SOURCE: “In Defense of the Realm: Sassoon's Memoirs,” in Raritan, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Summer, 1994, pp. 89-108.

The war is outside of life, and I'm in the war.

—Siegfried Sassoon

There is a way of referring to the generation of First World War poets that is still popular in Britain today. According to this myth, a group of men set out to chronicle the nation's experience of combat for those back home oblivious of its meaning. By capturing the elegiac testament of a “lost generation,” their poetry is presumed to record a nation's suffering.

In line with all myth, an element of truth to this reading cannot be ignored: the task of writing the war was taken up by many soldiers in a spirit of grief and protest. Many of these poets were incensed by the discrepancy between their experience of war and Britain's rhetorical denial of horror and suffering. This was a war in which several million people died, a war that continues to illustrate its historical pointlessness.

Although the large number of killed and maimed in the war cannot be discounted, I propose that the meaning of war is not reducible to a set of political or social determinants. While the conflict came to an end more than seventy years ago, its legacy is still palpable today as an image of global carnage, patriotic fervor, and national shattering that has haunted European—and especially British—memory ever since. The task of separating the “real” from the “mythological” aspects of war may therefore be impossible because it confronts our continued belief that each military event is an empirical and coherent certainty. Britain's First World War poetry illustrates how history is invested with cultural meaning, for its literature is inseparable from the work of national memory and mourning. By framing war as a literary event, Britain defines its meaning in terms of a national poetics. The argument that Sassoon, Owens, Thomas, Graves, and Brooke produced only elegiac accounts of the war generates a single reading of their work by assuming their allegiance to a mythology that is all but indifferent to their ontological resistance.

Rather than argue that Britain has wrongly appropriated this reading, I suggest that there are elements of these writers' work that endorse it, and a resonance to their work that is often ignored. Since Sassoon's writing is emblematic of this link between subjectivity, desire, and loss for British culture, his grief and disorientation appear to mirror the collapse of Britain's imperial power. Similar to an obsessional fantasy, Britain repeats to itself with unfailing fascination the image of its international decline by assuming that its waning power is expressed literarily by Sassoon's dream of a bygone era. In line with all forms of nostalgia, this reading of the war poets signals a commemorative appeal for what was shattered by the war: the pastoral beauty and metropolitan elegance of Edwardian England. Each account of this period helps create a fantasy of national stability that ushers in nostalgia by an alarming “refurbishment of the Empire's tarnished image.”

Contrary to the presumption that these poets shared an identical response to the First World War, I will focus on elements of Sassoon's work that question national allegiance and military combat. These elements are central to the war, and to the reflexive and interrogative modernity to which it contributed. I suggest that two aspects of these questions require critical attention: the notion that the iconography of the “war poets” rescinds their ambivalence to Britain's military policies, and the excision of same-sex desire from this ideal to clarify a specific understanding of Britain's wartime allegory.

In terms of the first proposition, Sassoon, Owens, Brooke, and Graves publicly redefined their support for the war, and changed from ardent patriotism at its beginning to prominent criticism by the time of its end. Their trajectory is significant in encouraging a shift in public consciousness that did not jeopardize the alleged integrity of British masculinity, for these poets attempted to end the war by downplaying the idea of surrender as national emasculation. Despite the relative invisibility of homosexual desire in Sassoon's poetry, it is shaped by a tradition of homophilia that encompasses a yearning passion for camaraderie and intimacy. Although many critics have interpreted this yearning as a desire for fraternal bonding, or a generic defense by European allies against the terror of the German enemy, they rely on a select reading of Sassoon's poetry that ignores his memoirs and diaries.

Sassoon's broadly “intermediary” period of protest between unquestioning patriotism and repudiation of violence is related to Britain's wartime allegory of masculinity and the difficulty of encoding same-sex desire, for his anger was directed largely at the cowardice of the British public and the incompetence of its political representatives. The title of one of his collections, Counter-Attack, suggests this embittered reversal as a resistance to combat and a suggestion that he might take up arms against an enemy he identified at home. Thus cowardice was reframed as the vindictive aim of a public intent on killing its citizens, not the classic “effeminacy” of those who uphold principles of pacifism.

