“I told him that I was a Pilgrim going to the Celestial City.” When the reader of the Complete Memoirs reaches the epigraph to the final volume, Sherston's Progress, the impression is confirmed that he has been accompanying a spiritual wayfarer. All his long, meditative life, Siegfried Sassoon maintained the dual role of action and rumination under the aspect of pilgrim allegory. Throughout his extended autobiographical career—from The Heart's Journey poems of 1927 to the final volume of his propria persona autobiographical trilogy, Siegfried's Journey （1945）—Sassoon was governed by the figure of quest, though his active life diminished and his ruminations increased in inverse proportion. With the benefit of hindsight and with varied degrees of satisfaction in his conversion to Catholicism in 1957, his critics have mapped his religious path in closed or handsome curves, but the view from the road his books report is unencumbered by claims to distance and direction. To apply the phrase with which another long-lived contemporary concluded his autobiography, “the journey not the arrival matters.”

The absence of religious conversion and formal completion in Sassoon's self-writings does not, however, bar them from full use of the figures with which spiritual autobiographers have given pattern and meaning to their lives. Sassoon habitually uses the terms spiritual autobiography and private pilgrimage for his career, and he exhibits a long-standing obligation to Bunyan that goes well beyond the choice of epigraph. Perhaps more significantly, his poetry gives frequent indications of a typological habit of mind in confronting the otherwise unassimilable spectacle of the Great War. “The Redeemer,” for one, creates a typological image closely resembling those of other war poets, such as David Jones, that superimpose the sufferings of the human-all-too-human Tommy and the paradigmatic martyrdom:

He faced me, reeling in his weariness,
Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless
All groping things with freedom bright as air,
And with His mercy washed and made them fair.
Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,
While we began to struggle along the ditch;
And someone flung his burden in the muck,
Mumbling: “O Christ Almighty, now I'm stuck!”

Other Sassoon war poems take up biblical models for less agonized yet more alarming identifications with their modern instances. Adam becomes “the gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead” whereas the modern king sending troops to the slaughter for his selfish purposes stands revealed as another David, quick to exploit the death of Uriah. Some of these identifications are made for their topical, satirical thrust, but the long-standing practice of Sassoon's poetry confirms his autobiographical tendency to apply to the Bible for the figures of life. We may trace the habit to his sense of his Jewish heritage—“as a poetic spirit I have always felt myself—or wanted to be—a kind of minor prophet”—or to his favoring of the devotional and mystical poets of the seventeenth century, especially Herbert and Vaughan.

For all Sassoon's ample provision of biblical analogies with which to piece together the fragments of his war-shattered life, the first volume of the Complete Memoirs—Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man—is relatively free of figuration. This is the book that made him a venerated relic of the social world he set out to decently bury—the Cranford-Barset—“sceptered isle” world he continued to relish and recall while undertaking to show its limitations and its passing. Sassoon later took his opportunities for mythologizing the idyll of the turn-of-the-century home counties; in the second trilogy, The Old Century and The Weald of Youth move easily into symbolic ascriptions for childhood scenes, for example, the “half-hour's pilgrimage” to Watercress Well, which becomes a “symbol of life” and the “source of all my journeyings.” But in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man （MFM）, the landscape and his activities within it are held to the level of physical density and rich psychological impression: “With a sense of abiding strangeness I see myself looking down from an upper window on a confusion of green branches shaken by the summer breeze. In an endless variety of dream-distorted versions the garden persists as the background of my unconscious existence” （Pt. I, sec. 4）.

Sassoon wishes to maintain his native scenes—for all their numinousness in the memory—at the literal level, in preparation for the violent contrast he will draw between them and the war spectacle. Even in these early scenes, the descriptions are set up for pointed contrast with larger landscapes and other realms of experience. An extended passage on the expanding perceptions of waking follows the boy out beyond his window and garden to the valley, the town, and the historical world behind them: “How little I knew of the enormous world beyond that valley and those low green hills. From over the fields and orchards Butley Church struck five in mellow tones. … I inspected the village grocer's calendar which was hanging from a nail. On it there was a picture of ‘The Relief of Ladysmith.’… Old Kruger and the Boers. I never could make up my mind what it was all about, that Boer War, and it seemed such a long way off” （MFM, Pt. II, sec. 1）.

