Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

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I wouldn't recommend this to you if you're a particularly squeamish individual, but if you're okay with the quote above, you should be fine. Sassoon pulls no punches, but this gives the novel an extra dose of reality. This book contains the famous letter of denouncing the War. Succinct and clear, it must have sent shivers down the spines of the Big Wigs. Here is a decorated officer, highly popular telling them to stop, or at least announce the new directives (which Sassoon felt were dishonourable). The only action left to them was to send him to a mental hospital. And thus the end of this volume. The quotation marks here, insistently cordoning off the clichés from Sassoon’s late-1920s prose, suggest that the author has subsequently grown sceptical of these class assumptions. The little toff who had taken domestic help and private tutors for granted grew up into a world which sent these supposedly social inferiors in their thousands to be slaughtered in a war. The adult Sassoon has been forced to change his world view. The Memoirs of George Sherston (contains Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress), Doubleday, Doran, 1937 (published in England as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Faber, 1937 ). Published anonymously) Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (novel), Faber & Gwyer, 1928, Coward, 1929, new edition, Faber, 1954.

More and more, as the Somme campaign drags on, Sherston struggles with a sense of helplessness in the face of interminable war. One evening he takes a stroll, watching the pale orange beams of the sun streaming down on a fading, melancholy landscape. “For me that evening expressed the indeterminate tragedy which was moving, with agony on agony, toward the autumn.” (82) As a solitary observer, he can do nothing to stop the war, he feels, but only observe an Armageddon that surpasses understanding. A gunner had just been along here with a German helmet in his hand. Said Fricourt is full of dead; he saw one officer lying across a smashed machine-gun with his head bashed in---’a fine looking chap,’ he said, with some emotion, which rather surprised me.” Here we have George Sherston in a nutshell: born into privilege and snobbery, yet impressed and intimidated by more vigorous boys and cut off from people of like mind.

by Siegfried Sassoon

In comparing ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’ to that other great WWI novel, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, the title character George Sherston is more detached and reserved than Paul Baumer, the more innocent first person protagonist in Remarque’s book. While Remarque gets the nod as the better story teller, Sassoon is able to masterfully capture the incongruous feelings of despair and boredom on the front lines. Perhaps because he is a poet, Sassoon is not always as consistent in his story-telling but this is offset by the literary gems scattered throughout, such as this one in the midst of the Battle of the Somme "I was huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and trying to forget about the shells which were hurrying and hurrooshing overhead."

I was given this book as a present many years ago and first read it at that time. Although I enjoyed it I was conscious that I hadn't read the first book of the trilogy and that I was therefore missing a lot of context. Recently I got round to reading "Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man" and decided to follow that with revisiting this second part. The M.P. will wait to bring up the matter in Parliament until Sherston has submitted a copy of his statement to his colonel, which he will do only when he is required to report for duty. In the meantime Sherston goes through the motions of military procedure, applying for an instructorship with cadet officers as his chosen duty when his leave will expire. In reality, he believes he will go to prison. It is painful for him to chat with fellow officers while the time bomb of his declaration is set to explode. He has to spend two weeks with his Aunt Evelyn without revealing his seething thoughts. At a train station bookstall he searches for something that will give him consolation and grabs a copy of The Morals of Rousseau, a thinker with whom he has no familiarity. But rather than consolation, he finds only that a nonsense couplet by Cowper goes incessantly through his mind: “I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau/ If birds confabulate or no.”“I mention this couplet because, for the next ten days or so, I couldn’t get it out of my head.” (234)

Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from ths soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed the place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the war. Who made the War?” Craig Raine, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ (1973), in: Haydn& the Valve Trumpet (London, 1990), pp. 165, 167. The Old Century and Seven More Years (autobiography), Faber, 1938, Viking, 1939, reprinted with introduction by Michael Thorpe, Faber, 1968. My guesstimate is that Sassoon wanted the freedom fiction provides. You can fudge facts. Change names, dates, places. Not worry about whether you're getting it "right" or, if speaking about sensitive issues which could implicate other people, you can say—Hey, I made it all up! I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.”