The authorities' response to Sassoon's “willful defiance” was one of bewildered reproach, followed by silencing strategies, accusations of treachery, and, finally, an order for his detention for the treatment of a psychiatric disorder—“war-shock.” Literary criticism of his Counter-Attack has paradoxically endorsed this prognosis by suggesting a tone of “adolescent” rage that “bludgeons” the reader into acquiescence by focusing relentlessly on the mutilation and decomposition of men's bodies. In other words, what is unappealing or “unpoetic” about these poems is their refusal to adopt a Romantic esthetic of death as heroic, and their insistently naturalist transposition of the sublime into corporeal abjection.

Sassoon was not the only poet to describe this transposition, but his later writing is significant in representing the war as a constitutive influence on European modernity; his memoirs foreground the impossibility of the sublime as one of their principal effects. I contend that this representation was largely inadvertent, and that Sassoon's resistance to modernism in his early memoirs and poetry sought to reverse a shift toward Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism, as well as Dada's absurdist response to the war, by reinvoking the Romantic esthetic of the previous century. This may explain why the war poets remain so enduringly popular, and why their esthetic seems central to Britain's disavowal of its imperial dissolution and economic turbulence at the end of the war. While numerous examples attest to a contrary social history, Edwardian Britain is thus recalled as a period of untroubled peace and harmony.

One example of this retroactive collation of British culture is the opening volume of Sassoon's 1928 autobiography, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Sassoon began writing this account after the war had ended as if the danger of forgetting was his principal concern. The task of rewriting the war expanded into a lifelong project, however, as Sassoon devoted his remaining years to revising texts whose sole preoccupation was the anticipated, lived, or protracted experience of combat. While periods overlap in these texts, chronology is oriented toward psychic time, and diaries return to, amend, and rechronicle an experience already detailed by his testimonial poetry—and again by memoir—as if to work through what was clearly the central inspiration of his life.

This reworking of temporality and constant rebinding of the signification of war drew Sassoon closer to the conceptual and stylistic procedures of European modernism. As part of his reminiscence, and contrary to his desire to return to an ideal subjectivity, Sassoon never reached the mythic tranquility of prewar culture, for he could define it only against the turbulence of the present. Thus his project defeated itself because the drive to envisage life before the war endlessly devolved on a catastrophe he could never forget. The fact that Sassoon never gave up trying means that the actual war recedes in his fiction, and the fantasy that outlasts it hones the event down to an increasingly diffuse recollection.

In addition to his textual accounts of violence, Sassoon's writing is notable because the war configures issues to which it holds no necessary relation. The questions of his childhood, choice of career, literary friendships, and homosexual desire seem to cohere around this event because it organizes their meaning. The war encouraged Sassoon to revise the narrative of his childhood, for instance, and to associate the absence of war with domestic and psychic plenitude. Military and personal conflict also coalesce in his Memoirs and Diaries, for Sassoon seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between historical and psychic issues. In these terms, war stands in as a metaphor for the breaks and transitions of his childhood by substituting writing for the ontological crisis that precedes it: the conflicts of desire, violence, and symbolization that shatter him into a chaotic order of military symbols.

It would be easy for criticism to adopt a similar procedure, and exchange war for unresolved psychic conflict as if literature were reducible to psychobiography. This is not my suggestion; yet the reverse supposition that war and subjectivity are distinct is also unsatisfactory. The problem with Sassoon's writing is that war repeats and interprets moments of immense psychic resonance: while military recollection is not simply fortuitous; it cannot also be consigned in his writing to “incorrect” or idealistic fantasy.

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man supports this association between psychic violence and cultural nostalgia by constituting the past as a time of mythical happiness. Events are isolated and spun into a narrative so overlaid with sentiment that it almost excludes the traumatic events of 1914. Chapters comprise the description of memorable hunts or rounds of golf; adopting the archaisms—now clichés—of Romanticism, Sassoon virtually suspends the influence of the modern by reverting to scenes of pastoral tranquility. His account of his childhood home is so overwritten that the prose seems to balk from the weight of allusion:

Looking back across the years I listen to the summer afternoon cooing of my aunt's white pigeons, and the soft clatter of their wings as they flutter upward from the lawn at the approach of one of the well-nourished cats. I remember, too, the smell of strawberry jam being made; and Aunt Evelyn with a green bee-veil over her head. … The large rambling garden, with its Irish yews and sloping paths and wind-buffeted rose arches, remains to haunt my sleep. … In an endless variety of dream-distorted versions the garden persists as the background of my unconscious existence.