The literal prevails in all the prose on his youthful love affair with horses, which takes up the major part of this first volume. But in these detailed accounts as well, a contrast is effected with another level of consciousness that stands outside and judges the vigorous physical activity. At a climactic moment of the young rider's career, his winning of the “Colonel's Cup” at “Dumbridge,” the cup is placed next to another treasured object in his room:

Everything led back to the talisman; while I gazed and gazed on its lustre I said to myself, aloud, “It can't be true that it's really there on the table!” The photograph of Watts's “Love and Death” was there on the wall; but it meant no more to me than the strangeness of the stars which I had seen without question, out in the quiet spring night. I was secure in a cozy little universe of my own, and it had rewarded me with the Colonel's Cup. My last thought before I fell asleep was, “Next season I'll come out in a pink coat.” （MFM, Pt. VI, sec. 4）

The contrast of the cup and the reproduction seems at first casual, but when the “strangeness of the stars” is brought into the equation, it reveals the young man's lack of curiosity about the truly mysterious and his banal awe at the presence of the apparently numinous and merely fatuous symbol of sporting success. The Watts painting has come up at other summary junctures, we now recall （Pt. I, sec. 4; Pt. II, sec. 1）, to suggest the realm of artistic depth and spiritual mystery to which the youth is vaguely sensitive but not as yet committed.

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man does not end with this contrast but with the more primitive one between peace and war. As the part titles indicate, the first volume leaves Sherston “At the Front” whereas Memoirs of an Infantry Officer takes up the tale much later, with a 1916 scene, “At the Army School.” The form of the opening volume, then, already encompasses the full range of the transition from the idyll of gardens and race courses to the mud of trench life and the clay of death. As the third in a succession of friends troops to the grave, the narrator baldly reports: “A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew Death then” （MFM, Pt. X, sec. 5）.

The movement downward to this low place begins early, even in the midst of fox-hunting larks. Quick to enlist and proudly mounted, Sherston tries to extend his prewar “picnic in perfect weather” in the mounted infantry: “My notion of acting as ground scout was to go several hundred yards ahead of the troop and look for jumpable fences. But the ground was still hard and the hedges were blind with summer vegetation, and when I put the farrier-sergeant's horse at a lush-looking obstacle I failed to observe that there was a strand of wire in it” （MFM, Pt. IX, sec. 1）. The resulting fall is figurative as well as literal: its consequence is not merely a broken arm but an alertness to strands of wire impeding movement, freedom, and life. There will be much ado with wire cutters purchased at the army and navy stores and pressed into service at the Battle of Mametz Wood, but already the mortal bonds of the soldier—and with him, man—are laid on.

As Sassoon's commentators observe—and as he himself discloses in one of his frequent chats in the autobiographer's workshop—his creation of a pseudonymous persona to tell an authentic but selective tale allows him to exaggerate the ingenue in his early self-portrait. Yet it is not the young romantic Sherston who is raised as the figure of innocence led to the slaughter but the brother officer who becomes the contents of that sack, “Dick Tiltwood”:

His was the bright countenance of truth; ignorant and undoubting; incapable of concealment but strong in reticence and modesty. … he had arrived at manhood in the nick of time to serve his country in what he naturally assumed to be a just and glorious war. Everyone told him so; and when he came to Clitherland Camp he was a shining epitome of his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German shells and machine-guns. … （MFM, Pt. IX, sec. 4）

The language inclines here not only toward indignation at outraged innocence but also toward universal finality: this “bright countenance of truth” becomes the “shining epitome” not only for his historical generation but for an eternal pattern of human experience. It is this larger burden of the narrator's slowly growing political awareness that begins to emerge in his anticipation of the debacle: “To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity” （Pt. IX, sec. 2）.

The story of Sherston's first years at war is briefly told by comparison with the close attention that will be given the final years in the next volumes. Moving to the Front is to pass a traditional threshold, not merely beyond the familiar world at peace but beyond an insular culture: “For the first time in our lives we had crossed the Channel” （MFM, Pt. X, sec. 1）. The specific boundary in time and place is marked—and remarked upon—by the line, “We got to Béthune by half-past ten” （Pt. X, sec. 1）. From this point, an accretion of baleful events begins to separate the fox-hunting man from his old self: “Everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering away and falling to pieces…” （Pt. X, sec. 4）. With the loss of his riding friend, “Stephen Colwood,” his former groom, “Dixon,” and then “Dick Tiltwood,” a point is reached well known to less naïve but equally spiritual autobiographers: “Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen” （Pt. X, sec. 6）. The pilgrim now embarked on his ways of exile experiences the blankness of despair: “As for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die: the idea made things easier” （Pt. X, sec. 6）.

