BOOK: Siegfried Sassoon, "The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston"

Siegried Sassoon: The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. [My copy is a later reprint, probably from the 1990s.] 0571099130. 656 pp.

I suppose it's inevitable that a war, being such a momentous event in the lives of people that get swept up in it, spawns a certain amount of ‘war literature’ in which these people try to grapple with their experiences; but even so, WW1 seems to have been more than usually abundant in this department. I'm not *terribly* keen to read this sort of thing, but I felt vaguely compelled to read some WW1 memoirs, mostly in the hope of understanding a bit better what it was like for the participants, and what made this war so different and more shocking than the previous ones. There seems to have been a widespread idea that this particular war represented some sort of break with the past, that wholesale changes must occur after it in pretty much every sphere of human activity, that nothing must go on like before, neither in the arts, nor in international relations, nor indeed in the very fabric of society. There have been plenty of wars before WW1 (and some since), but none seems to have shocked society in quite the same way.

Anyway, I can't say that I really understand anything about these questions any better after reading this book than before it, but then it wouldn't have been fair to the book to expect *that* from it. In any case, it was an interesting enough read, though I can't help noticing that the parts I found the most interesting were those that had the least to do with the war :) The book is a first-person narrative of the protagonist, George Sherston, presenting the story of his life from his childhood to the end of the WW1. From having a brief look at the biography of Sassoon on the wikipedia, it seems clear that Sherston's story has a great deal in common with Sassoon's own life, and it would be interesting to see which details in this book are fictional and which are autobiographical, but the present edition doesn't say anything about that; Sherston's story is presented simply as a work of fiction.

It initially appeared as three separate works — Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936) — but the story continues seamlessly from one part to the next, and the boundary between the first and the second part in particular seems completely arbitrary, so it's really better to think of the whole thing as a single work, and I think it was a great idea to publish it in a single volume the way we see here. I think it was the title of the first part that did much to persuade me to read this book, as the mention of fox-hunting hinted at the vanishing world of the British pre-war rural upper class (see my post from last year about David Cannadine's extremely interesting book about the decline of that class). In this I was not disappointed; I knew pretty much absolutely nothing about fox-hunting and the fox hunters before, and the first 1/3 or so of this book is a very nice introduction to this subject (and was, for me, the most interesting part of the whole book).

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The book starts somewhere at the very end of the 19th century (see the mention of 1896 on p. 24). George Sherston is a boy who lost his parents early and is being raised his aunt Evelyn, who lives somewhere deep in the English countryside. The world we see in the first few chapters strikes me as having probably more in common with Tolkien's Shire than with anything that exists there today. Aunt Evelyn is perhaps not extravagantly rich by the standards of the upper class of the time, and I think the house she lives in is really a house and not a palace (which seem to have often been called “houses” by the English upper classes), but she has an independent income large enough to employ some three maids, a groom, and a stable-boy. As George has inherited a similar income from his parents, he has little reason to care about getting an education or a career, and his aunt doesn't seem to particularly mind this (he ends up attending Cambridge for some time, but doesn't graduate).

His chief interest in life are country sports, especially fox-hunting, but also cricket and (later) golf. In this he is encouraged by his groom, Dixon, who realizes that his best bet to come closer to the hunting world himself is by encouraging George to take up hunting. It was quite interesting to follow George's gradual development as a hunter. At first he has little idea what he is supposed to be doing, and suffers considerably from a lack of self-confidence, but his zest for the sport never wavers, and gradually he becomes thoroughly familiar with it. He does not shy from expenses that his income can just barely support; he buys a horse, and then another better one, and later I think still another one; and if no good hunting is going on close to where he lives, he endures long bicycle trips and train rides if it helps him get to an area with a better hunt — the logistics of getting himself, his horse, and possibly his groom to the other side of the county are not exactly trivial.

*

Fox-hunting has always struck me as a perfectly ridiculous sport, and this hasn't really changed after my reading this book. It seems to consist mostly of riding around the countryside jumping over hedges and fences. Supposedly there are dogs involved somewhere, and there might even be a fox that they're chasing after, but the hunters, judging by what we see of George here, seem to often have only the most distant and tenuous connection with these animals. Their biggest foe is in fact not the fox, but the farmer who puts barbed wire into his hedge and who kills foxes by more practical means which do not involve a large body of bizarrely-attired gentry traipsing around the countryside on horseback (“that sanctimonious old vulpicide”, p. 120 :)))). Wilde surely had a point in describing fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to have anything against the practice. It may be a bit silly, but there's something charming about the very idea of something as silly as this going on. I vaguely remember, while visiting London more than twenty years ago, that I saw some people protesting against fox-hunting, and I read somewhere that they later successfully managed to get it outlawed. I suppose their excuse was that it's cruel to the fox; but I suspect that the real reason was that the activists disliked the fact that rich people were having fun. But surely the solution to that is to abolish the rich people, not to abolish fox-hunting. And they have only grown richer since then; what good will your prohibition of fox-hunting do when you tolerate the existence of a class of global bazillionaires who are rich and powerful enough to start personal space colonization projects? It would have been far better if they were hunting foxes instead.

