bears heavily upon the social-psychological responses evoked by the Western Front. The literary qualities - and defects - of the writers discussed are analyzed only in so far as they enhance - or detract from - the impact made upon the reader in conveying their experiences and attitudes. Second, it will be observed that the prose writers discussed were, primarily, poets, Although the central focus is directed upon their autobiographical works, the poetry is nevertheless referred to, in so far as it illuminates aspects of their personality which emerge in their prose works. Finally, the three writers have been selected as they share certain central characteristics. First, there are strong personal associations in the histories of two of the figures discussed, Sassoon and Graves. They served in the same battalion and both appear extensively in each other's autobiographies (albeit Graves appears in a thinly disguised form in Sassoon's autobiographical works, in accordance with the latter's device of concealment; c.f. below). Second, two of the personalities - Sassoon and Blunden - were strongly identified by deeply shared attitudes, centring upon a profound nostalgia for a lost civilization, the pivot of which was the highly idealized veneration for pre-1914 rural England. Third, all three, serving as infantry officers, survived the supreme - and fateful - crisis of British arms in World War 1, the Somme; and, indeed, served in the same sector of this front in 1916. The Western Front was the scenario of the major crisis which beset European civilization during the Great War. (To the collective European mind its traumatic impact was comparable to that of the Ice Age). Thus, in terms of the relationship between war and culture, the impressions contained in the autobiographical works of this trilogy of writers are more relevant than, for example, T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (published in 1935), which describes the Arab revolt against the Turks in the Middle East during 1917-1918, and which is generally regarded as a classic of modern English prose writing. The futile stagnation and attrition of industrial war was most fully experienced by the infantry serving on the Western Front, and thus the branch of the army in which these three writers served is also immediately relevant to the theme of technological war shaping the cultural response; to a far greater extent than, for example, Cecil Lewis's Sagittarius Rising (published in 1936), which provides a vivid picture of an aviator's life in the Royal Flying Corps. Indeed, Lewis himself testified to the stark contrast between the two modes of fighting:

'It was like the lists of the Middle Ages, the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his enemy and faced him in mortal combat, the only sphere where there was still chivalry and honour. If you won, it was your own bravery and skill; if you lost it was because you had met a better man.
You did not sit in a muddy trench while someone who had no personal enmity against you loosed off a gun, five miles away, and blew you to smithereens - and did not know he had done it! That was not fighting; it was murder. Senseless, brutal, ignoble. We were spared that.'

EDMUND BLUNDEN: Undertones of War (1928)

Edmund Charles Blunden was born in 1896 and, before the outbreak of World War 1, was educated at Christ's Hospital. In 1916 he joined the British Army, aged 19 years. He served with the Royal Sussex Regiment and was awarded the Military Cross. After the war he continued his education at the University of Oxford and then commenced a career in journalism, joining the staff of the Athenaeum. Early volumes of poetry appeared in 1914,1916 and 1920. He was appointed Professor of English at the University of Tokyo in 1924 and returned to England in 1927. In 1931 he was made a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement in 1943 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1951. In 1953 he was appointed Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. He died in 1974.

His autobiography Undertones of War (published in 1928) captured the (then) rising tide of popular interest in World War 1, and was reprinted several times. In common with the other retrospective writers of the 1920s - be it in autobiography or fiction - Blunden had an essentially therapeutic motive in recording his experiences. He was endeavouring to seek a pattern in the traumatic and harrowing events which had so unexpectedly impinged upon his formative years. (Writing in the preface to the 1956 impression, Blunden states that '... in contrast with the Second World War the Great War fell like the proverbial bolt from the blue; it was to most of us like a very queer jest of the gods.')

Such a raison d'etre applied with especial intensity and urgency to the survivors of the Great War, in view of the cosmic and hitherto unimagined dimensions of the experiences into which they were plunged. Hence, their literary evocation of these events embody an extended confrontation with their wartime lives.

The urgent need, on Blunden's part, for such a re-appraisal of his wartime experiences is clearly reflected in the poem 1916 seen from 1921, the opening lines of which are:

'Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

and I

Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags
Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own ... '

'The experience that has prematurely aged him binds him not only with its insistent fears, but also with the ties of love. This is the force of "green places ... that were my own". But where nature has made "green" again the hideousness of a mutilated territory [i.e. the Western Front] and should offer benign comfort, the very terms of his previous life so lovingly and fearfully bound together have been eradicated; and not merely in that many of the men he knew are dead, but by the force of nature. Thus what should succour him does not; it exiles him from the area to which he was committed, and its now [restored] character is no consolation to him. Nature fails him and the failure increases his desolation, in that it was nature that he had always relied on before, and through the war, to provide a comfort that he could find nowhere else.'(6)

The theme of the poem is the concept that memory exiles him from a developing present. There is a strong echo of the deep isolation within the post-war world which resulted from the awareness of being a member of a 'lost generation'. Implicit in this isolation is possibly the feeling of guilt which accrues from the very fact of survival itself, explicitly stated in Blunden's poem, War Autobiography:

'Then down and down I sunk from joy
To shrivelled age, though scarce a boy,
And knew for all my fear to die
That I with those lost friends should lie.'