From the point where Memoirs of an Infantry Officer （MIO） begins, the language of the lower world rises by steady increments to sweeping asseveration: “I remember waiting there in the gloom and watching an unearthly little conflagration caused by some phospherous bombs up the hill on our right” （Pt. IV, sec. 2）; “I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago” （Pt. IV, sec. 2）; “Our own occupation of Quadrangle Trench was only a prelude to that pandemonium which converted the green thickets of Mametz Wood to a desolation of skeleton trees and blackening bodies” （Pt. IV, sec. 3）; “Low in the west, pale orange beams were streaming down on the country that receded with a sort of rich regretful beauty, like the background of a painted masterpiece. For me that evening expressed the indeterminate tragedy which was moving, with agony on agony, toward the autumn. … altogether, I concluded, Armageddon was too immense for my solitary understanding” （Pt. IV, sec. 4）.

A brief leave at an Oxford college gives him a wary taste of “Paradise”—“Had I earned it? I was too grateful to care” （MIO, Pt. X, sec. 1）. Here, and on his return to the captured Hindenburg Line, Sherston begins to contrast his knowledge-without-forgiveness with the stolid incomprehension of the “people at home who couldn't understand.” The effort to make sense of the inchoate leaves him in spiritual dryness: “But my mind was in a muddle; the War was too big an event for one man to stand alone in. All I knew was that I'd lost my faith in it and there was nothing left to believe in except ‘the Battalion spirit’” （Pt. VIII, sec. 2）. This last faith proves equally difficult to maintain: “Last summer the First Battalion had been part of my life; by the middle of September it had been almost obliterated.” One last hope remains, in the human spirit and the heroic principle:

I, a single human being with my little stock of earthly experience in my head, was entering once again the veritable gloom and disaster of the thing called Armageddon. And I saw it then, as I see it now—a dreadful place, a place of horror and desolation which no imagination could have invented. Also it was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve. （Pt. VIII, sec. 4）

These last defiances of the néant avail him nothing as he descends into the abyss of the tunnel under the Hindenburg Trench: “The earthy smell of that triumph of Teutonic military engineering was strongly suggestive of appearing in the Roll of Honour and being buried until the Day of Judgment” （Pt. VIII, sec. 4）. There is only one further point of exile, the Outpost Trench:

wherever we looked the mangled effigies of the dead were our memento mori. Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands （nationality unknown） which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? … the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull. （Pt. VIII, sec. 4）

At this point, Sherston is wounded in the shoulder and is withdrawn to England for convalescence, but his illness is more radical than a tearing of flesh. In company with the other survivors, he feels “estrangement from everyone except the troops in the Front Line”: “I couldn't be free from the War; even this hospital ward was full of it, and every day the oppression increased” （MIO, Pt. IX, sec. 1）. The oppression and bondage express themselves in the characteristic visions of combat neurosis: “Shapes of mutilated soldiers came crawling across the floor; the floor seemed to be littered with fragments of mangled flesh. Faces glared upward; hands clutched at neck and belly; a livid grinning face with bristly moustache peered at me above the edge of my bed; his hands clawed at the sheets” （Pt. IX, sec. 1）.

At once, at the point of crisis, a sign is given, though in a medium oddly different from the usual organs of revelation. It is the “Unconservative Weekly” （The Nation）: “The omniscience of this ably written journal had become the basis of my provocative views on world affairs. … an article in the Unconservative Weekly was for me a sort of divine revelation. It told me what I'd never known but now needed to believe…” （MIO, Pt. IX, sec. 2）. It is true that Sherston goes on to belittle his ability to comprehend and retain the political acumen of the journal, but his comic reduction of his rational response only enhances the power of his faith. This faith is further bolstered by its contention with the traditional beliefs of “Lady Asterisk,” who likes having “serious helpful little talks with her officers”: “When I had blurted out my opinion that life was preferable to the Roll of Honour she put aside her reticence like a rich cloak. ‘But death is nothing,’ she said. ‘Life, after all, is only the beginning. And those who are killed in the War—they help us from up there. They are helping us to win’” （Pt. IX, sec. 3）. With this travesty of Christian consolation and the news that all but one of the officers of his Second Battalion have become casualties, Sherston writes to consult the editor of his journal of revelation, “Mr. Markington” （H.V. Massingham）.