George is not, admittedly, entirely wrapped up in fox-hunting. He also likes to read, and is particularly fond of fine 18th-century editions, but he goes about it in a scattershot way and it isn't exactly obvious from this that he would later become a prominent writer and poet (if we accept for the moment that Sherston is just a thinly-disguised Sassoon).

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I suppose many people today would criticize George for leading such a narrow, unambitious life. His world is limited, not even to England, but pretty much to just one county of it. He goes rarely even to London, and when he does it's mostly to buy hunting clothes and gear. He has no interest whatever in the world abroad. “Europe was nothing but a name to me. I couldn't even bring myself to read about it in the daily paper.” (P. 176.) “Had there been no Great War I might quite conceivably have remained on English soil till I was buried in it. Others have done the same, so why not Sherston?” (P. 563.) As I said, many people would probably criticize him for this. Heck, in the book itself, his lawyer and trust fund guardian criticizes him heavily for not finishing his studies and taking up a career. For all I know, perhaps Sassoon himself, later in life, disapproved of the narrow horizons of his youth. (“It looks rather paltry”, p. 201.)

And yet, and yet — how wonderful this sort of life seems! How nice it would be to live like this, content and happy in a small and homely world, a familiar place filled with things and *people* that you are used to! Perhaps the biggest crime wrought by the WW1 was that it reached all the way in to people like Sherston, thickly cocooned deep in the heart of merrie old England though they were, and tore them mercilessly out of their cozy environment, flinging them into open, into the din and chaos and turmoil not only of the war, but of modernity, into a windy world of instability and change, in which the calm and tranquility of their pre-war lives would remain forever impossible. But perhaps it is unfair to blame all this on the WW1; these changes would have happened sooner or later anyway, due to technological progress, but WW1 came at a time when it could act as a catalyst to make them happen faster and therefore come across as even more shocking than they would otherwise have been.

*

Once the war breaks out, the book gets considerably less interesting. George joins the army early on, first as an ordinary soldier in the Yeomanry, a sort of reserve unit, but he then feels obliged to find a way to get to the front lines earlier, and gets himself commissioned as an officer in an infantry regiment of the regular army (pp. 228–31). A retired captain whom he got to know through fox-hunting puts in a good word for George with his old regiment, and between that and the fact that George is (by class) a gentleman, getting a commission was apparently a completely trivial matter (he became a second liutenant, which seems to be the lowest officer rank).

There are several fine passages illustrating the simple, trusting patriotism of the generation who volunteered for the army in such large numbers in 1914. “To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage [. . .] was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.” (P. 230.) “[H]e had arrived at manhood in the nick of time to serve his country in what he naturally assumed to be a just and glorious war. [. . .] he was a shining epitome his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German shells and machine-guns” (p. 241).

Soon George is in France with his regiment. They are being rotated between periods in the trenches on the actual front line and much safer periods in the rear, billeted in houses and barns and the like in various French villages (p. 263). At one point George gets a safer job as a transport officer, but eventually turns it down (p. 274). By the time Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man ends, in early 1916, most of George's friends whom we got to know earlier in the book have been killed (including Dixon, his old groom, who had enlisted by pretending to be eight years below his real age; pp. 228, 267).

The narrative of George's war experience struck me as somewhat picaresque; one damn random thing after another — which, I suppose, is realistic enough. Even he himself says that “it could be tedious and repetitional for an ordinary Infantry Officer like myself” (p. 407). Occasionally their routine is interrupted by a bigger push or raid towards the enemy trenches, which generally doesn't accomplish anything much, exactly as you'd expect on the Western Front (p. 307). In July 1916 he is also involved in the Battle of the Somme. Eventually he falls sick with enteritis and is sent to England for a few months to recover (p. 367); he even manages to get some hunting done.