Despite his opening caution （“In this brightly visualised world of simplicities and misapprehensions”）, Sassoon's prose resists the post-Edenic bathos of war because his irony extends only to childhood fragility, not historical crisis. Sassoon's esthetic is so successful that his frequent digressions into other episodes bolster this ideal instead of puncturing the very drive to recreate it. This counters John Onions's suggestion that Sassoon's memoirs are an “ironic prefiguration” of the war because his narratives strive to displace military conflict, and return to themselves in a strategic hope of forgetting.

Toward the end of this text, the war is absolved of crisis and refigured as an extension of Britain's idyll: “For me, so far, the War had been a mounted infantry picnic in perfect weather. The inaugural excitement had died down, and I was agreeably relieved of all sense of personal responsibility.” Sassoon writes, with an irony only modern readers could appreciate, that being in the army is “very much like being back at school” because its structure of discipline encourages heroism and male camaraderie, and—one might add—infantilism. While the emphasis on order and intimacy protects him from violence, the health of outdoor living and “homely smells” recreate lost pleasure: “there was something almost idyllic about those early weeks of the War.” As the narrative moves listlessly toward the war, the convolution of figurative language becomes more intense and resists the incipience of conflict by dwelling on each renunciation of pleasure. Yet the struggle for amnesia is impossible because violence surfaces from the place it was formerly denied: “everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering and falling to pieces.”

Sassoon often describes “the spellbound serenity” of Edwardian England by metaphorizing a seasonal transition from late summer to bleak winter to emphasize why the “cloudless weather of that August and September [of 1914] need not be dwelt on; it is a hard fact in history.” Yet the figurative cannot occlude the Fall as a “hard fact” of history because it fetishizes “the peaceful past” as a time of security that is no longer tenable. Analogous to the body of a soldier he confronts whose “whole spurious edifice fell to bits,” Sassoon's military experience shatters his illusion of “spellbound serenity” when the figurative fails to supplant the intensity of violence. This metaphor parallels his allusion to English pastoralism, for Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man struggles to cover the empty space of death and the traumatic real of war.

To the extent that he returned to his childhood fourteen years later, Sassoon's first memoir failed to memorialize his past. Sassoon produced two other volumes that chart his youth from the perspective of his literary career, though their remarkable avoidance of death intensifies only the urgency of his lyricism: The Weald of Youth （1942） is tinged with such nostalgia that it is closer to Hardy's late-Victorian poetics than the retributive and contemporaneous anger of Osborne, Orton, or Greene: “Some way back I have defined this book as an attempt to compose an outline of my mental history. That sounds safe and comfortable enough, and can be kept modestly plausible while the said history is unfolding itself through actual episodes.” The episode in question is not the Second World War, as we might suppose from its historical proximity, or even Sassoon's preoccupation with the First; rather, it is the story of how he came to publish his first book of poetry. Even “this impulsive holocaust” is an exorbitant reference to his destruction of juvenilia in a text that is otherwise obsessed with the “gentle revisitation of the days that are no more.” It later transpires that this “revisitation” consists of piecing his childhood together from mnemonic fragments of bicycle rides, games of tennis, and resplendent sunsets:

Out on the lawn the Eden freshness was like something never breathed before. In a purified ecstasy I inhaled the smell of dew-soaked grass, and all the goodness of being alive now met me in a moment, as I stood on the doorstep outside the drawing-room. … In the Arcadian cherry orchard across the road a bird-scaring boy had begun his shouting cries and clattering of pans.

The reference to Arcadia in post-Holocaust Europe is no irony for Sassoon, for it indicates the preoccupation of a man whose present exists with almost no other referent than the legacy of unresolved violence. Thus history and the present converge as Sassoon wistfully meanders from past simple to present continuous—“Meanwhile I am still overhearing …”—and from present simple to a future conditional; a tense in which history is reframed by imaginary projection: “revisiting some such house I should go there in summer—preferably on a dozy July morning. I should find myself in an upstairs room. … It is an unfrequented room, seeming to contain vibrations of vanished life.”

