War Horse

As the National Theatre’s production of War Horse has left its London home for the final time, I thought that now would be a pertinent moment to write something about it.

I was lucky enough to see the play live when I turned eighteen and it’s something that I’ll never forget. There are so many moments that have lingered in my mind and that I still find myself thinking about – especially the point in the play when the foal Joey becomes the adult Joey. It’s a mastery of puppetry, technology and drama – full to the brim with feeling; soaring joy, amazement, wonder. It’s certainly the first time I have ever audibly gasped aloud and clutched at the armrests of my seat in reaction to a piece of drama.

These are the things which have stayed with me in the three years since I saw the play. First, the artistry that comes from the puppets. They’re so lifelike, it’s easy to forget about the men behind them. There are small nuances that make it all the more real – a flicker of an ear, a slight movement of the head, a gentle whickering sound. Second, the laughter that comes and lightens some of the moments, even when a little unexpected. The play is not misery after misery, far from it; but the balance is there, between laughter and the quieter moments that rest a little heavier on the audience – something which is welcome, I think.

When I saw the play, I found myself overwhelmed by it, my heart in my mouth and tears falling freely as the narrative unfolded on the stage, but it was such a release of emotion that it was cathartic – something I needed to do.

A relative saw the film a few weeks ago and said, “It’s so much more important, isn’t it? Once you’ve been to France..” and perhaps it does add something else to the piece, another sort of knowledge, a different perspective and a different focus. The book too was something completely new as far as WWI narratives go – told through the eyes of an animal. A different voice, a new experience – but it remains still fresh now, despite the wealth of stories that have been brought to the forefront.

In my eyes however, the play stands tall of its own accord – a wonderfully moving piece of drama that still leaves you with hope at the fall of the curtain.

a dear sacred voice;

I am incredibly pleased to announce that my exhibition, Behind the Lines, looking at the war poetry of Leeds and the way in which the people of the City creatively responded to the war, has all been printed and delivered. It’s been an amazing two months putting it together, from investigating the work in our collections to writing interpretation and receiving the final proofs.

At present, the exhibition can be seen from 1st July at Leeds Central Library and then at Leeds City Museum during October half term. Keep an eye out here and on twitter for information of when and where it will be on display outside of these two dates.

If you, or anyone you know would be interested in displaying the exhibition or want to find out more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via twitter or email!

But where the lamb

Wilfred Owen was born on this day in 1893.

Wilfred Owen is one of those poets, it seems, that people wonder what he might have done – even his contemporaries. I own one biography of him and three collections of his poetry and the question does sometimes linger in my own mind. What path might he have taken and how might his talent have developed? We don’t know, and never will know, as 1918 saw the close of Owens life, and the war within a week of one another. This post however is in honour of Wilfred’s birthday. It is a small one on a poem I love and cherish dearly, one which I come back to on occasions and find myself just as moved as I was that first time I found the words.

I first came across Owen (and his works) as I did with Sassoon, reading Regeneration – a novel it seems I will never escape. Of course, Anthem for Doomed Youth was the first (I remained fascinated for weeks at the Latin end for the piece), but there is another of his works which stood out to me more than any other and which earned a place firmly in my heart.

It was The Parable of the Old Man and the Young. It’s one which I have mentioned in passing on this blog before, I believe, but I’ve never written much about it. It’s different, in my view to Anthem, so very different and all the richer for it. Perhaps that is why I love it. I find it even more wrenching than that description which lingers long in the mind , ‘and at every jolt..’

Instead, Parable gives me a sense of foreboding with its jerky rhythm that never quite settles and it brings tears to my eyes each time I read it. I find there is a slowness to the piece, as though one is watching Abram and Issaac play out their roles with no alternative, heading toward an inevitable terror. War’s apologist and war’s victim are Owen’s subjects in this piece and there is no other way to the end but the warmongering apparent in the final lines which come as a shock to the reader.