'The tunnellers who were so busy under the German line were men of stubborn determination, yet, by force of the unaccustomed, they hurried nervously along the trenches above ground to spend their long hours listening or mining. At one shaft they pumped air down with Brobdignagian bellows. The squeaking noise may have given them away, or it may have been mere bad luck, when one morning a minenwerfer [a trench mortar] smashed this entrance and the men working there. One was carried out past me, collapsing like a sack of potatoes, spouting blood at twenty places. Cambrin was beginning to terrify. Not far away from that shaft-head, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three fire bays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out and I thought all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados [earth bank] where three minutes ago the lance-corporal's mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer? At this moment, while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal's brother came round the traverse.

He was sent to company headquarters in a kind of catalepsy. The bay had to be put right, and red-faced Sergeant Simmons, having helped himself and me to a share of rum, biting hard on his pipe, shovelled into the sandbag I held, not without self-protecting profanity, and an air of "it's a lie; we're a lie!"

A dominating motif in Blunden's autobiography is the infusion of imagery derived from rural England into his evocation of the Western Front. Writing of this aspect of his work, one critic, Jon Silkin, comments: 'The tender rural memory is interleaved with the experience of war, and the whole is held together in a questioning retrospective gentleness. In Blunden's mind the two seem inalienable from each other, linked perhaps because the emotional extremity of one recalls the contrasting gentleness of the other.'(7)

In the writer's opinion, Silkin's interpretation does not approach the root cause of the pervasiveness of the naturalist imagery within Blunden's work. For the essence of this consistent evocation of rural England is the preservation of a sense of continuity with the known, familiar and, above all, loved, amidst the recollection of horror. It thus serves an essentially therapeutic psychological purpose on the author's part. The contrast between the two worlds is not conveyed with bitterness or irony. Rather, it forms a balanced approach, the opposite thus evoked contributing to a profound sense of continuity. This impression is clearly conveyed by the following passage:

'The heart of the village is masked with its hedges and orchards from almost all ground observation. That heart nevertheless bleeds. The old homes are razed to the ground: all but one or two, which play involuntary tricks upon probability, balancing themselves like mad acrobats. One has been knocked out in such a way that its thatched roof, almost uninjured, has dropped over its broken body like a tea-cosy. The Church maintains a kind of conceptional shape, and has a cliff-like beauty in the sunlight; but as at this ecclesiastical corner visitors are sometimes killed we may, in general, allow distance to lend enchantment.

Up that naked road is the stern eye of Beaumont Hamel ... this way the tourist's privacy is preserved by ruins and fruitful branches.'

'It has been objected by some (to me insentient) critics that his continual reference to the gentle charms of the unspoilt countryside marks him as an unrepentant Georgian; but one writes out of love for what one is deeply attached to and what evokes the deepest layers of one's imaginative world, and there is nothing half-hearted, shallow or sentimental about Blunden's spiritual identification with meadows, trees, flowers and the wild creatures that roam among them, one might say the countryside as nature intended; in fact it seems to me to give unique strength to his work.'(8)

' ... I went ahead to see all that the mist allowed; there were troops of our Brigade advancing through the lines of men consolidating shell holes, and with map before me I could recognize some of the places which we had certainly captured. It seemed marvellous, for the moment. All ours - all these German trenches ... But, stay - even now a pity looks one in the face, of these trenches are mostly mere hedges of brushwood, hurdles, work for a sheep fold, with a shallow ditch behind; and they have been taking our weeks of gunfire in these!' (author's italics).

'Waiting there in the gashed hillsides for Lewis, who had gone below for instructions, we looked over the befouled fragments of Ypres, the solitary sheet of water, Zillebeke Lake, the completed hopelessness. The denuded scene had acquired a strange abruptness of outline; the lake and the ashy city lay unprotected, isolated, dominated finally. But further off against the sunset one saw the hills beyond Mount Kemmel, and the simple message of nature's health and human worthiness again beckoned in the windmills resting there. There - and here!' (author's italics).