By the time he is back with his unit, in early 1917, he finds that most of his old comrades from 1916 are dead and gone, and in the ranks the enthusiastic volunteers of 1914 were by then mostly replaced by decidedly unenthusiastic recent draftees. He gets injured in the shoulder during the Battle of Arras (p. 445) and gets sent back to England again. By then he feels, like it seems many WW1 soldiers did, that the civilians back home don't and can't understand the war the way the soldiers did (pp. 421, 451, 464). He spends some time staying in the mansion of an elderly aristocratic couple who voluntarily take reconvalescing officers as guests (p. 460).

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In mid-1917, there was much talk about “war aims”. I remember reading a little about this elsewhere before; were each country to publish its war aims, it could be a first step towards a negotiated peace. Many, however, were against committing to any definite war aims; the only aim, they would say, should be to win the war and then take what they could from the defeated enemy. George cannot help noticing that Britain had entered the war ostensibly to liberate “gallant little Belgium” but now they seem to be fighting mostly for things such as British control over the oil wells of Mesopotamia (p. 475). War, in short, is being unfairly prolonged because the original defensive war aims have been quietly replaced by aggresive ones (p. 496).

He establishes contact with peace activists, including a philosopher named Thornton Tyrrell who seems to be a very thinly disguised version of Bertrand Russell (pp. 477–8); and following their advice, he writes a defiant anti-war statement (p. 496) and sends it to his commanding officer. The hope seems to be that the resulting court-martial and the publicity surrounding it (pp. 505–7) could be used to draw attention to the cause of peace, and that such a statement would have much more weight coming from a wounded and decorated veteran than from random pacifist intellectuals who had spent the whole war safe in England (p. 483).

The army, however, proves to be a fairly cunning institution. The officers dealing with George's case are not at all keen to arrest him and let him turn himself into a martyr, and would rather treat his gesture as a medical issue, a nervous breakdown caused by shell-shock. Eventualy a friend persuades him that the army would simply shut him up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of the war if he remains obstinate (p. 512), and George finally gives in and is transferred to a hospital for soldiers suffering from shell-shock. He spends a good deal of time playing golf (p. 524) and thinking about his position; he decides that, since his original intention of pacifist activism has been thwarted, the only decent thing to do is to return into action and not accept a safe posting in Britain: “I would rather be killed than survive as one who had ‘wangled’ his way through by saying that the War ought to stop” (p. 549).

He spends some time in Ireland, where his Depot (“a place where recruits are assembled before being sent to active units”, says the wiktionary) has been moved due to the Troubles (p. 558). This at least gives him plenty of opportunities for hunting, and there is a very funny scene where the hunt is cancelled due to rain and they spend the whole day visiting an interminable succession of friends instead, getting more and more drunk with each visit :) (pp. 577–82).

Next (by now it's February 1918) Sherston is sent to Egypt and Palestine, but before he can get involved in any real fighting against the Turks he is transferred to France again, since the situation there has apparently deteriorated and needs reinforcements (pp. 597–600). By now, seeing little point in the war, the most Sherston can do is focus on taking good care of the men under his command (p. 618). Even then, in the summer of 1918, nobody has any idea that the war would be over in a few months (p. 633). Eventually George gets wounded again, by friendly fire (p. 649); he is sent to England again to recover, and that is where his war experience ends.

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I found the ending of the book somewhat abrupt, and couldn't help wondering a little how Sherston's, or rather Sassoon's, story continues, how he ended up becoming a writer and poet, and how his opinions of the war and of pacifism developed in subsequent years. And of course, as always with anti-WW1 writings, I'm not quite sure what the author would have liked to have been done instead, and whether that would have actually been any better. Should Britain have let Germany overrun Belgium and have her way with France? Or gone to war for a couple of years to protect Belgium and help France, but then concluded a negotiated peace in 1916 or '17, which would presumably have meant a status quo ante in the west and a free hand for Germany in the east? Or is the alternative scenario that pacifists envisioned a still more counterfactual one in which anti-war sentiment prevails not only in Britain but also in Germany, and the war doesn't take place at all? All these things strike me as either too unrealistic or as worse than what ended up actually happening.

But anyway, I guess that any such counterfactual scenarios aren't really the point of a book like this. It is simply the record of the author's war experience and the development of his feelings on the subject; but the part that I liked best about it was the glimpse it provides into the vanished world of pre-war rural England, when Sherston was a happy young fox-hunter without the slightest care for what happens beyond the edges of his county. Being lured in by one topic and then ending up walking away happily having read about another — it's not a bad outcome from a book.