I end this short post with Owen’s own poem and the one which I have written about in this post. It says more for itself than I ever could hope to.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

– Wilfred Owen

Behind the Lines: War Poetry in Leeds

And the burning lips that Adonis kissed/Had never the glory that haloes thine.

As I have posted previously, I’m currently engaged in a placement year with Leeds Museums. It’s been a wonderful year and one which I am beginning to dread the end of. I’ve met and worked with some fantastic people and been granted so many amazing opportunities that I would not otherwise have had.

One of these things is the opportunity to put together my own exhibition. The idea was first put to me when I began my placement in September – of course I thought it sounded fantastic, but didn’t give much more immediate thought to it. Imagine that – 21 year old me with her own exhibit, ha!

However, here we are in March and I am currently awaiting the first design drafts!

The exhibition is titled Behind The Lines and looks at the war poetry written and treasured by the men and women of Leeds from 1914-1919, how they used poetry to communicate their feelings about the war, from optimism and motivation through to the anger and grief that marked the later years, including the immediate post-war world of 1919. Behind the Lines explores the work of three poets; Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson who was a Captain in the Leeds Rifles, Dorothy Una Ratcliffe who was an accomplished poet in her own right before the war and finally, the work of an unknown soldier found in a box of possessions belonging to a soldier from Armley.

All the poetry comes from the museum collection, and from people who had a connection with Leeds. It’s been an immense privilege to be able to appreciate this work and bring it to a wider audience. Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson’s work in particular is wonderfully evocative in its descriptions and at times, incredibly moving. His collection of poetry, entitled Sunrise Dreams, covers the early idealism of 1914 through to the sharp realisations that 1916 brought. I have chosen two of his pieces, alongside Dorothy Una Ratcliffe’s poem. Her work is addressed to the women of Leeds in their grief at the loss of husbands, sons and brothers, providing a startling glance into one of the most all-encompassing feelings shared by humanity. The remaining poem which marks the start of the exhibition is a semi-surreal but entirely comic look at the rigours of training to become a soldier, written by an anonymous author.

While Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson became a published poet within his lifetime, there are other examples of work in the collection which were never published and remain as extracts from letters, meticulously typed out onto a typewriter, the words no less filled with meaning for their lack of a wider audience. One of the poems which I ultimately decided not to include for reasons of both space and chronology, has the opening line of ‘T’was the break of dawn in Flanders and the morning promised bright.’ The piece, written by an anonymous member of the RAMC in the West Riding Division is another, unique look at war through the prism of a non-combatant’s experience, but one who still saw with acute clarity the terrible continuation of war. The poem also celebrates the camaraderie and the courage of both soldiers and the RAMC.

It was difficult choosing just four poems for this exhibition and I do hope that the rest of the poems in the collection will eventually be showcased at some point, be this during the centenary or afterward.

Behind the Lines is a portable exhibition. Dates, times and locations of display TBA. 

those who witness such destruction

may never witness the like again

 Having poetry read aloud gives it another layer, one which rests on the speakers voice. The way in which they utter the words, the moments at which they pause, the tone they settle and the feeling with which they imbue the words. It all adds something that is not always there when reading alone to oneself.

Hearing Jim Carter read some of my most favourite poetry on the Show of Hands album, opened them up further to me. Sitting and letting the words wash over me or walking across the fields and moors in the rain with the lines of The Silent One, overlaid on a quietly whistling track of Tipperary, the song fading at the same time as the poem – it gave the poem something new, and gave me something new too; a feeling of atmosphere, stronger than just the words of Gurney himself.

The album itself consists of two discs – the first one of spoken word poems. It begins with Wilfred Owen’s Anthem and ends with The Fallen by Laurence Binyon; therefore it is not chronological in nature. Many of the poems are ones which would be familiar to a great deal of people but there are also ones that I had never read or seen before such as Yvan Goll’s Requiem for the Dead of Europe. The lack of chronology means that there is no overarching narrative particularly, and I do wonder what the impetus was for ordering the tracks. The second disc is a collection of songs by the band themselves, though some have been written by others. A few of the songs, such as The Gamekeeper have appeared on previous albums, but are now given a new arrangement.