A distinct feature of Blunden's prose is his sharp, exact powers of observation. These apply to the phenomena of war no less than to the rural landscape, and provide the vehicle for reflections regarding the changing nature of the war. For example, one may quote his comments regarding the prevalence of the steel helmet after 1916. This observation contains an awareness of the impersonal technology which dehumanized the combatants: 'It is true that steel helmets now became the rule, their ugly useful discomfort supplanting our old friendly soft caps ... The dethronement of the soft cap clearly symbolized the change that was coming over the war, the induration from a personal crusade into a vast machine of violence ... '

This passage, one of the few moments of overt reflection, represents one of the slight climaxes of the book, but it is not dwelt upon, such detailed discussion being inconsistent with the writer's reticent narrative approach.

Any interpretation of the war as a heroic epic conflict was totally alien to Blunden (as also to Graves and Sassoon). Within this context, the essentially pacific outlook of Blunden may be contrasted to the attitude of Ernst Junger, whose autobiographical work, The Storm of Steel appeared in English translation in 1929, subtitled From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front. Although Junger survived much the same experiences as his British counterparts on the Western Front (including the Somme) his attitude is remarkably contrasted to theirs. Despite the fact that he too records violent death, mutilation and every kind of physical squalor and privation, not for one instant does his enthusiasm for the war falter; his patriotic fervour and idealism remain unimpaired until the very end of the war - and, indeed, survived into the post-war world. Despite all that Junger had seen and endured (almost dying of a lung wound) he continued to exalt war as a great and ennobling experience. This violently contrasting approach to the experience ot the Western Front may be most effectively illustrated within the context of Blunden's passage alluding to the emergence of the steel helmet, which has been quoted above. Whereas Blunden writes ruefully of the helmet's 'ugly useful discomfort', and looks back nostalgically at the soldiers' soft caps and the primitive stage of the war associated with them, Junger conceives of the helmeted German soldier as a figure of heroic energy, embodying the noble qualities of the Classical or Renaissance epochs:

'The spirit and the tempo of the fighting altered, and after the battle of the Somme the war had its own peculiar impress that distinguished it from all other wars. After this battle the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his features there were chiselled the lines of an energy stretched to the utmost pitch, lines that future generations will perhaps find as fascinating and imposing as those of many heads of classical or renaissance times.'

To reiterate, Undertones of War is characterized by a marked austerity of approach. This is illustrated, not only in the highly confined narrative focus, but in the extremely restricted scope of the narrative. No less than in Owen's poetry, the world of the Western Front is conceived as a totally self-contained entity, a civilization within itself (albeit of an extremely bizarre character), possessing its own values and even its own peculiar time scheme. The Western Front is projected as having its own unique historical development:

'The joyful path away from the line, on that glittering summer morning, was full of pictures for my infant war mind. History and nature were beginning to harmonize in the quiet of that sector. In the orchard through which we passed immediately, waggons had been dragged together once with casks and farm gear to form barricades; I felt that they should never be disturbed again, and the memorial raised near them to the dead of 1915 implied a closed chapter. The empty farm houses were not yet effigies of agony or mounds of punished, atomized material; they could still shelter, and they did. Their hearths could still boil the pot. Acres of self-sewn wheat glistened and sighed as we wound our way between, where rough scattered pits recorded a hurried firing-line of long ago. Life, life abundant sang here and smiled; the lizard ran warless in the warm dust; and the lizards were trembling quick ... , in worlds as remote as Saturn.'

ROBERT GRAVES: Goodbye to All That (1929)

Robert Graves was born in 1895 and, prior to the outbreak of war, was educated at Charterhouse. He joined the Army in 1914, with a commission, and served on the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. After the war he continued his education at the University of Oxford (where, characteristically, he did not sit for his BA examinations but was awarded a post-graduate B Litt degree on the basis of his published works on literary criticism). Apart from a brief and unhappy period as a Professor of English Literature at the University of Cairo, he pursued a highly successful career as a man of letters. Primarily a poet, he was, in addition, a highly successful novelist (producing such acclaimed novels as I Claudius, Claudius the God and King Jesus) and literary critic. (His famous work, The White Goddess generated a totally new mythological concept of English poetry).

