Regeneration: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Rivers sits in a church, listening to the congregants sing a hymn while he gazes at a stained glass portrayal of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Rivers considers that this is the sacrificial bargain every patriarchal society is built on: if the young will consent to sacrifice themselves to the old, those few who survive will someday inherit society and get to offer their own sons to be slaughtered in war rather than themselves. As Rivers sits with Charles, his brother, gazing at the “flag-draped altar,” he thinks back to the simplicity of their childhood and mourns the fact that those days will never return.

Rivers is staying on his brother’s chicken farm with Charles and his wife Bertha. The farm had been Rivers’s idea, believing the open air would do his brother good and turn a profit, though they were barely breaking even. Hens seem determined to die. After spending the afternoon helping Charles move hens to another pen, Rivers promises to balance their accounts while Charles and Bertha go out for the evening. Rivers also needs to write Burns, who’s invited him to visit for a few days, and he has a half-finished letter for Sassoon waiting, as well. He spends the evening sitting in an armchair by the fireplace and wandering from room to room, but doesn’t get much done.

Much of the furniture in Charles’s house is from their childhood home in Knowles Bank. Rivers thinks back to his father, who was a speech therapist. Mostly, Rivers remembers their house full of teenage boys with various degrees of stammer like his own, as his father paced up and down the room with them, trying to teach them to regulate their breathing. Rivers even remembers his father coaching their minister, Reverend Dodgson, as 12-year-old Rivers snuck beneath the window of his father’s study to eavesdrop. That same summer, Rivers gave a stammering speech on Darwinism, which infuriated his father since it contradicted their family’s Christian beliefs, but Rivers only felt proud to have “forced his father to listen to what he had to say, and not merely to the way he’d said it.” In spite of those memories, Rivers regrets that he has no son.

Rivers looks at the unfinished letter to Sassoon on the table. All he’d managed to do thus far was talk about the weather, and he cannot understand why it is so difficult in a letter to always do what he does in person, nudging the conversation gently along. Rivers starts the letter over again: “My dear Siegfried…”

In Craiglockhart, Sassoon sits with Owen as they workshop another of his poems. As they do, Sassoon notes that Owen seems to be getting better. His stammer is hardly present and he is far more confident than when he first introduced himself. Sassoon tells Owen he wants to try to get his work published, starting with Owen’s piece, “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

Sarah and Madge visit the hospital to see Madge’s lover, recently wounded and recovering in one of the wards. Madge was nervous, so Sarah came as emotional support, but once Madge finds her man in reasonable health and with all his limbs, Sarah wanders off to allow them some level of privacy. Unable to find the exit to the grounds, Sarah wanders accidentally into a conservatory behind the hospital, which she realizes is full of amputees. The men in the ward go silent, and she realizes they are afraid of her; afraid both that she will look at their mutilation or not look at it. She is a “pretty woman,” and they are ashamed to be seen by her in their new state. Sarah realizes she unwittingly brought pain into the ward with her, and she leaves, furious with herself, the war, and the world.

In the same hospital, Prior is having his lungs re-examined, although the physician Rivers had called already checked them once. The current doctor obviously believes that Prior’s psychiatric condition is a ploy to get out of combat, and he treats Prior as bitterly and roughly as it is possible while wielding a stethoscope. Irritated and ashamed, Prior leaves and finds Sarah standing outside the hospital, the first time they’ve seen each other since the beach. Sarah tells him about the amputees she saw, hidden away so the world wouldn’t have to look at them. She is still upset. Prior convinces her to leave with him, since Madge is still with her lover, and they set off.

Rivers walks down a country road with Head’s wife Ruth, as she tells him about what life has been like in Cambridge while he’s been away in Craiglockhart. When they pass a war hospital full of wounded soldiers, Ruth remarks that she thinks Sassoon and his declaration are right; she agrees wholeheartedly with it. Rivers asks if that means he should let Sassoon destroy himself then, but Ruth argues that it needs to be Sassoon’s choice one way or the other, not Rivers’s.

That evening, after dinner, when Rivers speaks of missing London, Head tells Rivers that there is a job in London waiting for him, as a psychologist with the Royal Flying Corp. Rivers could be closer to family, and he could work with Head again. Rivers is interested, but also does not want to abandon Bryce at Craiglockhart, though there is rumor that Bryce will be replaced soon anyway.