Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress

Siegfried Sassoon writes a very restrained prose – so restrained that it’s either emotionless or makes you feel that he’s hiding a kind of furious anger. Perhaps he doesn’t feel that passion is polite. But it is strange how land his prose is here, when other things he has written, like the introduction to the war poetry anthology, like his own poetry, is so beautiful and unique. It really mars this memoir. The detail of what happens, exactly, on a raid into no-man’s-land is both informative and important. It’s the most detailed WW1 stuff I’ve read, and it really underlines, in a way that everyone can relate to, how absurd it was, in the same way any kind of government project is absurd and divorced from reality and common sense. So what Siegfried Sassoon writes about is incredibly valuable and it’s a worthwhile piece of writing, but it isn’t beautiful.

It gets more insipid when it moves onto his war-time protest and his incarceration in a shell-shock hospital. Can it be both insipid and realistic? It does feel honest and it does seem to reflect what probably happened in his mind. You can’t tell whether he’s trying to acquit or accuse himself. Robert Graves doesn’t come across too well. I wonder if they remained friends!

The – sad? strange? – thing about his protest was that he was angry not about the killing but about the dying. It reminded me of C. S. Lewis’ essay, “Why I am not a pacifist”, which threw up so many reasons why dying in battle wasn’t so bad. Surely, surely, the pacifist hates to kill more than he hates to die? And actually, Siegfried Sassoon never talks about killing soldiers – he always seems to miss, seems to feel his bombs would have failed. Partly he is, of course, running himself down, underlining the absurdity of his “job” – but is he also excusing himself, also trying to see himself as someone who didn’t kill those men who weren’t his enemies? Is he trying to make peace with a guilt he can’t write about?

The end of the book is almost creepy. It reminds me – surely, it can’t be just me – of a 1920’s book written for girls.

“Oh Rivers, I’ve had such a funny time since I saw you last!”

I suppose you could say all sorts of things about that relationship, which I won’t, but it was a sorry mess of a finish.

This poet deliberately made no mention of his, or any other war-time poetry – why? No mention of Wilfred Owens or Edward Thomas – why? Was he trying to make his experienced universal – surely not, with the last strange book. And for the same reason he couldn’t have been deliberately hiding his identity! I wonder why.

This is a good companion read to Robert Graves’ version, with the other side of the story, and a good overview of WW1, and an interesting look at a flawed human being, an ordinary, honest person, no hero, a very recognisable human being. Pity about the writing, but at least we have his poetry.