The middle of the first disc finds the band putting Bombed Last Night [x] alongside The General by Sassoon. It feels unspeakably right – darkest humour against the righteous anger and indignation of the poet. It is almost chilling in a way as the voices of the men who are singing slowly fade out and away, after the poem itself has already finished, leaving one with a distinctly uncomfortable, almost eerie feeling. There are other, more familiar songs which have been attached to poems, such as I Vow to Thee my Country, alongside Jessie Pope’s The Call. The poem ends in a gently questioning manner, yet the song rises above it – soaring and then fading gradually – like optimism itself slowly losing conviction. One wonders what it would have felt like to be surrounded by such propaganda, nudging and cajoling and pushing that it was the right thing to do, to sign up.

There are other poems that are left well alone, with just voice and no music – Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, the textured voice of Carter bringing new panic and strain to those immortal words “Gas, GAS!” and then a gently exasperated tone to The Soldier Addresses His Body, one which fits so well – a chummy conversation occurring that I would never have given to Rickword’s piece. Similarly, Brooke’s The Soldier is reminiscent I think, of a son speaking to his mother, seeking to reassure her – a more human and gentle look at a poem that I simply saw previously as a particularly blind kind of patriotism harking from Edwardian England.

The songs on the second part of this recording are not ones that I have ever heard, but I believe some may be more familiar to those who have listened to Show of Hands before. The Padre, from the view of an army chaplain is the voice of a man who watches the soldiers who first come to him, unknowing of what they will face, and he remains with them until the very end when he is the one to give them a last ‘grain of comfort.’ He sees them as all the same, as his ‘flock’, whether they believe in God or not – a true leveller and an interesting look into what might have been on a chaplain’s mind. The beginning of the song suggests that he was once a parish chaplain – thrust now into this land where he watches those around him train, fight and die, whilst he remains.

The Lads in their Hundreds by A.E. Houseman has also been turned into a song, sung by Imelda Staunton, different in tone to the spoken poem of earlier in the track listing. There is a jolly nature to it, that if one did not pay attention to the words, might delude one into considering it to be a bright piece. There are other songs here which are popular songs from the period such as the ever present Long Way to Tipperary. The song is first heard alongside Sassoon’s Concert Party: Busseboom, but is presented here without words, and is instead an interesting combination of beatbox and harmonica. Whilst reading reviews before I purchased the album, I was slightly repelled by this – confused as to how on earth it would work, wary that it would seem gauche. In listening to it however, it does work, in an odd sort of way. The beginning, with a lone harmonica, brings to mind someone quietly eking out the song on a battered mouth organ in a dugout, an image with startling power. It gives way however, to the sounds of beatboxing. It is not the sound which I associate with it, instead it is almost akin to the fading fall of bombs, the explosions the final sound of the track.

There are few major rearrangements and reinterpretations of tracks such as this, the majority of songs from the period sounding more or less akin to what I imagine they would have sounded like. Despite this, I do like this album – though I have a soft spot for older music, the tunes from the 1940s and 50s, and the second part of this album is somewhat similar. I would recommend it more for the poetry readings than the songs themselves on merit alone. It is an interesting artistic response to the centenary and one which I continually find myself coming back to.

Centenary: Words and Music of the Great War can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon.

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(on a mostly unrelated note, I have now had this blog for two years! A huge thank you to everyone who has stayed with it – and me – from the beginning, and to those who have come across it more recently, RT’d links on twitter or shared them on Facebook. It is so very much appreciated!)

valour is stability

I can hear the nation / I can hear the nation cry

Memorials and places of remembrance often take many forms, depending on what, or who, they are aiming to remember. There are the familiar cenotaphs of various towns across Britain, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior which lies in Westminster Abbey and the other memorials to similarly unknown soldiers which are scattered all over the world.

There are certain memorials to the civilian dead which are also to be seen across the country; I came across one in Whitby. It was not one which I had seen before, despite having walked the same route into the town for as long as I can recall. It was put in place in 2014, a few years ago now.

