Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon -- Analysis and Themes

Themes

• Disillusionment with religion:

A ludicrous oleograph of our Savior preaching from a boat, which we always referred to as jocular Jesus.

…

Finally, when with flushed faces we sauntered out into the sunshine, he remarked that he'd half a mind to go and look for a young lady to make his wife jealous. I said that there was always the cathedral to look at, and discovered that I'd unintentionally made a very good joke.

• Violence and danger lurking around. Audio and visual representations:

But on the horizon the bombardment bumped and thudded in a continuous bubbling grumble.

…

While I lay on the floor in my flea-bag the blackness of the night framed in the window was lit with incessant glare and flash of guns.

• Innocence corrupted - conceptions of purity shattered by violence:

The Seventh Division Battle Plan didn't look aggressively unpleasant on paper as I transcribed it into my note-book. Rose Trench, Orchard Alley, Apple Alley, and Willow Avenue, were among the first objectives in our sector, and my mind very properly insisted on their gentler associations. Nevertheless this topographical Arcadia was to be seized, cleared, and occupied

• Excitement about war:

We decided, with quite a glow of excitement, that the Fourth Army was going to fairly wipe the floor with the Boches.

• War merging with the pastoral:

I remarked on a sickly sweet smell which I attributed to the yellow weeds which were abundant there, but Durley explained that it was the lingering aroma of gas-shells

• Pointlessness of war:

My personal impression was that we were setting out for the other end of nowhere.

...

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 eighteen. 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.

• Magnitude of war:

I felt nothing worth recording -- merely a sense of being irrevocably involved in something bigger than had ever happened before.

• Reasons for war:

I thought of the huntsman walking out in his long white coat with the hounds; of Parson Colwood pulling up weeds in his garden till tea-time; of Captain Huxtable helping his men get in the last load of hay while a shower of rain moved along the blurred Weald below his meadows. It was for all that, I supposed, that I was in the front-line with soaked feet, trench-mouth, and feeling short of sleep...

• War breaks spirit:

His jaunty fag-smoking demeanor and freckled boyish face seemed to defy the darkness we had emerged from. That moment has impressed itself strongly on my memory; young Kendle was remarkable for his cheerfulness and courage, and his cheeky jokes. Many a company had its Kendle, until the war broke his spirit. . . .

• Nature and war:

Or was it as though the desolation of numberless deaths had halted the clouded sky to an attitude of brooding inertia?

• Helplessness, unhappiness:

But my thoughts were powerless against unhappiness so huge. I couldn't alter European history, or order the artillery to stop firing. I could stare at the War as I stared at the sultry sky, longing for life and freedom and vaguely altruistic about my fellow-victims. But a second-lieutenant could attempt nothing.

Analysis

• PR is a big part of WWI:

Larks were rejoicing aloft, and the usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench; but he squeezed past us without so much as a nod, for the afternoon was too noisy to be idyllic, in spite of the larks and poppies which were so popular with war-correspondents. "I suppose those brass-hats do know a hell of a lot about it all, don't they, Julian?" I queried. Durley replied that he hoped they'd learnt something since last autumn when they'd allowed the infantry to educate themselves at Loos, regardless of expense. "They've got to learn their job as they go along, like the rest of us," he added sagely.

• Repressing war-related events, and remembering the pleasant or droll things:

What we did up in the Front Line I don't remember; but while we were remounting our horses at 71. North two privates were engaged in a good-humored scuffle; one had the other's head under his arm. Why should I remember that and forget so much else?

• He never uses artillery fire as the subject of a sentence, instead making it an afterthought:

I was huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles and trying to forget about the shells which were hurrying and hurrooshing overhead

• War/fear makes the mind seek shelter in nonsense, to escape from horrifying reality into comfort and unimportant minutiae to evade imminent reality:

It was queer to be in an empty front-line trench on a fine morning, with everything quite peaceful after a violent early bombardment.

• At the beginning of the report, there's lots of nature imagery, but as reality begins to sink in there are more war descriptions. (II)

Afterwards I asked him what he had been thinking about. His reply was "Carpet slippers and Kettle-holders." My own mind had been working in much the same style, for during that cannonading cataclysm the following refrain was running in my head:

They come as a boon and a blessing to men,
The Something, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen.

• He still thinks of war in terms of a story, something he'd heard of rather than something he's in:

I wanted to be able to say that I had seen "the horrors of war"; and here they were, nearly three days old.

• War is very confusing:

He had now lost all control of himself and I gathered from his incoherent utterances that he was on his way to Headquarters to tell Kinjack that his Company hadn't moved yet because they didn't know which way to go to find the Germans.

• Courage is meaningless:

I mention this because, as the day went on, I definitely wanted to kill someone at close quarters. If this meant that I was really becoming a good "fighting man", I can only suggest that, as a human being, I was both exhausted and exasperated. My courage was of the cock-fighting kind

…

it sounded as if they were keeping up their courage with the volubility usual among soldiers who knew that they would soon be in an attack.

• This book is a work of fiction, so this memory lapse is a stylistic choice to illustrate how traumatic war is:

I went down to Bottom Wood by a half-dug communication trench whose existence I have only this moment remembered (which shows how difficult it is to recover the details of war experience).

• They want to be comforted by each other's presence, not stressed out:

On the way I gave him a breathless account of my adventures up at Mametz Wood, but neither of us really wanted to talk about the Somme Battle.

• Diversity of opinions- questioning paradigms (fragmentation):

"The blighter's never satisfied unless he's turning something upside down. I actually heard him say that Homer was a woman. Can you beat that? And if you'll believe me he had the darned sauce to give me a sort of pi-jaw about going out with girls in Liverpool. If you ask me, I think he's a rotten outsider, and the sooner he's pushing up daisies the better."

• In the same chapter, they mention homer, Shakespeare, Dickens and an advertisement for pens.
• Identity fragmentation:

Was it a mistake, I wondered, to try and keep intelligence alive when I could no longer call my life my own?

• WWI is Armageddon:

And altogether, I concluded, Armageddon was too immense for my solitary understanding.

• Detachment and fragmentation- he feels as though he is someone else from another time:

But for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.

Siegfried Sassoon