Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy continues to come up with interesting stuff for this centenary year.  Like this, from The Eye in the Door. Psychologist Rivers asks a patient, Captain Manning (no, not Captain Mainwaring!), what he thinks of “the strict Freudian view of war neurosis”. This is apparently the view that the all-male environment of war, with its high emotional intensity, plus the experience of battle, arouses suppressed “homosexual and sadistic impulses” and that “in vulnerable men, this leads to breakdown.” Manning replies:

“‘Is that what you believe?’

“Rivers shook his head. ‘I want to know what you think.’

“‘I don’t know what makes other people break down. I don’t think sex had much to do with my breakdown.’ A slight smile. ‘But then I’m not a repressed homosexual.’”

Rivers presses him for an answer. Manning replies:

“‘I’m just trying to think. Do you know Sassoon’s poem The Kiss?’

“‘The one about the bayonet. Yes.’

“‘I think that’s the strongest poem he’s ever written. You know, I’ve never served with him so I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve talked a lot to Robert Graves and he says the extent to which Sassoon contrives to be two totally different people at the Front is absolutely amazing. You know he’s a tremendously successful and bloodthirsty platoon commander, and yet at the same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another anti-war poem. And the poem uses the experience of the platoon commander, but it never uses any of his attitudes. And yet for once, in that one poem, he gets both versions of himself in.’

“‘And of course it’s crawling with sexual ambiguities …’”

Well, more of the sexual ambiguities later. But for now here’s the poem itself:

“To these I turn, in these I trust –

Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

To his blind power I make appeal,

I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;

But up the nobly marching days

She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel

The body where he sets his heel

Quail from your downward darting kiss.[1]

I’m not absolutely sure to what extent “he gets both versions of himself in” here. But there it is.