The backdrop to the memorial is the sea, which perhaps accounts for, what I found, to be the slightly jarring nature of the piece. The memorial itself is fashioned after a bombarded house, the walls low and half blasted away. The shell of the rooms are painted a bright, sunshine yellow and in the centre of what represents a living room (a fireplace, a small clock on the mantle) is an unexploded shell. A small cat sits on the edge of the window.

It is jarring in that one does not expect it – it does  not fit seamlessly into the landscape like so many memorials do. The yellow is almost acidic, especially against the grey sky and grey sea as I found it last weekend. The jarring nature is twofold with the large shell in the centre of the room, perhaps a signifier for the ultimately jarring nature of warfare, and especially this point in the war when it was suddenly very, very near and not at all miles away as the wars before had been.

Not fitting is by no means a bad thing. It means that I stopped to look at it and I wondered what precisely it was for. Despite the fact that there is a small sign reading “1914-2014” on the side of the wall, it is not immediately obvious on first glance. The presence of a domestic space, buffeted by the wind and torn open by metal, left bare to the wind, rain and spray.

A board beside the memorial reveals what the intent of this little piece of bombed out homestead. This piece commemorates the two deaths in Whitby which were a result of the bombardment on the east coast on 16th December 1914. The raid also affected Scarborough and Hartlepool.

In this memorial, we are told of the courage of the people in the town who picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and continued on – a familiar-ish narrative, but one that is still worth hearing, noting and giving thought to.

what remains today

The Somme was not what I expected it to be, but then even I did not know what I expected. It’s a strange thing, visiting a place one has only ever read about in the context of bloodshed, in the context of numbers (men lost, ground gained, grave references) and the idea of family. A strange land, one that is buried in words and ideas and statements but not actuality, not until that summer week.

It was hot, the week we drove through France. The weather granted everything a semi-lucid quality. The heat was uncomfortable, the sun at times glaring but then softened by the trees. The stone benches under the trees were warm against the backs of my legs. The grass itched against my calves when I sat before my great uncle’s gravestone. I didn’t say a great deal when I was there – not that it felt wrong, but it’s what felt right for me. Remembrance is different for everyone. For me; it was sitting on the grass with the paper-thin petals of a poppy in my hand (picked from the side of the road as we drove endlessly) and being there. My nana preferred to talk; to me, to my uncle, to her uncle. My uncle preferred to draw – I still have his work from that week; a collection of scratchy pen drawings that are now pinned up next to my mirror. They are stark and lovely and painful all at once.

I was somewhat unprepared for the fact that, driving through the Somme, one passes memorials and cemeteries every several hundred meters or so. We drove past the memorial to Indian soldiers at Neuve Chapelle when we first arrived in France. I stared and stared until it was out of sight. We never went back; though I will do one day. The further we drove into France, the more we saw. Areas of land, a little back from the road; crosses and headstones, gates slightly open. We grew quieter and quieter as we drove – there was nothing to say as the enormity of it all swallowed us up. Seeing numbers is one thing, seeing the land and what remains is another.

…dew drenched blossom, and the scent
Of summer gardens; these can bring you all
Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall:…
S.Sassoon – The Dream

MCMXIV – Philip Larkin

I tend to come across poems in occasionally vague ways – a line heard and committed to memory; a few words ringing a vague bell, prompting a frantic search through a poetry book I received the year the millennium dawned or an old dogeared copy of WW1 poetry. I’ve copied bits of poems onto napkins, backs of receipts and occasionally my own hand. Sometimes I come across poems through studying them, like many people – Owen, Sassoon, Brooke; names I am unlikely to ever forget and poems that will remain forever lodged into my mind. There are poems found through blogging, posts from other people that lead me to borrowing yet another poetry book from the library and falling (however briefly) in love with a new stanza of words, a new poet with their pen. Less frequently, I find poems through film. A roundabout way, somewhat, but film is where I first heard Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV.