Goodbye to All That (published in 1929) is undoubtedly an autobiographical masterpiece of World War 1, clearly ranking with Blunden's work. There are several profound contrasts between the two works. The first concerns scope. Graves's work is a full scale autobiography, commencing with the author's schooldays at Charterhouse, extending to his post-war life as an undergraduate at Oxford and his experiences in Egypt, as a Professor of English Literature at the University of Cairo in 1926. However, the central chapters of the book relate to Graves's four years service in World War 1. The second major contrast resides in the personalities of the two writers. The character of the narrator in Undertones of War is modest and reticent, mirrored in the style. Graves, on the other hand, emerges as a vigorously eccentric personality, striding through the physical and psychological landscape of the Western Front. He is almost insufferably knowledgeable and opinionated. In Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (c.f. below) Graves's personality is vividly captured in the assumed character of David Cromlech (specifically meant to represent Graves):

' ... no one was worse than he at hitting it off with officers who distrusted cleverness and disliked unreserved utterances. In fact he was a positive expert at putting people's backs up unintentionally. He was with our Second Battalion for a few months before they transferred him to 'The First', and during that period the Colonel was heard to remark that young Cromlech threw his tongue a hell of a lot too much, and that it was about time he gave up reading Shakespeare and took to using soap and water. He had, however, added, "I'm agreeably surprised to find that he isn't windy in the trenches."
David certainly was deplorably untidy, and his absent-mindedness when off duty was another propensity which made him unpopular. Also, as I have already hinted, he wasn't good at being "seen but not heard". "Far too fond of butting in with his own opinion before he's been asked for it"' was often his only reward for an intelligent suggestion... Birdie Mansfield ... was once heard to exclaim, "Unless you watch it, my son, you'll grow up into the most bumptious young prig God ever invented!" - this protest being a result of David's assertion that all sports except boxing, football, and rock climbing were snobbish and silly.'

'Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) and the two sections of Sassoon's Sherston's Progress which deal with the war, have literary qualities that Goodbye to All That deliberately lacks. They are 'composed' works of art, whereas Graves's work was written at top speed [in some 11 weeks], and shows this by both its carelessness - sometimes excessive - and its urgency. Neither the book nor the intention behind it has anything to do with art. But it has something the others don't have.
Blunden's Undertones of War, which he began in 1924, is an exercise in ironic pastoral, exquisite within its limits but occasionally laboured. G S Fraser [a literary critic] called it the best poem to come out of the First World War, and he makes a good point. The book's tough mindedness consists of transforming the war present into an ironic reflection of a desentimentalized idyllic past. It is a work that is literary in the best old-fashioned sense. Sassoon's is a more complicated case. His Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the successor to Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928) was published in 1930. It is a mannered, memorable book, but, once again, literary in the old fashioned sense. Sassoon calls himself Sherston and chooses to see himself through a veil of artifice - albeit exquisite artifice ... Goodbye to All That sums up the hopes and fears of the generation who experienced the war with a pertinence that could hardly admit of a strict literary treatment...'(9)

'The point of Blunden's and Sassoon's non-journalistic memoirs was that they had not rejected the past, even though they had lost it. Their accounts are poignant because they are set against, because they contrast with, the decencies and the beauties and the quietness of the traditional past ... Sassoon and Blunden, reclusive men, were too removed from the real present to be able to bear it. What moved them was the loss of the "old things"; war above all symbolized this.'(10)

Robert Graves, no less than Edmund Blunden, had urgent recourse to certain psychological antidotes which, encapsulated in his autobiography, were pre-eminently a means to the recovery of mental stability in the face of the harrowing and nightmarish experiences with which he had been confronted on the Western Front. In Graves's case (and in that of numerous others) the nightmare of his experiences certainly did not end with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, but persisted with terrible intensity for the following decade. As Graves's biographer writes:

'Externally he was nerve-wracked. As he describes it, shells would burst on his bed at night, strangers would take on the faces of comrades killed in the war, he could not use a telephone, he considered everything - even the beloved landscape of Harlech - in terms of war (how could he hold or capture this or that piece of land, and soon), if he met more than two new people in one day he could not sleep.'(11)

'Your grieving moonlight face looks down

Through the forest of my fears,

Crowned with spiny bramble crown,

Dew-dropped with evening tears.

Why do you spell "untrue, unkind",


Reproachful eyes plaguing my sleep?

I am not guilty in my mind

Of aught would make you weep.

Untrue? but how, what broken oath?


Unkind? I know not even your name.

Untrue, unkind, you charge me both,

Scalding my heart with shame.

The black trees shudder, dropping snow,


The stars tumble and spin.

Speak, speak, or how may a child know

His ancestral sin?'