Their first meeting is a luncheon at the editor's club, “the mecca of the Liberal Party,” under the visible aegis and spiritual example of Richard Cobden. Markington provides historical perspective on past antiwar campaigns and political insight into one of the chief impediments to a negotiated peace—the Allies' refusal to publish their war aims and secret treaties. He also, almost in passing, provides the idea of moral protest and witnessing resistance to the war: “He told me that I should find the same sort of things described in Tolstoy's War and Peace, adding that if once the common soldier became articulate the War couldn't last a month” （MIO, Pt. X, sec. 1）. Sherston takes the idea home and returns, the following week, to the editorial office: “It was a case of direct inspiration; I had, so to speak, received the call, and the editor of the Unconservative Weekly seemed the most likely man to put me on the shortest road to martyrdom” （Pt. X, sec. 1）.

Markington spells out the broad lines of a proclamation of protest, and the unpolitical Sherston is led beyond his characteristic diffidence: “His words caused me an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps I was only making a fool of myself; but this was soon mitigated by a glowing sense of martyrdom. I saw myself ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired’ …” （MIO, Pt. X, sec. 1）. Literary as well as religious conventions are here put subtly to the test of simultaneous renewal and satire.

To counteract the excessive afflatus of the newly dedicated spirit, Markington also provides contact with the best rational mind—and the most vigorous antiwar protester—of the time, Bertrand Russell （“Thornton Tyrrell”）. The philosopher's discourse is clipped and pragmatic, shifting focus quickly from the large political issues to the scale of the man before him and his spiritual crisis: “‘It amounts to this, doesn't it—that you have ceased to believe what you are told about the objects for which you supposed yourself to be fighting? … Now that you have lost your faith in what you enlisted for, I am certain that you should go on and let the consequences take care of themselves. … But I hadn't intended to speak as definitely as this. You must decide by your own feeling and not by what anyone else says’” （Pt. X, sec. 2）. The act of protest on which they collaborate takes the form of a traditional religious protest-cum-profession of faith. Sassoon/Sherston's famous declaration begins:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. … I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. … I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. （Pt. X, sec. 5）

In difficulty at the unwonted bravado of his position and his prose, Sherston seeks inspiration where he can find it. He goes to Cambridge, drawing mingled sustenance from his alma mater: “Sitting in King's [College] Chapel I tried to recover my conviction of the nobility of my enterprise and to believe that the pen which wrote my statement had ‘dropped from an angel's wing.’ I also reminded myself that Cambridge had dismissed Tyrrell from his lectureship because he disbelieved in the War” （MIO, Pt. X, sec. 3）. With these mixed influences, Sherston finds himself in “purgatory” （Pt. X, sec. 4） and returns to his home town to suffer through his condition. There follows one of the classic scenes of autobiographical writing, an ascent of a hill to the point of epiphany, in which a vision of history and of oneself in history enables the divided mind to resolve itself and make its central choice in life:

Late on a sultry afternoon, when returning from a mutinous-minded walk, I stopped to sit in Butley Churchyard. From Butley Hill one looks across a narrow winding valley, and that afternoon the woods and orchards suddenly made me feel almost as fond of them as I'd been when I was in France. While I was resting on a flat-topped old tombstone I recovered something approximate to peace of mind. Gazing at my immediate surroundings, I felt that “joining the great majority” was a homely—almost a comforting—idea. Here death differed from extinction in modern warfare. I ascertained from the nearest headstone that Thomas Welfare, of this Parish, had died on October 20th, 1843, aged 72. “Respected by all who knew him.” Also Sarah, wife of the above. “Not changed but glorified.” Such facts were resignedly acceptable. They were in harmony with the simple annals of this quiet corner of Kent. … And Butley Church, with its big-buttressed square tower, was protectively permanent. One could visualize it there for the last 599 years, measuring out the unambitious local chronology with its bells, while English history unrolled itself along the horizon with coronations and rebellions and stubbornly disputed charters and convenants. Beyond all that, the “foreign parts” of the world widened incredibly toward regions reported by travellers' tales. And so outward to the windy universe of astronomers and theologians. …