It is a poem, briefly referenced and quoted by Scripps – a character in the Alan Bennett play The History Boys. I was never lucky enough to see it onstage, but I saw it on DVD; drawn to it when I saw the quote ‘history is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind…with a bucket.’

There are other moments in the film- naturally – that stuck with me. The reciting of Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy (Yet portion of that unknown plain/Will Hodge forever be) and the comment on remembrance – worthy of a post all its own. But, this post is for Philip Larkin’s poem. It is not one written during the war, but instead it was penned some time afterward; the gift of hindsight in his writing and perhaps a little romanticism. Still, it’s a poem that has lingered, certain lines more than others. It is not one I studied, though I might try to one day.

The first and last stanzas are the ones I find myself drawn to.

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

…

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

I am not sure why it’s those two stanzas that I find myself lingering upon, and not the lines ‘And the countryside not caring/the place names all glazed over’ for instance, from the third stanza. I think its the sense of before, the innocence which Larkin imbues his words with. As a reader, one knows what will come next, what will happen when the men have left their tidy gardens and gone away. One knows that there will never be such innocence again, a dull ache in recognising that that comes with the final line.

An August Bank Holiday Lark is also the name of a play I saw in the summer of 2014, somewhat appropriately. It had a similar feeling to Larkin’s poem itself, a slight melancholy – making it difficult to concentrate on the brightness and the laughter for the all encroaching knowledge of what was to come, sooner rather than later.

The entirety of MCMXIV by Philip Larkin can be found here.

The War the Officers Knew

*Please note: this post contains some spoilers for Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff

The original title of Journey’s End was originally set to be Waiting, or Suspense; but Journey’s End is what R.C. Sherriff eventually settled on. The play contains both things – the end of a journey and the suspense of waiting. Set during the run up to Operation Michael towards the end of the war, the tedium of waiting is palatable in this play. It drags. The men smoke. One of them drinks. They read from novels and talk about their wives and sweethearts. But most of all, they wait.

Normally, for a play to drag would be a bad thing. I saw it performed and found myself fidgeting slightly, casting a glance or two at my companions. It was a very quiet play when I saw it – terribly quiet – but for the rumble of guns, set up so that it felt as though they were going off around the audience. I flinched more than once, until I got used to it and the sound faded to a dull rumble in the background – until the final crescendo as the lights flickered out and the play ended. The slowness of the play echoes the experience of many soldiers – hours upon hours of waiting before the attack.

It’s a very human play, a play about waiting (though not to the extreme of Beckett’s). The men talk about meat cutlets and the lack of pepper for their dinner; they talk of their lives before the war. Some, like Raleigh who is the new boy in the trenches, are public schoolboys who all played ‘rugger’ together and thought it marvellous. 2nd lieutenant Trotter hates the war, the food and he counts down each hour he has in the trenches by drawing circles on a piece of paper and carefully colouring them in. It is one aspect of the painful passage of time in this play – watching a man colour circles in on a sheet of paper, methodically and carefully because there is little other way of marking the slow inexorable journey to the definitive end, both of the play and of the war. For us, it is the same ending, but for the characters onstage, it is not.

The relationships in this play are interesting ones – they need to be. The most interesting is that of Jimmy Raleigh and Captain Dennis Stanhope. It is referenced, by Raleigh himself, that the two knew each other before the war – they were at school together and Stanhope embarked on a courtship of Raleigh’s sister. Raleigh asked to be placed in Stanhope’s Company, he looked up to him at school with a sort of hero-worship that becomes more and more painfully evident as the play goes on, not least for the fact that Stanhope himself terms it as such.

Stanhope is first seen through the eyes of Raleigh and we register the shock in his response. The man who walks down the dug-out steps is not the same man that Raleigh left behind in cricketing whites. Instead, Stanhope is plainly exhausted, perilously close to shattering point and he reacts with irritation – not joy – when it becomes clear that his sweetheart’s brother specifically asked to be in his company. Stanhope is not the man Raleigh knew, and nor is he the man  whom Raleigh’s sister is in love with. Instead, he is a man who has been steadily ground down by the reality of warfare which has continued on for four years.