An especially marked feature of Graves's autobiography is the vivid reconstruction of dialogue and conversation (foreshadowing his later skill as a novelist, especially in I Claudius and Claudius the God). This facet is graphically illustrated in the welcome afforded to Graves on his first arrival in the trenches by Capt Dunn, a veteran who eventually proved to be two months younger than the narrator. The following passage most skilfully captures the entire rhythm of Capt Dunn's personality:

'Dunn did not let the war affect his morale at all. He greeted me very easily with "Well, what's the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker - clever chap from Cambridge, fancies himself as an athlete. This is Jenkins, one of these elder patriots who chucked up their jobs to come here. This is Price - joined us yesterday, but we liked him at once: he brought some damn good whiskey with him. Well, how long is the war going to last, and who's winning? We don't know a thing out here." '

'It seems that a good deal of cognac had been going round, and the French civilian, who bore a grudge against the British because of his faithless wife, began to insult the private. He was reported, somewhat improbably, as having said, "Anglais no bon, Allmand tres bon. War fineesh, napoo les Anglais. Allmand win." The private had thereupon drawn his bayonet and run the man through. At the court-martial the private was exonerated: The French civil representative commending him for having "energetically repressed local defeatism".'

'The adjutant said: "Good heavens, how did that happen?"
"It was an accident, sir."
"What do you mean, you damn fools? Did you mistake him for a spy?"
"No, sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant."
So they were both court-martialled and shot by a firing squad of their own company ... The French military governor was present at the execution, and made a battle speech saying how gloriously British soldiers can die.'

Graves's work reveals the personality of the writer concealed beneath a mask, or 'persona'. This persona is that of a somewhat unimaginative regimental officer, characterized by a high degree of insensitivity. The anecdotes which have been quoted above are integral to the projection of such a personality; they suggest a disconcerting lack of feeling. Graves made a conscious effort in his autobiography to appear before the world as a conventional, traditional public schoolboy type, an embodiment of the 'stiff upper lip' attitude without the inflexibility usually associated with such a character. To reinforce this persona Graves exhibits a degree of concern for regimental traditions and the ritualistic minutiae of service life quite lacking in the other two autobiographies discussed in this article. The following passage is a striking example of this pre-occupation:

'I used to congratulate myself on having quite blindly chosen the Royal Welch Fusiliers, of all regiments in the army. "God God!" I used to think. "Suppose that when the war broke out I had been living in Cheshire, and had applied for a commission in the Cheshire Regiment." How ashamed I should have been to find in the history of that regiment - the old Twenty-second Foot, just senior in the line to the Royal Welch, the Twenty-third - that it had been deprived of its old title "The Royal Cheshires" as a punishment for losing a battle. (This was a quite unhistorical libel, but we all believed it.) Or how lucky not to have joined the Bedfords, who were making a name for themselves in this war, but were still called "The Peace-makers"; for they had only four battle honours on their colours, none more recent than the year 1711, and we misquoted their regimental motto as "Thou shalt not kill". Even the Black Watch had a stain on its record; and everyone knew about it. If a Tommy of another regiment went into a public bar where men of the Black Watch were drinking, and felt brave enough to start a fight, he would ask the barmaid not for "pig's ear", which is rhyming slang for beer, but for a pint of "broken square". Then belts would be unbuckled.'

'Like everyone else, I had a carefully worked formula for taking risks. In principle, we would take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk, particularly if there was some wider object than merely reducing the enemy's manpower; for instance, picking off a well known sniper, or getting fire ascendancy in the trenches where the lines came dangerously close. I only once refrained from shooting a German I saw, and that was at Cuinchy... While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loophole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line, I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. "Here take this. You're a better shot than I am," He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.'

One is compelled to resolve the question: to what extent is the writer being honest with regard to the presentation of himself during the war years? In other words: has the persona been adopted simply for the purposes of the autobiography, in order to 'render the recollection of the experiences more tolerable or is it an accurate reconstruction of the poet's mental approach to his service on the Western Front? The writer is inclined to the view that it is, indeed, an accurate reconstruction. There is a deep underlying reason which lends credibility to the assumption that Graves adopted this persona during his war service. For he probably realized its value as a psychological defensive mechanism, distancing the imagination and thereby preserving a mental equilibrium. It is thus the counterpart of Blunden's immersion in pastoral associations. Graves's schooldays at Charterhouse led him to form a reluctant sympathy with tradition because he undoubtedly appreciated the innate value of even ostensibly meaningless rituals. (To this extent, the far greater scope of Goodbye to All That facilitates a far more detailed delineation of character than is the case in Undertones of War). Within this context, the following extract from an article which appeared in the Museum Review (concerned with Bruce Bairnsfather's famous cartoon character, 'Old Bill') is relevant:

