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Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

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In light of this, it might help us if we were to should acquaint ourselves some pertinent aspects of Sassoon’s earlier book, together with a discussion on the relationship between the writer’s own life experiences and those of his protagonist, George.

He doesn’t want to be rescued from his situation, as he is in it by choice. But his friend Cromlech materializes with important news. It turns out Cromlech has spoken with relevant officials and helped to arrange that his case be treated as a medical one. A “big bug” at the War Office has gotten involved, and they will refuse to court-martial him. For Sherston this is a let-down of sorts, but on the other hand, he has made his statement, and he won’t have to go to prison. Waves of relief wash over him. I was given this book as a present many years ago and first read it at that time. Although I enjoyed it I was conscious that I hadn't read the first book of the trilogy and that I was therefore missing a lot of context. Recently I got round to reading "Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man" and decided to follow that with revisiting this second part. Siegfried Sassoon is one of the mainstays of World War I literature. He wrote poems (see "Glory of Women"—one of my favorites) and he wrote a trilogy of fictional memoirs. Now, why would anyone want to write a fictional memoir? A thinly veiled fictional memoir, at that. About one man's journey through one of the most visceral and haunting wars of the 20th century. urn:lcp:memoirsofinfantr00sieg:epub:5166dbc8-fcb4-444d-ab18-e9f0e61c8359 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier memoirsofinfantr00sieg Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6155sj6z Isbn 0571064108 Lccn 66069663 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7855539M Openlibrary_edition

An army of shopkeepers, miners, farmers, and young aristocrats. Was patriotism what kept them fighting? That book’s sequel was also well received. The New Statesmancritic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer“a document of intense and sensitive humanity.” In a review for the Times Literary Supplement,after Sassoon’s death, one critic wrote: “His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer… is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous. … If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident.” In 1936, while reviewing the third of the trilogy, Sherston’s Progress, writer Howard Spring described the three books as ‘the most satisfying piece of autobiography to be published in our time. All the equipment of a novelist is Sassoon’s. But what novel could equal in fascination this true story?’ [4] Nowadays, many potential readers of Sassoon’s evocation of a pre-1914 rural idyll are put off by its title: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. A hunter of foxes? The book must be full of ignorant bullies and gruesome death! No Thank You.

But there's too much of reality in this fiction for it to be purely make-believe. Too much reality... they say that about war. Reality blowing up in your face. The most "realistic" war movies often garner the highest praise. But the reality of war is in the unreality of it. In this war's case, the absolute insanity of it. Now and again she took me to a children’s party given by one of the gentry: at such functions I was awkward and uncomfortable, and something usually happened which increased my sense of inferiority to the other children, who were better at everything than I was and made no attempt to assist me out of my shyness. I had no friends of my own age. I was strictly forbidden to ‘associate’ with the village boys. And even the sons of the neighbouring farmers were considered ‘unsuitable’– though I was too shy and nervous to speak to them. [ 6] I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.” As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face was undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He'd evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn't look to be more than 18. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyway I hadn't expected the battle of the Somme to be quite like this. As this is a thinly veiled autobiography, it's easy to spot the people he's referring to. Cromlech is obviously Robert Graves, a man who Sassoon has really mixed feelings about. Having read Graves' Goodbye to All That, it's a stark contrast of opinion- Graves thought Sassoon was wonderful, while Sassoon says some rather harsh things about Cromlech/Graves.

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I)t was Dixon who taught me to ride, and my admiration for him was unqualified. And since he was what I afterwards learnt to call ‘a perfect gentleman’s servant’, he never allowed me to forget my position as ‘a little gentleman’: he always knew when to become discreetly respectful. In fact, he ‘knew his place’. [ 7] Slowly Sherston comes to hate the war and all of the meaningless death and destruction it brings. As he digs further and asks more questions he comes to believe that those in charge, the people for whom he and his friends are putting their lives on the line, are pursuing not a noble war of defense in the face of tyranny, but a war of aggrandizement and acquisition. Is this worth dying for? Is it worth killing for? Sherston knows the answer to these questions that his own heart gives, though he feels keenly the futility and alienation of his position should it ever become known. Still, he begins to tentatively travel in some of the anti-war circles of his day and formulates an idea that he must do something, anything, even if it is simply to state his opposition to the horrors continuing unless the Allies’ objectives become clear and open knowledge. He is not really a member of the anti-war intelligentsia though, and even his desire to act in some way outside of the military sphere is one fraught with internal conflict. He is still simply a soldier thinking of the needs of other soldiers and while it may be true that in the eyes of the anti-war protestors …there was no credit attached to the fact of having been at the front… for me it had been a supremely important experience. I am obliged to admit that if these anti-war enthusiasts hadn't happened to be likeable I might have secretly despised them.

The second volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston , with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell The Memoirs of George Sherston (contains Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress), Doubleday, Doran, 1937 (published in England as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Faber, 1937 ). A major figure in George’s early life is his aunt’s groom, Tom Dixon, closely modelled on one of the most significant adults in Siegfried Sassoon’s own boyhood. Here is Sassoon’s idealised memory, wrapped up in the dominating class’s sentiment of how an employee should behave: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is actually the second book in a series of fictionalized memoirs about the character George Sherston, essentially a psuedonym for Sassoon himself. Sassoon, who was Jewish and labored under the German name "Siegfried" during a time when this was very inconvenient to him, joked that his life might have been easier if he had been called George. George Sherston is a version of Sassoon whose existence is marginally less complicated, but whose life in the infantry during the First World War borrows very heavily from Sassoon's own. Sassoon based the book upon his war diaries of the period. When the blurb says this book is unsentimental, it means it. Sassoon frequently gets you to start liking a soldier he introduces, before giving you the details of their death at the end of the paragraph. It's like being repeatedly punched in the stomach. To me, it shows his skill at grabbing the reader's attention and emotions in a really short space of time, then twisting them. It's written in a similar vein to his poetry, in many ways.

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Published anonymously) Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (novel), Faber & Gwyer, 1928, Coward, 1929, new edition, Faber, 1954.

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