World War I Books: REGENERATION, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, THE GHOST ROAD

World War I books

Book review by Laurel Piippo

REGENERATION, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, THE GHOST ROAD by British novelist Pat Barker, focus on historical characters such as poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers.

This is the war that first had to deal with "shell shock" ant its treatment, psychotherapy, or "the talking cure."I am rereading all three of Barker's prize-winning books and have just finished THE GHOST ROAD, last of the trilogy, set primarily in the psychiatric hospital, Craiglockhart, in Scotland, the battlefields of France, and in Rivers' memories of a primitive tribe on an island in the South Pacific.

Actually, the "setting" is in the minds of the characters whose thoughts Barker creates, based on her research and fleshed out with her imagination.

It may be a challenge to tell who is speaking. -- Billy Prior, who wanted Dr . Rivers to "cure" him so he could go back to the front rather than stay in Britain, subjected to the glib conversation of clueless civilians. He was at home with his buddies in the trenches.

The book covers a time span from the summer of 1918 until November 3, almost Armistice Day in November 1918.

Dr.River's' flashbacks of his anthropological research with a tribe of former headhunters in the South Pacirfic are woven among the therapy sessions and scenes of horror and filth in the battlefield -- also a few disgusting sex episodes.

The headhunters have entirely too much in common with civilized Man:"Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of banning it asre everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the people's lives.

Head-hunting is what they had lived for.

Though it might seem callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most FUN and without it life lot almost all its its zest.

"This was a people perishing from the absence of war. It showed in the genealogies, the decline in the birth rate from one generation to the next -- the islands population was less than half what it had been. . ."I have felt for some time that we have wars because people like them, fools like Nicholas II of Russia, thought a nice little short war would make him look good, rouse everyone's patriotic fervor, divert them from domestic disasters, and win territory and power (oil).

And of course their grandiose plans never turn out as expected, but thousands and millions of strong young people end up dead and their countries impoverished with the high cost of war.

As a wise woman once said, "The only thing you can control in s war is the first shot," but too many leaders in their bullheaded stupidity keep on doing what doesn't work -- plenty of examples in World War I and today.

My World War I history professor emphasizes the great poetry that came out of World War I, and this gives us some humorous doggerel, too.

She told us that the British soldiers couldn't pronounce Ypres, called it "Wipers": I can't resist quoting: "Far from Wipers I long to be, Where German snipers can't get at me. Damp is my dug-out, Cold are my feet, Waiting for Whizzbangs To put me to sleep."

Try singing the next one to the tune of "Onward Christian Soldiers!"

"Forward Joe Soap's Army,

Marching without fear

With your brave commander

Safely in the rear.

He boasts and skites

From morn till night

And thinks he's very brave,

But the men who really did the job

Are dead and in their grave."