Regeneration: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Rivers arrives in Burns’s seaside town, Aldeburgh. They meet on the train platform and take a walk on the water’s edge. It is difficult to tell Burns’s mental state; he is still terribly thin, though barbed wire and sand bags seem not to bother him as they used to. After walking for some time, Burns leads him to his home, where he lives alone and acts much like a child trying to guess at how adults entertain guests. Rivers had expected to meet Burns’s parents, but he sees no sign of them in the house. They pass the evening chatting pleasantly, though never mentioning war or mental breakdown. Burns seems to Rivers a mixture of a “prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy,” though at least Burns has found an interest in learning the local country and handcrafts.

The next morning, Rivers finds Burns in the kitchen. He still does not eat, and Rivers is unsure whether there is any food in the house beyond a bit of cereal set out for him. They go for a walk, during which Burns let slip that his parents are in London and never visit, but they have the neighbors keep tabs on him instead. As they walk the shoreline, Burns shows Rivers an old stone cellar that’s been boarded up for fear that children would fall in. Rivers notes that it must fill with water when the beach floods, and he feels as if people must have died there in the past. They make a long journey along the shore, into a pub—Burns drinks, even if he does not eat—and returns to his house, though they still do not speak of anything significant.

That evening, Rivers stokes the fire and steps out to buy biscuits to have with their evening tea, though he does not notice if Burns eats any. Later, Rivers sets aside some time to try to work on a paper he was writing about repression, which seems fitting since Burns himself is the master of it. Rivers cannot understand why he dreads to push Burns to fully face his memories as he does with his other patients, though he suspects perhaps it is because Burns’s experience with the corpse is so undeniably horrific.

Burns ought to be out living, working, dating, but instead he is here, hiding in this house. Even so, Rivers is impressed that Burns has good relationships with the locals here, especially since many of them knew him when he was young. He fares far better here than in London, where twice civilians gave him a white feather.

Burns sleeps late until noon the next day, having been kept up by night terrors the night before, so Rivers works on his paper through the morning. Outside, a storm is slowly gathering. After Burns finally rises, he proposes that they take a walk in spite of the bad weather. As they walk, they pass by a pile of gutted fish on the beach. Rivers thinks little of it until he realizes Burns is frozen in place, his head twitching like it did when he first arrived at Craiglockhart. That evening, they pile sandbags against the door, like one does in the trench, since the beach will likely flood during the storm. Burns tries to pretend everything is normal, but with the guts on the beach, the sandbags, and the buffeting storm, Rivers can see he is on the edge of another breakdown.

Rivers wakes to a sound he first thinks is an explosion, but after hearing it again, he realizes it is a moored boat crashing against the rocks on the shore. He hears Burns walk past his door and assumes he is going downstairs for a cup of tea. However, Rivers quickly gets restless and goes to check on the young man, but cannot find him anywhere in the house. Worried, Rivers ventures outside, finding a group of locals trying to rescue the banging boat, but Burns is not among them. Rivers starts running down the beach until he finds Burns huddled in the old stone cellar. River is worried that a large wave might breach and trap them in there, but when he gets close enough to see the fear in Burns’s eyes, he thinks “Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing” before dragging the patient out and back up the beach.

Rivers helps Burns home and puts him in bed, then goes to the butcher to buy food to cook himself for breakfast. When Burns wakes up, late in the morning, he off-handedly brings up his job as an officer writing letters to families of fallen soldiers. Rivers pauses, since Burns never volunteers information about the war. Burns continues, saying that after one particularly bad charge, he wrote letters for 80 percent of their company. A map had been mismarked and during the charge, all the soldiers found themselves caught exposed against a river. German machine gunners tore them to pieces. The next day, the general treated it as a minor mistake, since the charge was only a diversion anyway.

After that, Burns started going on patrols every night, telling himself he was setting a good example for his subordinates, but really he just wanted to be injured or killed. It seemed as if enemy bullets curved around him—he was never touched—but his breakdown occurred all the same. As they talk, Rivers feels for the first time that Burns may have some chance at recovery, at leading a functional life. However, he certainly “had missed his chance of being ordinary.”