'Essentially Bairnsfather's characters exhibit the ability to suspend the imagination. This is a critical psychological asset in war, as was attested to by Ernest Hemingway when he stated that "fear is the inability to suspend the imagination ..." To allow the imagination too free a play in a scenario such as that of the Western Front could well paralyze the intellect with the appalling logic of the situation.'(12)

'Ritual, in order to be effective, denies the inroads of the imagination. The surface theatricality of the acts comprising it must be self-sufficient and self-sustaining in their impact. To delve into the symbolism underlying the ritualistic performance (i.e. to apply the imagination and intellect) undoubtedly destroys its power, or at least diminishes it.'(13)

' ... one should not assume that all officers on the Western Front possessed the deep sensitivity that we associate with the war poets ... A certain jocular insensitivity, founded on lack of imagination, was implicit in the Victorian and Edwardian public school system, which shaped the formative years of the majority of British officers on the Western Front.'(14)

In his description of the experience, the writer seeks to retain his characteristic detachment: 'I was semi-conscious now, and aware of my lung-wound through a shortness of breath. It amused me to watch the little bubbles of blood, like soap-bubbles, which my breath made in escaping through the wound. The doctor came over to my bed. I felt sorry for him; he looked as though he had not slept for days.'

This harrowing event completed Graves's disillusionment with, and isolation from, the civilian population. He writes: 'We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.'

In his autobiography Graves thus relives this profound Lazarus-like experience. The recapturing and mental re-enactment of this traumatic and momentous event undoubtedly led to far reaching psychological repercussions. Thus, many of his poems dealing with the theme of death-in-life (a concept which has always obsessed him) derive their emotional power from the poet having actually lived through this experience. He wrote from his hospital in London (Queen Alexandra's Hospital, Highgate): 'I did die on my way down to the Field Ambulance ... To cut a long story short old Rhadamanthus [one of the three judges of Hades in Greek mythology] introduced himself as my judge, but I refused ... '(15)

One manifestation of these repercussions was the stark realism which pervades his autobiography; reflected in the physical descriptions of battle (partly based on a wartime diary) and the psychological honesty displayed in the frank analysis of his feelings and attitudes. With regard to this latter facet, the writer's struggle against the onset of neurasthenia, and his feeling of succumbing to it, is conveyed with a brutal honesty. Shortly after the death of a close friend of his, David Thomas (in March 1916) he writes that his

' ... breaking point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off. Not that I felt frightened. I had never yet lost my head and turned tail through fright, and knew that I never would. Nor would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied trousers; I had seen cases like that.'

In January 1917 he returned to the Western Front, but was soon classified as unfit; his period of active service had ended. He spent much of the remainder of the war in a training role.

Although Graves certainly disapproved of the war, the idea of active resistance to the military authorities never entered his head. It is possible that his role of regimental officer - and the cultivation of powerful group loyalties which this role necessarily entailed - precluded such gestures of defiance. (Thus, in a letter to Ronald Clark, the biographer of Bertrand Russell, written in 1974, Graves states: 'I never became an anti-militarist myself'(16)). As in the case of Blunden, his essential attitude was one of stoical endurance ('the only way out was the way through'). He disapproved strongly of Siegfried Sassoon's action in sending to the press a statement, dated July 1917, in which Sassoon announced his refusal to serve further in the war. (Graves and Sassoon had become firm friends earlier in the war.) The statement read:

'I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I am convinced that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest ... On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.'

This discussion of the relationship between Graves and Sassoon anticipates the third subject of autobiography selected for study.

SIEGRIED SASSOON: The Sherston Trilogy

Siegfried Sassoon's stature as a writer of autobiography is founded upon three works: Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). These three works comprise the trilogy entitled The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Prior to the outbreak of World War 1 he led the idyllic life of a country gentleman, devoting his time entirely to cricket, fox hunting and book collecting, nostalgically captured in his Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. In the work he appears to be totally oblivious to the profound destabilizing factors which beset Britain during the Edwardian period and was fracturing the calm of British society; there is no mention whatsoever of the industrial unrest, the threat of civil war in Ulster or the Suffragettes. His academic career was extremely undistinguished; being a poor scholar at Marlborough School and abandoning his legal studies at Cambridge.

To reiterate, Sassoon, like Blunden, felt himself to be deeply alienated from the post-war world, and was powerfully impelled to recapture the pre-war innocence of his formative years. We are aware of Sassoon's almost Proustian determination to recover a vanished past:

'Yet I find it easy enough to recover a few minutes of that grey south-westerly morning, with its horsemen hustling on in scattered groups, the December air alive with the excitement of the chase, and the dull green landscape seeming to respond to the rousing cheer of the huntsman's voice when the hounds hit off the line again after a brief check. Away the stream, throwing up little splashes of water as they race across a half-flooded meadow.

