Regeneration: Identity, friensdhip, brotherhood

I am a soldier - Sassoon

• “I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.” - Sassoon (pg 5)

If Sassoon wanted german heads - Graves

• “Sassoon’s the best platoon commander I’ve ever known. The men worship him – if he wanted German heads on a platter they’d get them. And he loves them. Being separated from them would kill him. And that’s exactly what a court-martial would’ve done.” - Graves (pg 30)

He’d come back for this - Burns

• “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 realised he’d come back for this.” - Burns (pg 55)

Fathers remain opaque to their sons - Rivers

• “Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there’s anything in the father worth seeing. Until he’s dead, and it’s  too late.” - Rivers (pg 144)

Rivers touched by young men fatherly feelings

• “Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young men, some of them not yet twenty, spoke about feeling like fathers to their men.” - Rivers (pg 145-146)

Admiration vs good model - Sassoon

• “The fact that you admire somebody very much doesn’t automatically mean they’re a good model - Sassoon (pg 167)

Fossilized school boy - Rivers

• “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 a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side.” - Rivers (pg 226) 

Right kind of love? - Rivers

• “After all, in war, you’ve got this enormous emphasis on love between men – comradeship – and everybody approves. But at the same time there’s always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love?” - Rivers (pg 272)

Mask - Rivers

• “You know you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.” - Rivers (pg 324) 

Rivers changed by Sassoon

• “He was amused by the irony of the situation, that he, who was in the business of changing people, should himself have been changed and by somebody who was clearly unaware of having done so.” - Rivers (pg 333)