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. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
“What’s an ‘unnecessary risk’ anyway? The maddest thing I ever did was done under orders.”
“I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the…other side…that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…” He laced his fingers. “Knot them together.”
“I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?”
“Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.”
All the way back to the hospital Burns had kept asking himself why he was going back, Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he’d realized he’d come back for this.
[Sassoon] was more corruptible than that. A few days of safety, and all the clear spirit of the trenches was gone. It was still, after all these weeks, pure joy to go to bed in white sheets and know that he would wake.
They’d been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men. […] Fear, tenderness—these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.
“If I were going to call myself a Christian, I’d have to call myself a pacifist as well. I don’t think it’s possible to call yourself a C-Christian and… j-just leave out the awkward bits.”
[Prior] didn’t know what to make of [Sarah], but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.
“You’re thinking of breakdown as a reaction to a single traumatic event, but it’s not like that. It’s more a matter of … erosion. Weeks and months of stress in a situation where you can’t get away from it.
[Rivers] distrusted the implication that nurturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were borrowed, or even stolen from women […] If that were true, then there really was very little hope.
Everywhere saurian heads and necks peered out of winged armchairs, looking at the young man [Sassoon] with the automatic approval his uniform evoked, and then—or was he perhaps being oversensitive?—with a slight ambivalence, a growing doubt, as they worked out what they blue badge on his tunic meant.
“It makes it difficult to go on, you know. When things like this keep happening to people you know and and …love. To go on with the protest, I mean.”
In his khaki, Prior moved among them like a ghost. Only Sarah connected him to the jostling crowd, and he put his hand around her, clasping her tightly, though at that moment he felt no stirring of desire.
Rivers got up and went across to the window. He found a bumble bee, between the curtain and the window, batting itself against the glass, fetched a file from the desk and, using it as a barrier, guided the insect into the open air. He watched it fly away.
“When all this is over, people who didn’t go to France, or didn’t do well in France—people of my generation, I mean—aren’t going to count for anything. This is the Club to end all Clubs.”
[Sassoon had] joked once or twice to Rivers about being his father confessor, but only now, faced with this second abandonment, did he realize how completely Rivers had come to take his father’s place. Well, that didn’t matter, did it? After all, if it came to substitute fathers, he might do a lot worse.
The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons.
Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had “matured” these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and fossilizes schoolboy seemed to exist side by side.
[Burns’s] body felt like a stone. Rivers got hold of him and held him, coaxing, rocking. He looked up at the tower that loomed squat and menacing above them, and thought, Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing
“You’re never gunna get engaged till you learn to keep your knees together. Yeh, you can laugh, but men don’t value what’s dished out for free. Mebbe they shouldn’t be like that, mebbe should all be different. But they are like that and your not gunna change them.”
“It’s only fair to tell you that…since that happened my affections have been running in more normal channels. I’ve been writing to a girl called Nancy Nicholson. I really think you’ll like her. She’s great fun. The…the only reason I’m telling you this is…I’d hate you to have any misconceptions. About me. I’d hate you to think I was homosexual even in thought. Even if it went no further.”
At the moment you hate me because I’ve been instrumental in getting you something you’re ashamed of wanting. I can’t do much about the hatred, but I do think you should look at the shame. Because it’s not really anything to be ashamed of, is it? Wanting to stay alive? You’d be a very strange sort of animal if you didn’t.
“You will leave this room when you are speaking normally. I know you do not want the treatment suspended now that you are making such progress. You are a noble fellow and these ideas which come into your mind and make you want to leave me do not represent your true self.”
Just as Yealland silenced the unconscious protest of his patients by removing the paralysis, the deafness, the blindness, the muteness that stood between them and the war, so, in an infinitely more gentle way, [Rivers] silenced his patients, for the stammerings, the nightmares, the tremors, the memory lapses of officers were just as much unwitting protests as the grosser maladies of men.
Now, in middle age, the sheer extent of mess seemed to be forcing [Rivers] into conflict with the authorities over a very wide range of issues…medical, military. Whatever. A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.