We see the dependency that Stanhope has developed on alcohol as the play goes on. He drinks more often than those around him and he drinks a good deal more quickly too. Osbourne – a man who was once a schoolmaster – puts a drunk Stanhope to bed and Hardy comments on Stanhope’s alcoholism at the start of the play. The only response to the accusation is that Stanhope is the best commander they’ve ever had. This is the first we hear of him – this is the first that we know – the Captain is an alcoholic, but he is wonderful at his job. It is interesting then that we form our first opinions on Stanhope not through his actions, but through what other characters say of him.

During the play, Raleigh writes a letter to his sister and Stanhope – terrified that the letter contains note of his rampant alcoholism – takes it from the boy to be censored. Instead, he finds the letter full of nothing but praise for him and his actions – there is no malice in the letter and it is not what he expects. The love that all the men – schoolmaster Osbourne, even Trotter the perennial complainer – have for Stanhope is abundant, despite his rudeness and we see it in their actions and the way they speak of him.

There is one character however, who does not share the same love for Stanhope and that is Hibbert. Stanhope views him as a ‘worm..trying to wriggle back home.’ In short, he sees Hibbert’s neuralgia as a ruse, a con – the actions of a man wanting only to be away from the fighting. To Stanhope, Hibbert does not care about his duty – and yet duty is the linchpin that is barely holding the Captain together. This is the cause for their explosive confrontation that comes halfway through the play.

It is a revealing moment for Stanhope; he lays himself bare to Hibbert, however briefly this may be. He threatens to shoot the other man; Hibbert has first made it clear he intends to desert and second, he has struck his commanding officer – but he does not. Instead, the conversation results in Stanhope admitting that he feels the way Hibbert does. That he wants to go up and over the top about as much as his subordinate does. That there have been moments when he felt he could:

‘just lie down on this bed and pretend I was paralysed or something – and couldn’t move and I’d just like there till I died or was dragged away.’

A rare moment in the play when Stanhope voices his innermost thoughts and feelings but as an audience, one gains not just an insight into Stanhope’s mind, but an insight into the cost of his duty. In acknowledging that he feels the same as Hibbert, he is also making it clear how much he must hide. There is no-one to whom Stanhope can speak to – if he shows that he does not want to fight, then his men would more than likely follow suit. A commanding officer was a source of morale, of encouragement, courage and bravery. If they could not be that, then they were not doing their jobs. It is suggested that the rate of shell shock in officers was much higher than the rate of psychological stress on other ranks. Stanhope cannot speak to his men, he cannot write letters home which tell the truth. Instead, he is reduced to finding solace in a whiskey bottle.

I loved this play when I studied it, and I still love it today. For me, it is a melancholy portrait of a young Captain – but it is not sugarcoated. It shows a little of what happened to some men during the First World War – and it was not pretty. What happened young men – just out of school-  who would more than likely have become part of the landed classes of England, had they lived, had they survived and had they remained unbroken by the extraordinary pressure of war. Instead, they took command of groups of men, some who were older than they, and they had to look after them, to lead them and to never, ever let slip what they truly felt about the situation they were in.

For more information about the Captains experience of the First World War, I heartily recommend Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel

 

Regeneration – Pat Barker

Regeneration – Pat Barker (1991)

 

Regeneration is one of those novels that I never expected to like, let alone love. There was once a time in my life when the First World War didn’t particularly interest me at all (strange, right?!) but this all began when I was assigned a series of novels and poems about the First world War as a result of my AS-Level English Literature class. I thought for this post, I’d talk a little more about one of those books.

I first read Regeneration on a plane to Greece – something to pass the time. My copy now is dog-eared, with passages covered in highlighter, a slightly bent cover and a cracked spine – I have read it more times than I care to say, but at that moment, it was fresh and new and had that delicious new book smell.

Looking at the cover, I was not particularly filled with enthusiasm. I’d read the blurb a few times too, Wilfred Owen vaguely rang a bell, but I had no clue who this Sassoon bloke was, or what he’d written. Well, I thought, I’d better have a read of it now before I go back to sixth form. I opened the cover and was entirely lost for the next hour or so.