Since he conflates adolescence with middle-aged nostalgia, and psychoanalysis equally insists that “psychic time” is tied to the subject's erratic self-narrativization, it is not surprising that Sassoon's version of the war—at the end of this now supplemental memoir—erases all record of violence and renders the war a vanishing point of his imaginary. Yet despite its post-war fantasies of pre-war pleasure, The Weald of Youth is notable for enumerating much of the war's psychic resonance in Sassoon. Accompanying the rage and bitterness of many of his poems, he remarks: “I should have been quite put out if someone had told me that there might not be a war after all, for the war had become so much my own affair that it was—temporarily and to the exclusion of all other considerations—merely me!” Sassoon's overidentification with the war suggests that the war produced the right conditions for him to bind otherwise disparate elements of his personality. I suggest that it also encouraged him to realize and partially resolve a tension between ambition and desire by bringing each diffuse element of his character to the fore:

It was possible, I found, to divide myself—as I had existed during the past year [1913]—into three fairly distinct parts: the hunting man; the person who had spent ten weeks in Raymond Buildings [the London esthete]; and the invisible being who shadowed the other two with his lordly ambition to produce original poetry.

If the “hunting man” is restless with inactivity, and the esthete dispirited by the loneliness of city life, “the invisible” third—according to Sassoon—“was mainly responsible for the ineffectiveness of the whole affair.” The war seems to dispel this ennui by “tak[ing] the trivial personal problem off his hands,” providing a symbol for each component of his personality: the sportsman is transformed into a soldier, the esthete into an officer, the writer into a poet overwhelmed by creative incentive. Yet the personal continues to cut across these symbolic constituents because the war embodies, rationalizes, and finally legitimizes physical intimacy with other men.

Instead of supposing that desire and military ambition are restricted to biographical interest, I interpret Sassoon's experiential investment in war as synecdochic to a generic reorientation of sexuality at the time. Although Sassoon gave the “invisible being” that immobilized his existence in London the attributes of a poet, the influence of this persona surfaces at the beginning of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man as the missing half of his character.

As a consequence of my loneliness I created in my childish daydreams an ideal companion who became much more of a reality than such unfriendly boys as I encountered at Christmas parties [when …] I was so glad to escape from the horrors of my own hospitality. … The “ideal companion” probably originated in my desire for an elder brother.

Since the amount of time Sassoon devotes to childhood is curtailed by this sequel volume, his “ideal companion” is soon displaced by the plenitude of rural life. Sassoon's passion for horses and their caretakers briefly supplants the need for “an elder brother” before memory restores it as a burning demand:

[He] has cropped up with an odd effect of importance which makes me feel he must be worth a passing mention. The fact is that, as soon as I began to picture in my mind the house and garden where I spent so much of my early life, I caught sight of my small, vanished self with this other non-existent boy standing beside him. And though it sounds silly enough, I felt queerly touched by the recollection of that forgotten companionship.

Sassoon's division of his character into specific interests is arguably related to his management of memory, for he later claims that “Sherston”—the fictional protagonist of his memoirs—“is only one-fifth of myself,” a figure that is curious for its mathematical precision and the suggestion of a remainder that is excised from his memoirs. The most obvious omission from this fraction is his interest in poetry, though the remainder actually expands in later accounts from “one third” to “one half,” to finally “four-fifths” of his missing identity. As Bernard Knox remarks without substantiation: “The persona of Sherston dictated the exclusion of poetry from the trilogy. … Poetry, however, was not the only side of Sassoon that was suppressed in Sherston; the war diaries reveal clearly enough that the poet's tenderest feelings were for those of his own sex.”

Sassoon's Diaries clarify these fractions without rendering him whole. The testimony of his private word explicates, but never redeems, his artistic disseveration because the fantasy that we can read Sassoon entire rests on a premise that an adequate relation joins language and desire. Instead of searching for this fraction, or paradoxically extolling the critical possibilities of its absence, I suggest that Sassoon's struggle with sexual representation actually surfaces in his preceding narratives. The intrusion of this desire—indeed, the demand that it now be heard—suggests more than an assumption that it was formerly denied because Sassoon attributes the entire conflict to the psychological damage of war. Yet the interrogative style of his diary pronounces this conflict a misrecognition by demonstrating that cohesion is an ontological impossibility:

Writing the last words of a book, more than four years ago, I left a man—young for his age, though nearly thirty-four—standing in Trafalgar Square, vaguely conscious that his career had reached a point where he must begin it all over again. That man was, of course, myself. I had conducted him as far as August 1920 with a fair amount of confidence in my ability to get back into his skin and describe his state of mind. He was remote, but unamenable to the process of reconstruction. Since leaving him, I have often tried to get in touch with him again. But the distance between us has widened in more than years, and I have found myself complaining that we are now scarcely on speaking terms—that he has dropped out of my life, and that if I were to meet him I should not know what to say to him. It seems that I, his successor, have outlived our former intimacy: And I am not sure that I want to revive my relationship with one so inexperienced, uninformed, and self-dramatising as he then was. （emphasis mine）

Sassoon adopts many personal pronouns in his diary because each one infers, and immediately questions, the adequacy of self-reference: “I … myself … I … him … my … he … us … I … myself … we …” etc. Although the idea of imagining oneself as the other of one's speech is a convention of journal writing, Sassoon also interrogates the adequacy of each possessive pronoun: “myself … my … our.” What does “our” incorporate that “he” cannot, and what does “myself” mean in its radical disseveration from “us”? In their respective ways, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic criticism represent the breach between the “I” and “my” of linguistic utterance as a sign of the insoluble difference between the place from which one speaks and the position from which one is spoken. Sassoon never ceases to probe and confound the fictional unity of the subject as it speaks from the place it has been. To put this another way, Sassoon demonstrates that the desire to solidify the present, and represent oneself as “self-present,” is possible only by projecting oneself from an imaginary reconstitution of the past. As Lacan recently corroborated, subjectivity can be understood in the future anterior only because this tense collates the “present” from a fantasy of what will have been. Sassoon seemed to imply this when he wrote: “I doubt whether this book is giving anything like a chart of what is really going on inside me. Anyhow it is as near as I can get.” The signifier can approximate only the profuse web of fantasy that underlies it.

Beyond this general difficulty of language and expression, Sassoon compounds the drama of self-presence by the meaning he attributes to each register of personality. His “I” confers an authority on a “self” that looks with misgiving and frequent disgust on the parts of a “he” it would rather disown. As his diary testifies, this split occurs whenever Sassoon broaches the question of sexuality, for his desire seems to separate from consciousness and be viewed as a painful incursion on friendship and intimacy: “It was a very lovely and peaceful affair [with the painter, Gabriel Atkin] and made us both feel better … because I felt the existence of a bond which is untroubled by animalism.” When Sassoon ruminates on Gabriel as a “distraction,” however, he comments: “I seem to suffer from a poisoned mind; an unwholesome unhappiness pervades my healthy body. Is it pride—conceited pride—that makes me crave to alienate everyone?” An answer seems to surface the following week as a more extreme self-accusation: “What is wrong with me? Is it this cursed complication of sex that afflicts me?” The question persists throughout the journal, and soon represents the entirety of his discontent.

Attractive faces in streets. Cursed nuisance of sex … Rome doesn't disappoint me. It is myself that fails. Why am I so dreary and unreceptive, incapable of imaginative enthusiasm and romantic youthfulness? … Is it my own fault that I am under this cursed obsession of sex-cravings[?] … My mind is somehow diseased and distorted. I live in myself—seek freedom in myself—self-poisoned, self-imprisoned. … If I had my heart's desire I should be happy; but not for long. （emphasis mine）

Although Sassoon's self-loathing and recrimination are poignantly elaborate, they are also contrary to the ongoing announcement of homosexual desire in his writing: he oscillates between periods of insanity, “morosity,” and “a sort of self-lacerating irritability … that … is not unconnected with my animal passions.” This characterization of desire—and his vigilant wish to control it—exacerbates his self-recrimination by leading him to the brink of suicide at the end of this year （1921）. As its etymology （sui-caedere） reminds us, suicide is an annihilation of the self that is intimately related to Sassoon's carefully defined, and impossibly proscribed, tasks, values, and behaviors.

