I’ve been reading Pat Barker’s well thought of trilogy, Regeneration [Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road] about WW I veterans returned to England to be treated [and sent back to the trenches if possible] for what today we call PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.] Back then it was called “shell-shock” [thought to be brought on by the concussive effect of the big shells on the brain,] or later, “war neurosis.”
One of the main characters in this fiction is the actual Siegfried Sassoon, sent to Craiglockhart Asylum [in fact] at the behest of his friend Robert Graves, who thought his being there would be better than being court-martialed for Sassoon’s widely read “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which began “I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority…”
The Dreamers is a poem from his “Counter-Attack” volume [at Alibris and Guttenberg], the title poem of which is as terrible an image-creating text as I’ve ever read.
The Dreamers
Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
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