I’m an incredibly quick reader (my father still cannot get over the fact that as a child, I read the Order of the Pheonix in one afternoon) and I devoured this book completely. From the first page up to realising that Owen was going to be sent back out to the front, I was lost to the world. Instead of being sat on an aeroplane surrounded by bored and whiny children, I was stood in the doorway of Craiglockhart War Hospital, watching the life there as it passed by. I was watching Robert Graves berate Sassoon for his actions. I was sat beside Owen as he crafted Anthem for Doomed Youth, quietly reading over his shoulder as the words took their shape upon the page. I saw the care that Rivers had for his patients and squirmed at the complete lack of compassion evident when I came across Lewis Yealland.

It is by no means the best novel I have ever read – I say this honestly. I find the main character, Billy Prior, to be inherently dislikeable. His scenes irritated me (unfortunately, considering this was meant to be a book about him..) and I didn’t care for his journey. Barker’s writing is by no means sophisticated, and yet this book has remained lodged within my heart and I think it will always have a spot there.

It was the poetry that gripped me. It was the admiration that Owen had for Sassoon which touched my heart – not Prior’s plight. Perhaps it is because I found their words so much more powerful than Barker’s. The novel begins with Sassoon’s ‘Declaration’, not Barker’s own words, and I feel this sets a precedent for the whole book. She is a fair enough writer, but it is the words of those who were truly there which have the most impact. I first read The Dug-Out as part of this novel and it is one of those poems that will stay with me for a long time; one that will remain a favourite.

Having said that I do not particularly like Barker’s somewhat pedestrian style of writing, there are several moments in the novel when her descriptions remind one of the true horrors at the Western Front. One of the most startling moments in the book for me was when it was revealed why one of the men could not eat. He had been blown into the air and landed, face first onto a decomposing German corpse – his mouth and nostrils full of rotting flesh. It brought me up short. I had known that War Was Bad (obviously) and that many men came away from it, irrevocably changed, but this was something different to losing a limb. I felt a curious mixture of revulsion and sympathy. I don’t know if anything like this happened, or if it is simply something that Barker made up but it certainly lingers long in the mind.

I watched the film a few years ago too – I found it on Youtube under the American title. James Wilby became briefly my Sassoon and I longed desperately for a remake; the resemblance was uncanny – even down to the slight dimple in his chin and those unmistakeable ears. I loved his performance, I loved the way he spoke – he was exactly as I imagined Sassoon to have been. Of course, I shall never know exactly what he was like – there are voice recordings out there, but no video. His diaries paint a picture as does the correspondence both from and about him; and yet there will always be a part of him that remains elusive to me. Stuart Bunce was a lovely Owen, though the disappearing stutter did become somewhat irritating. Jonathan Pryce was also delightful as Dr. WHR Rivers. I felt little towards Jonny Lee Miller (yes, that Jonny Lee Miller) as Prior, though that is most likely down to my own inherent dislike of Prior. It’s a very muted film in terms of colour – greys and browns and khaki greens – shot through with the pinched white faces of men tormented by what they have seen. It ends with a reading of the Parable of the Old Man and the Young, a fitting ending, certainly. It is by no means the best film in the world, and one of the opening shots entirely spoils the ending, but it is a fair enough adaptation. I do still long desperately for a remake – though I cannot say who I would want to play Sassoon. I heard a while ago that John Hurt is to play him for some ITV drama that is yet to be broadcast, but I shall remain sceptical until I see it.

I have the other two books in the trilogy on my shelf – one of them a secondhand copy bought from Camden Market one chilly winters day – but I am yet to pick them up. I’m not sure why. Regeneration is what brought me, in a roundabout sort of way, to Sassoon and Owen and Graves and all those who wrote to express their anger and dismay and horror at the war that they were a part of. I don’t think the other two will have quite the same, odd magic that the first one did – for me at least.