The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road
By Pat Barker
Viking, 1996. 592 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
It is almost 80 years since the first world war finished, but the horrors live on. In the murderous trenches of France, the battle of the Somme killed 60,000 British soldiers on the first day of a campaign that cost 420,000 lives. Verdun produced 1 million casualties from 2 million combatants.
Ypres, Passchendale, Mons and other bloodbaths of the western front played their gruesome part in the 10 million dead, 7 million missing and 21 million wounded of the war.
The carnage, and the lies spouted from parliamentary seat, pulpit, newspaper and boardroom, shook society profoundly. Two British officers, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who wrote powerful antiwar poetry in response, feature in Pat Barker's fictional recreation of the war. Her three novels are an evocative, absorbing treatment of the personal conflicts generated by the war.
Second Lieutenant Sassoon writes a protest against the war, "in wilful defiance of military authority because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". Sniffing subversion, the military authorities return him to England for "treatment" at the Craiglockhart (psychiatric) War Hospital in Edinburgh.
Sassoon's friend, the officer and writer Robert Graves, believes that such an act of conscientious objection will tar him with the "conchie" brush and persuades Sassoon, who had thrown his bravery medal away and come under the influence of Bertrand Russell and other pacifists, to seek a medical board which will declare him to be suffering from a nervous breakdown rather than making a principled political and moral commitment.
The army psychiatrist, Major Rivers, obliges in this strategy. Altogether more civilised than his colleagues, who use electric shock treatment and other physical tortures, Rivers nevertheless gets Sassoon to abandon his protest after his antiwar statement is read out in the House of Commons and written off as the ravings of one not responsible for his actions because of psychiatric problems.
Rivers, however, is not free from his own internal tussle. He shares Sassoon's horror at the suffering but believes the war must go on.
He frets that, despite his kinder methods, he has the same aim as his more physical colleagues — silencing the soldiers' protests (conscious in the case of Sassoon, unconscious in the case of patients with shell shock, mutism, paralysis, deafness, blindness, stammering, memory lapses). Rivers returns his patients to the warrior role, replenishing the supplies of cannon fodder.
Sassoon returns to France, as does fellow patient Owen. Sassoon had influenced Owen to abandon his view of poetry as a refuge from ugliness and to harden it with ruthless honesty. They handle the conflict of being efficient commanders and brave soldiers fighting a war they oppose by producing some of their most effective antiwar poems from the trenches.
The central character of all three novels is Billy Prior, a Craiglockhart patient stricken with mutism. He is "regenerated" by Rivers and returns to France, but only after a stint in the Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Munitions. The British state used agent provocateurs and spies to track down what the ministry head calls an "unholy alliance of socialists, sodomites and shop stewards" who opposed the war, carried on the class struggle in the arms factories or whose "deviance" otherwise threatened the established order in wartime.
Prior, though regaining his voice, develops a dual personality. One part of him opposes the war, assists those being abused in prison for their antiwar views and hates what he does in Intelligence. His other self betrays antiwar activists to the authorities.
By the time Prior returns to France, his opposition to the war has firmed and his consciousness of the propaganda used to keep the war going is more politically acute.
"Patriotism honour courage vomit vomit vomit" he writes in his diary, aware that hatred and war are maintained by the differences deliberately fostered amongst people by their rulers — "the little words that trip through sentences unregarded — us, them, we, they, here, there — the words of power which lie about in the language, like unexploded grenades in fields and any one of them'll take your hand off".
Yet Prior's antiwar philosophy never amounts to more than an impotent political agnosticism. He sees the war as a self-perpetuating system in which "nobody benefits, nobody's in control, nobody knows how to stop".
Marxists, on the other hand, clearly identified the capitalist class which reaped the benefits, the capitalist state which kept the slaughter machine going, the working class victims who bore the cost and who, in revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, toppled tsar and kaiser, brought the war to a halt and set up organs of democratic workers' power. From the blood and mud of Flanders arose socialism in years pregnant with socialist promise.
Barker's trilogy builds to an intensely emotional climax — Prior and Owen are killed just one week before the armistice, and Rivers' final patient, a young pro-war soldier with part of his brain and half his jaw shot away, struggles to articulate his dying words — "It's not worth it", a sentiment which the other patients, and Rivers, share with him in his agony.
Barker's novel is a fine addition to the critical literature on the war. It is head and shoulders above the ruck of most contemporary fiction, and it leaves the muck of Savannah and kindred TV sludge for dead. Despite Barker's indulgent flights into psychoanalysis and social anthropology, and the antiwar left playing second-fiddle off-stage, The Regeneration Trilogy is well worth a look.