It may be reductive and perhaps superfluous to speculate on the relation between Sassoon's homosexual defense and his postwar illness. What is more certain and interesting is the way he enjoined on himself a ferocious command to sublimate, excise, and expel this set of impulses. The command not only failed （the impulses would not go away） but was later attributed to his dearth of creative success. Thus Sassoon associated with such writers as Hardy and Forster, and frantically emulated them in the hope of producing “another Madame Bovary dealing with sexual inversion, a book that the world must recognise and learn to understand! O, that unwritten book! Its difficulties are overwhelming.” Later, stymied by exhaustion and self-censorship, he impulsively dissolved the project altogether: “Now I am no longer in the mood to reveal the workings of my thought-processes for the benefit of unbegotten generations of psychopathic subjects. I cannot put down more than a fraction of what was in my head.”

Recognizing all the dangers of prognosis, I suggest that Sassoon's inability to write had little or nothing to do with his artistic ability （which was clearly considerable）. Writing led him to an impasse that seized over the use of acceptable symbols—acceptable, that is, to both its writer and public readers. We risk taking Sassoon at his （frequently unreliable） word if we accept that the residue of the unwritten was little more “than a fraction of what was in my head,” for the “cursed” supplement of sexual “obsession” had already emerged, and been displaced, elsewhere. Forster expressed similar discomfort and disingenuous confession when he decided to “burn … my indecent writings or as many as the fire will take. Not a moral repentance, but [from] the belief that they clogged me artistically.”

I suggest that Sassoon's Diaries illustrate a complex literary displacement that represents the compression and release of his desire in the trenches. This substitution of “cursed” desires is more successful in a military context because combat, struggle, and tension already function as metaphors in his writing. Thus the antagonism of his desire （“and is there anything in life which can be disconnected from this curse of sex?” [emphasis mine]） is frequently counterpoised with the threat of it disappearance （“but I must have feelings toward something!”）, which precipitates a crisis over the very decision to desire: “the question now arises—which of my myselves is the most worthy of survival? Which of myselves is writing this excorium? And, having written it, how can it be responsible for what future selves may reveal?”

Sassoon's questions force us to consider his choice of genre and narrative style: if the Memoirs are—by his conscious division—“only one-fifth of myself,” the problem remains where （and how） to deposit the remainder. Writing is central to this project for it supports a belief that internal war can be exteriorized as a conflict among competing nations. Though the question of self-survival is largely unanswerable to Sassoon, the assumption that it corresponds to political hatred suggests a temporary reprieve from self-accusation. As Sassoon poignantly explained:

In retrospection we see ourselves as we never existed. So I am keeping a journal in order to record my daily and essential inconsistency and constitutional silliness. From this jungle of misinterpretations of my ever-changing and never-steadfast selves, some future fool may, perhaps, derive instruction and amusement.

Although this analogy between national and psychic war offers a fleeting resolution, it poses questions about the relation between this “jungle of misinterpretations” and the battlefield on which so many millions of lives were destroyed. As many critics have argued, the war was also fought over questions of meaning and validation, and the point is worth reiterating to question the assumption that military conflict is entirely responsible for mental illness. My suggestion is that it may have disinhibited Sassoon's psychic distress before intensifying it later with the prominence of visible devastation.

∗ ∗ ∗

I had done what I could to tidy up the mess in no-man's land.

—Siegfried Sassoon

By the time Sassoon wrote Memoirs of an Infantry Officer （1930）, the war it described had receded into popular mythology and another of greater magnitude loomed on the political horizon—the consolidation of National Socialism in Germany was underway. Although Sassoon's perception of the Second World War displaced the terms of its historical truth, he could no longer produce a companion volume that “would lead [him] along pleasant associative lanes connected with the English counties”: the creation of “one of those peaceful war pictures” was impossible because they have “vanished for ever and are rarely recovered in imaginative retrospect.”

With its emphasis on greater fidelity to historical drama, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer describes the substitution of the civilian by its military counterpart. The critic Eric Leed has described the psychic consequence of this transformation by paraphrasing a prominent military strategist: “the purpose of training is to get the soldier to ‘pattern himself after his persecutors （his officers）’; if successful, this causes the trainee to undergo a ‘psychological regression during which his character is restructured into a combat personality.’”

