a war of friendship Somedaymybrainwillgobang,
Andthey’ll say what lovely faces were
Thesoldier-ladshesang
Does this break your heart? What do I care?
Sassons.^57The omissions, Graves claimed, were due to lack of space; but this may be
disingenuous. Graves both treats the poem as public property and cuts those
moments in it which are highly personal, and which reflect directly on the nature
of his relationship with Sassoon (financial dependence among them). Yet if the
inclusion (and omissions) are seen as a betrayal of the private, a contradiction
becomes evident which typifies debates surrounding war memoirs in the late 1920s.
In the preface to his own war memoir,Undertones of War,EdmundBlunden
(whose own friendship with Graves ended with the publication ofGoodbye to All
That) claimed that ‘no one will read it who is not already aware of all the intimations
and discoveries in it...by reason of having gone the same journey. No one? Some,
Iamsure;butnotmany.Neither will they understand—that will not be all my
fault.’^58 Implicit here is the sense outlined by Sassoon that the experiential Great
War writer can speak for and to those who ‘shared...experiences’, who have ‘gone
the same journey’. It is perhaps on these grounds that inRegeneration,Barker
places, unacknowledged, Wilfred Owen’s account of going over the top in a letter
of 14 May 1917 into the mouth of her fictional working-class officer Billy Prior,
although with some anachronistic modifications of language: ‘It felt’, says Prior,
‘sexy...You keep up a kind of chanting. ‘‘Not so fast. Steady on the left!’’...I
looked back and saw the ground was covered with wounded. Lying on top of each
other, writhing. Like fish in a pond that’s drying out. I wasn’t frightened at all. I
just felt this...amazing burst of exultation.’^59 This, however, is Owen:
There was an extraordinary exultation in the act of slowly walking forward, showing
ourselves openly....I kept up a kind of chanting sing-song: Keep the Line straight!
Not so fast on the left!
Steady on the Left!...When I looked back and saw the ground all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies,
I felt no horror at all but only an immense exultation at having got through the Barrage.^60
To an extent, the ‘borrowing’ assumes that ‘experience’ of war is transferable:
that it is shared regardless of age, class, sexuality, ideological perspective, pre-war
experience. The desire to get the story right, as in the return to ‘primary’ sources
(^57) See the withdrawn 1st edn. ofGoodbye to All That, 341–3. The complete poem was published
after Sassoon’s death in 58 War Poems, 130–2.
59 Edmund Blunden,Undertones of War(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 7; italics original.
60 Barker,Regeneration,78–9.
Owen to Colin Owen, 14 May 1917, inCollected Letters, 458.