However, although motivated by similar attitudes to Blunden, Sassoon approached the medium of recollection by a different path. For he adopted the literary artifice of concealing autobiography beneath a fictional mask. Sassoon's experiences in his trilogy are transmuted into those of a character called George Sherston. Sassoon clearly states in his later, and strictly autobiographical volume, Siegfried's Journey (1945) that, in reading the Sherston Trilogy, the underlying assumption should be made that the events of Sherston's life both before and during World War 1 can be identified with his creator's. The major difference between Sassoon and Sherston is that the latter is not a poet, and is presented as a simpler and less sophisticated figure than Sassoon. Hence, Sassoon's trilogy approaches the genre of the autobiographical novel. In conformity with such an approach, actual personalities are transparently disguised. Thus, to reiterate, Robert Graves is presented in the guise of 'David Cromlech', David Thomas as 'Dick Tiltwood', and Bertrand Russell as 'Tyrrell'. It is this device which renders Sassoon's presentation of his wartime experiences considerably less powerful than those of Blunden and Graves. For one cannot escape the feeling of muffling and diminution. The resulting impression is not one of dishonesty but, rather, one of diffidence and concealment.

Sassoon enlisted in August 1914 and sailed for France in November 1915. There he joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, where he met Robert Graves, the two becoming close friends. Home on leave in 1916, he realizes that the war has permanently shattered his pre-war world of innocence: 'Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realize that my past was wearing a bit thin. The War seems to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine. Point to point cups shone, but without conviction.'

Shortly after this passage, his first volume of autobiography breaks off, and Sherston's/Sassoon's army experiences are continued in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Of Sassoon's courage (frequently of a reckless character) there can be no doubt. This is clearly attested to in Graves's autobiography. Writing of an attack in Mametz Wood on 15 July 1916 (four days before Graves was seriously wounded; c.f. above) he records how Sassoon (serving in A Coy) greatly distinguished himself:

'The battalion's next objective was 'The Quadrangle', a small copse this side of Mametz Wood, where Siegfried distinguished himself by taking, single-handed, a battalion frontage which the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take the day before. He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out. "British patrols" were Siegfried and his book of poems. "I'd have got you a D.S.O., if you'd only shown more sense", stormed Stockwell ... [Siegfried's] nickname in the Seventh Division was "Mad Jack". He won a Military Cross for bringing in a wounded lance-corporal from a mine crater close to the German lines, under heavy fire.'

'Just before I arrived at the top I slowed up and threw my two bombs. Then I rushed at the bank, vaguely expecting some sort of scuffle with my imagined enemy. I had lost my temper with the man who had shot Kendle; quite unexpectedly, I found myself looking down into a well conducted trench with a great many Germans in it. Fortunately for me, they were already retreating. It had not occurred to them that they were being attacked by a single fool; and Femby, with presence of mind which probably saved me, had covered my advance by traversing the top of the trench with his Lewis gun. I slung a few more bombs, but they fell short of the clumsy field-grey figures, some of whom half turned to fire their rifles over the left shoulder as they ran across the open road towards the wood, while a crowd of jostling helmets vanished along the trench. Idiotically elated, I stood there with my finger in my right ear and emitted a series of "view-hollas" (a gesture which ought to win the approval of people who still regard war as a form of outdoor sport). Having thus failed to commit suicide, I proceeded to occupy the trench - that is to say, I sat down on the fire-step, very much out of breath, and hoped to God the Germans wouldn't come back again.'

Sherston (like his creator) is wounded in the fighting before the Hindenburg line ih April 1917. It is during the subsequent period of convalescence that Sherston-Sassoon decides to make his gesture of protest against the continuation of the war, which Graves also recounts in Goodbye to All That (c.f. above). The remainder of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer describes his ensuing experiences (in which Sassoon-Sherston receives the most sympathetic and kindly treatment from the military authorities), concluding with his arrival at Craiglockhart Hospital ('Slateford').

In the final volume of the trilogy, Sherston's Progress, we read of Sherston's period at 'Slateford', his admiring views of the neurologist W H R Rivers (but nothing regarding Wilfred Owen); his subsequent service in Ireland and Palestine, and his final return to the Western Front in the Spring of 1918. Here he is again wounded, and the book ends with Sherston once more in hospital being visited by Rivers.