The “psychological regression” of military training demands nothing less than a return to the place of Law—the moment when the threat of violence is first apprehended, and the infant's imaginary is shattered by the alterity of language, prohibition, and sexual difference. Additionally, the prerequisite unraveling of the civilian into a “combat personality” offers the soldier a fantasy of mastering the “bad object” （the enemy） by submitting to orders that are closer to home. Sassoon's narrative is significant, however, because his defense against this regression unmakes each order, and sets up a challenge through irony, illness, and defiance. In other words, the command—and the identification on which it relies—constantly fails. By his resistance to full participation, Sassoon empties the command of meaning, assessing its effect on his subjectivity by bringing the personal and the military into profound conflict. Thus he writes of his “spectral presences”:

Such hauntings might be as inadequate as those which now absorb my mental energy. For trench life was an existence saturated by the external senses; and although our actions were domineered over by military discipline, our animal instincts were always uppermost. While I stood there then, I had no desire to diagnose my environment. Freedom from its oppressiveness was what I longed for.

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer juxtaposes Sassoon's precarious loyalty to Britain by his corresponding desire to defy its authority. When Sassoon involuntarily listens to a lecture on “The Spirit of the Bayonet,” for instance, he judges the “homicidal eloquence” of the officer with critical disdain. As the officer cites the Manual of Bayonet Training—“The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister”; “if you don't kill him, he'll kill you”; “stick him between the eyes, in the throat, in the chest”—Sassoon responds with understandable revulsion. Yet the officer develops a penetrative fantasy—“Don't waste good steel. Six inches are enough. … Three inches will do for him; when he coughs, go and look for another. … Remember … [the] importance of a ‘quick withdrawal’”—in which the bayonet's castrating power encourages the soldier to sexually usurp the enemy. The bayonet is invested with a “spirit” that absolves the soldier of responsibility by conflating his territorial incursion with imaginary insemination: “We will force open the closed door and enter by force into the forbidden land. And for us who have for so long been forced to accumulate in desolate holes of shell holes, the idea of this thrust into the depths holds a compelling fascination.”

To the extent that almost all military rhetoric elaborates this “homosexual” fantasy, it is significant that Sassoon's irony inveighs only against the brusque and ruthless manner of the lecturer. This may indicate Sassoon's blindness to what might otherwise have been a sexual critique of both the war and Britain's colonial appropriation of “forbidden land.” Instead of this critique, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer describes Sassoon's shifting relation to the enemy at home and abroad: his position wavered between a loyalty that subsumed him beneath the camaraderie of his unit and a counter impulse to detach from its contaminating influence. By domesticating the war to the level of a schoolboy “escapade,” which develops from an adolescent “prank” into “a form of outdoor sports,” the narrative never unifies this oscillation. Yet Sassoon later describes the war with the disdain of an esthete who pursues beauty in order to redeem his surrounding violence.

Sassoon's focus on a love object seems to stabilize this oscillation, however, by encouraging him to grasp the unstable ground between group immolation and solitary detachment. By expanding on the passionate friendships in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, he “betrays” a deep affection for two men—Stephen Colwood and David Cromlech—that releases him from the sexual impediments of London. Thus the war offers a context for same-sex intimacy by representing a generic body to which it can be attributed. Sassoon allows this intimacy to fall under the banner of fraternal or “nonsexual” concern since his “indefinite pang of affection” （emphasis mine） for David intercedes between solitude and “the Horde.”

If affection is “indefinite” in this memoir, it is largely because Sassoon characterizes it as a diffuse and nonexclusive quality. The love object is not amorphous—but entirely specific—because Sassoon and Cromlech's relationship allows them to anticipate the end of war and speculate on their continued intimacy after it. Since Cromlech occupies in fantasy the place of his missing “half”—the absent brother/lover—he repeats Sassoon's childhood fantasy of an “ideal companion.” As Sassoon's memoir fails to distinguish between psychic and military registers, the war is conflated with a psychological drama that compels him to fight and recoil as if from an equivalent scene of violence.

The first half of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer anticipates this violence because the enemy is formless and ubiquitous, not recognizable in the narrative. The memoir begins with Sassoon preparing for conflict, though it later elaborates his dread that the unit will stumble on a fantasmatically comparable battle zone. As Sassoon considers the imminence of this attack, he is forced to interpret who and what the enemy is, and why he invests it with such a capacity for psychic retribution: “then I rushed at the bank, vaguely expecting some sort of scuffle with my imagined enemy.” In each projection, the enemy is patterned after a model of internal conflict so that his external encounter with the Germans is unheimlich when he discovers them maimed and disfigured: their bodies are sufficiently similar （as men） to endorse his private antagonism, and dissimilar （as enemies in a different uniform） to render the corpse a brutal encounter with the real.

