160 chapter 5
This ironic narration shows the harm caused by repression, despite the belief
that “it’s bad to think of war.” The poem ends with the subject running mad
among the trees.
Sassoon describes the order of daytime treatment and “wholesome activi-
ties” at the hospital as “elaborately cheerful. Brisk amusements were encour-
aged, entertainments were got up, and serious cases were seldom seen down-
stairs” (23), but he later contrasts these organized amusements with the
chaotic and uncontrollable aspects of the war neuroses. Day and night are
contrasted as interludes controlled by either the medical staff or by the anxiety
neuroses, but never by the patient’s own repaired will.
[B]y night [the doctors] lost control and the hospital became sepulchral
and oppressive with saturations of war experience... .One became con-
scious that the place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid and
terrifying — men muttering uneasily or suddenly crying out in their
sleep. . . . In the day-time, sitting in a sunny room, a man could dis-
cuss his psycho-neurotic symptoms with his doctor, who could diag-
nose phobias and conflicts and formulate them in scientific terminol-
og y. Significant dreams could be noted down, and Rivers could try to
remove repressions. (87–88)“Muttering” or “suddenly crying out” is calmly transcribed into “scientific
terminolog y” that the doctor “notes down,” diagnosing and renarrating the
symptoms into a cheerful reinscription of the experience in the patient’s mind.
In Sassoon’s description, daytime is unsettling and unsatisfying, as if we could
already anticipate the contrast with incommunicable and sudden terror,
shouted to the reluctant audience of other sleepless soldiers in the inevitable
night. The descent into chaotic memories is described in bracing detail as that
which is truly present in the patient’s mind—a place to which the doctor, de-
spite his nodding encouragement, will never have complete access. “[B]y night
each man was back in his doomed sector of a horror-stricken front line where
the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the
livid faces of the dead. No doctor could save him then. . . . Not then was their
evil hour, but now; now, in the sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis
of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech” (87).
Here, Sassoon narrates what will be familiar to us as the definition of
trauma: that the moment when the memory occurred is less powerful than its
haunting and endless return, mocking the deliberate military march of any
disciplined order and seizing the patient’s mind with an unordered “stampede”
of nightmare. Sassoon’s dramatization of the doctor’s attempts to “remove re-
pressions” feels ironically inefficient when compared to the patient’s disorient-
ing collapse of past into present and the resulting dislocation of expression
manifested bodily by the stammer. Rather than “reenacting” an experience for