Sherston's Progress is undoubtedly the least satisfactory work of the trilogy. It lacks unity of impression; having neither the poignancy of the recollection of the rural pleasures of Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man or the concentration of the battle scenes of ... Infantry Officer. Above all, it compresses too large and varied a range of experience within a small compass.

With regard to the trilogy in its entirety, it is an incomplete success; failing to achieve the limited but intense clarity of observation which distinguishes Blunden's memoirs, or the sharp, highly controlled focus of Graves. However, the central defect resides in the use of a quasi-fictional persona, in the form of Sherston (whilst the thinly disguised appearance of actual characters such as Graves, David Thomas and Bertrand Russell is simply irritating). This artifice severely limits the work's value as a subjective record of the Western Front. It is possible that Sassoon was afflicted with a profound psychological inhibition regarding the recollection of his wartime experiences. (It is curious, for example, that no mention is made of Wilfred Owen, even in a disguised form, although Sassoon's association with his fellow patient at Craiglockhart represents a seminal point in both their lives). Significantly, of the trilogy of writers discussed in this article, Sassoon was the only one to actually succumb to a nervous breakdown, which Graves considered to have been manifested in his public protest. (Graves, admittedly, was discharged in 1919 as a neurasthenic, but he did perform his military duties consistently until his demobilization; as did Blunden, who was so seriously gassed that his health was affected for the rest of his life). It is feasible, therefore, that Sassoon was afflicted with a profound guilt complex, accruing from the fact that he considered himself to have failed to meet a supreme crisis, which had been overcome by his friends and comrades. Some critics have suggested that Sassoon was anxious to conceal certain deeply personal aspects of his personality.

Nevertheless, one should not overlook Sassoon's very real contribution to our sense of the tempo and atmosphere of British civilization - or, more precisely, one aspect of it - prior to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fundamental manner in which that world was shattered by the impact of war. Above all, one gains a profound and moving impression of innocence corrupted by the association with cosmic and apparently mindless violence. ... Fox Hunting Man, which captures so effectively the rhythms of the pre-1914 rural world, should be juxtaposed with ... Infantry Officer, in order to appreciate the extent to which the sensibility founded upon those rhythms was shattered by the experience of industrialized war. Sherton's/Sassoon's experiences thus reflect this profound cultural crisis in microcosm.

As expositions of the traumatic contact between intelligent and highly sensitive personalities and the hitherto unimagined horror of mass war, the autobiographies produced by this trilogy of writers have assumed the status of classics. The American critic, Paul Fussell, in his work The Great War and Modern Memory justifiably regards Blunden, Graves and Sassoon as 'the classic memoirists' of World War 1, who have 'most effectively memorialised the Great War as a historical experience' in the English language. Within this context, it is pertinent to point out that the autobiographical genre occupies a central position between the disciplines of literature and history. It is certainly a vital, subjective dimension of history (including, of course, military history). Autobiography is no less historical reality than impersonal narrative. Thus, to extend this argument to the trilogy of autobiographical works discussed in this article, the reminiscences (embodying the psychological responses) of Graves, Blunden and Sassoon are integral to our understanding of the Western Front and the profound cultural repercussions which it generated. The distinctive styles which these writers adopted provide a unique illustration of the manner in which the psychological pressures generated by the Western Front structured their literary techniques: the rural imagery and understated prose of Blunden; the persona of the detached personality on the part of Graves; and the device of the autobiographical novel in Sassoon's instance, serving to screen his actual personality. Ultimately, the defensive mechanisms adopted by these writers was a method of sustaining their mental endurance in the face of their traditional obligations to society.

References

1. S. Monick, 'The poet under fire - four poets of World War 1: Brooke, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen'. Military History Journal, VII, I, pp 13-23.
2. Ibid., p 13.
3. R. Lewin, 'The poetry and the pity'. Purnell's History of the First World War, (London, BPC Publishing), VIII, p 3245.
4. M. Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work. (London, Abacus, 1982), p 566.
5. S. Monick, op cit, p 21.
6. J. Silkin, Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War. (London, Oxford University Press, 1972), pp 115-116.
7. Ibid,, p 106.
8. J. Lehmann, The English poets of the First World War. (London, Thames & Hudson, 1981), p 72
9. M. Seymour-Smith, op. cit., p 192.
10. Ibid., p 192.
11. Ibid., p 77.
12. S. Monick, 'Old Bill: His Character and Creator', Museum Review, No 4, September 1986, p 127.
13. Ibid., p 128.
14. Ibid., p 131.
15. M. Seymour-Smith, op cit., p 51.
16. Ibid., p 19.

Return to Journal Index OR Society's Home page