Since Memoirs of an Infantry Officer struggles to resolve two competing aims, it is split between supporting Britain by converting the “enemy” into a “fiend,” and confronting death by associating the German corpses with the military and psychic abject. The liminal border between these aims separates Sassoon's passionate interest in David Cromlech from the German bodies by upholding a precarious distinction between friend and foe on which Sassoon's perception of the war relies. This oscillation is largely inevitable because the line between loyalty and desertion for Sassoon—and the army and nation at large—is particularly fragile.

It would appear that Sassoon experienced difficulty in reconciling this tension, for it haunted him long after the war had receded as historical fact. The difference between national friend and foreign enemy turns on the strength of his identification with the group and his submission to contrary demands. The problem is more urgent when the idea of “brotherhood” is considered, however, because it forces him to recognize what is desirable in and “other” to the brother, and thence to separate the beloved of David Cromlech from the “enemy” that finally kills him. Although this recognition is quite obvious in national and political rhetoric, its psychic distinction is more arbitrary. The difference poses an ontological dilemma for Sassoon that asks him to examine what it means to identify with a nation, the military commands of the “father,” and the land that is claimed and violated in the name of his real and imaginary authority.

I suggest that Sassoon failed to resolve these questions because they surface in each memoir as a troubled relation to national service. Britain's demand that Sassoon identify with, and fight for, its people runs counter to his individualism and desire for a “brother,” for instance, because it requires him to renounce these drives in the service of a collective aim. The nation's call up is thus initially received with fervor and later rewarded by a medal for courage: “I wanted to make the World War serve a similar purpose … of demonstrating my equality with my contemporaries … for if only I could get a Military Cross I should feel comparatively safe and confident.” （emphasis mine）.

As I have earlier described, however, Sassoon reversed this strategy by attacking the home front with a petition he described as “an act of willful defiance.” The question of what he needed to be safe from, or to whom his defiance was directed, asks us to consider the terms of his identification because Sassoon repeatedly signified each military representative as an imago of Law: he condemned the surrounding genocide by these “fathers,” and continued to fight with a ferocious will to victory. As several members of his unit have commented, it is difficult to reconcile the outraged poet who “had just … published … a volume full of bitter indignation at the hideous cruelty of modern warfare” with the man who was “also … a first-rate soldier and a most aggressive company commander.”

During his temporary absence from the war, Sassoon was riven by such guilt that the relief of escape without physical injury seemed to recall memories of an earlier psychological battle:

It was nice to think that I'd been fighting with them, though exactly what I'd done to help them was difficult to define. An elderly man, cycling along a dusty road in a dark blue suit and a straw hat, removed one hand from the handle-bars to wave comprehensive gratitude. Everything seemed happy and homely. I was delivered from the idea of death, and that other thing which had haunted me, the dread of being blinded.

The guilt of avoiding some of the conflict may have been responsible for Sassoon's precipitous return to it, for the war renewed his desire to fight and reaffiliate: “willfully … in 1918 after his protest, … [Sassoon] patrolled to the German trenches as exuberantly as Julian Grenfell ever did in 1914-15.” Each transition between support and antagonism, submission and defiance, seemed to amalgamate diffuse constituents of his identity that were bound only by the “opaque arenas of War.” As he remarked with an inadvertently modernist consciousness: “Our inconsistencies are often what make us most interesting, and it is possible that, in my zeal to construct these memoirs carefully, I have eliminated many of my own self-contradictions.”

The zeal of Sassoon's elimination, and the prominence of self-contradiction, ask us to consider the fine line between passionate devotion to the nation and hostile defiance against it. These inconsistencies surface whenever Sassoon interprets heroic commitment, sacrifice to duty, and altruistic virtue on the one hand, and annihilation, grief, and devastation on the other. Though Sassoon never resolved this dilemma, his “indefinite pang of affection” for other men occupied the middle ground—or battleground—between these poles of military rhetoric because he was unable to locate desire outside, or beyond, the field of war. In his concern to inhabit this critical terrain, Sassoon identified with neither the sublime nor the abject, but rather the bleak and precarious “No Man's Land” that intercedes between them as their vanishing mediator.