Regeneration: Duty v Conscience

Sassoon sufferings evil and unjust

• “I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” - Sassoon (pg 5)

Cold feet - Sassoon

• “Look, Robert, you think exactly as I do about the war, and you do… nothing. All right, that’s your choice. But don’t come here lecturing me about cold feet. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” - Sassoon (pg 10)

plagued by questions - Rivers

• “Whenever he spent any time with Burns, he found himself plagued by questions that in Cambridge, in peacetime, he might have wanted to pursue, but which in wartime, in an overcrowded hospital, were no use to him at all. Worse than useless, since they drained him of energy that rightly belonged to his patients.” - Rivers (pg 27)

Cat and dog left to enlist - Graves

• Graves: “The last thing we needed was Siegfried talking sense about the war.

Rivers: Sense? You mean you agree with him?

Graves: Well, yes. In theory the war should stop tomorrow, but it won’t. It’ll go on till there isn’t a cat or dog left to enlist.” - Graves and Rivers

Sign a contract - Graves

• “The way I see it, when you put that uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don’t back out of a contract merely because you’ve changed your mind. You can still speak for your principles, you can argue against the ones you’re being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.” - Graves (pg 32)

attribute everything to a mental breakdown - Sassoon regading Graves

• “It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to . . . a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.” - Sassoon (pg 46)

acuated by selfish motives - Rivers

• “Sassoon made no secret of his belief that anybody who supported the continuation of the war must be actuated by selfish motives, and yet if Rivers had allowed such motives to dominate, he’d have wanted the war to end tonight.” - Rivers (pg 61)

events allowed to continue conflict - Rivers

• “Conflict between his belief that the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations, and his horror that such events as those which had led to Burns’ breakdown should be allowed to continue.” - Rivers (pg 64)

Mutism cause - Rivers

• “Mutism seems to spring from a conflict between wanting to say something, and knowing   that if you do say it the consequences will be disastrous. So you resolve it by making it physically impossible for yourself to speak.” - Rivers (pg 131)

Rivers in cave with Burns after his breakdown."

• “Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing.” - Rivers (pg 240) 

Officers aren’t supposed to think like that - Burns

• “You can’t let yourself know you want to be wounded, because officers aren’t supposed to think like that.” - Burns (pg 244) 

just as much unwitting protest - Rivers

• “The stammerings, the nightmares, the tremors, the memory lapses, of officers were just as much unwitting protest as the grosser maladies of the men.” - Rivers (pg 319) 

Judge and jury - Rivers

• “He went on sitting by the window as dawn grew over the Heath, and felt that he was having to appeal against conviction in a courtroom where he himself had been both judge and jury.” - Rivers (pg 320) 

unquestioning allegience - Rivers

• “A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.” - Rivers (pg 333)