Meanwhile my meditations had dispelled my heavy heartedness, and as I went home I recovered something of the exultation I'd felt when first forming my resolution. I knew that no right-minded Butley man could take it upon himself to affirm that a European war was being needlessly prolonged by those who had the power to end it. They would tap their foreheads and sympathetically assume that I'd seen more of the fighting than was good for me. But I felt the desire to suffer, and once again I had a glimpse of something beyond and above my present troubles—as though I could, by cutting myself off from my previous existence, gain some new spiritual freedom and live as I had never lived before. （Pt. X, sec. 4）

Coming down from this exalted vision and gritty determination, Sherston's final volume of memoirs might be expected to record a steady progress in pacifist activity and spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, that is what he anticipates; when shunted back to the Front, he suffers pangs of doubt as to his course but accepts them as “an inevitable conjuncture in my progress” （MIO, Pt. X, sec. 7）. And there is the monitory epigraph to Sherston's Progress, indicating movement toward the Celestial City, to lay out the path of the denouement. But the form and content of this last volume are by no means so clear, and Sherston's return to the Front only to suffer a near-fatal wound offers no easy moral or aesthetic resolution—it simply brings his war service to an end and closes the Memoirs. It was some such awareness of this inconclusive ending—along with the pressure of other aspects of his life that required telling—that must have led Sassoon to write three further volumes of autobiography in his own name.

Yet running through Sherston's Progress there is a figure of life that gives point to his further experiences in battle and hospital. By its very nature, this figure is unlikely to suggest full resolution as it opens the future to possibility rather than resting at a determinate place. Although Sherston's narrative of his treatment by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers is readily reducible to a psychiatric revelation of his fundamental immaturity and new dependence on a father figure, the human figure that emerges is of a less easily grasped kind. The terms of Sassoon's later poem on Rivers cast him in an archetypal form:

What voice revisits me this night? What face
To my heart's room returns?
From that perpetual silence where the grace
Of human sainthood burns
Hastes he once more to harmonize and heal?
…
O fathering friend and scientist of good. …

In Sherston's Progress （SP）, this image is scaled down to that of an “alert and earnest” face with the “half-shy look of a middle-aged person intruding on the segregative amusements of the young,” steadily regarding one with an “unreprimanding smile” （Pt. 1, sec. 2）. Given this dual image of the universal healer and the vividly human friend, suggestions of Christological displacement arise, but Sherston urges no certainty about the good doctor or his cure: “In later years, while muddling on toward maturity, I have made it my business to find out all I can about the mechanism of my spontaneous behaviour; but I cannot be sure how far I had advanced in that art—or science—in 1917. I can only suggest that my definite approach to mental maturity began with my contact with the mind of Rivers” （Pt. 1, sec. 3）.

Whether or not Sherston's condition is a rebirth and his activity a progress, the further pages of the volume infuse doses of expansive experience. Sherston even makes a journey to Jerusalem as part of a military force, but the occasion is not one for racial identification or postexilic return; it is instead an encounter with another learned doctor, who provides a running commentary on the flora and fauna of the land. Similarly, Sherston's reading provides no telling insights but a deepening of his response to long-familiar writers like Hardy. Yet he is still trapped inside the war: “And I felt a great longing to be liberated from these few hundred yards of ant-like activity—to travel all the way along the Western Front—to learn through my eyes and with my heart the organism of the monstrous drama which my mind had not the power to envision as a whole. But my mind could see no further than the walls of that dug-out with its one wobbling candle which now burnt low” （SP, Pt. IV, sec. 2）.

From this antlike limitation he is released with a violence that almost destroys him. He is sent home and decisively begins his lifelong career of trying to make sense of the war and his transformation by it. Back in the hospital, he tries to take stock of his life but is not impressed with the sums; of course, Sherston is prevented from reckoning in the war poetry that Sassoon had published and that was to provide a vocation and a means of establishing his identity. Summing up his faith in his vision and his protest: “I had no conviction about anything except that the War was a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation” （SP, Pt. IV, sec. 3）. But at this stage of renewed accidie, the good doctor returns:

And then, unexpected and unannounced, Rivers came in and closed the door behind him. Quiet and alert, purposeful and unhesitating, he seemed to empty the room of everything that had needed exorcising.

My futile demons fled him—for his presence was a refutation of wrong-headedness. …

He did not tell me that I had done my best to justify his belief in me. He merely made me feel that he took all that for granted, and now we must go on to something better still. And this was the beginning of the new life toward which he had shown me the way. （Pt. IV, sec. 3）