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| - Siegfried Sassoon was a decorated lieutenant in World War One before he published this letter of protest and declared that he would no longer take part in the war. His friend Robert Graves persuaded the Medical Board not to court-martial him, and instead Sassoon was sent, to his disappointment, to Craiglockhart, a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh. There, among the many other shell-shocked soldiers, he was assigned to Dr. William Rivers in the hope that Rivers would "cure" him of his delusions and make him fit to be sent back to the front.
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| abstract
| - Siegfried Sassoon was a decorated lieutenant in World War One before he published this letter of protest and declared that he would no longer take part in the war. His friend Robert Graves persuaded the Medical Board not to court-martial him, and instead Sassoon was sent, to his disappointment, to Craiglockhart, a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh. There, among the many other shell-shocked soldiers, he was assigned to Dr. William Rivers in the hope that Rivers would "cure" him of his delusions and make him fit to be sent back to the front. This is the opening, real life premise of The Regeneration Trilogy, by British author Pat Barker, which takes place in 1917 and 1918 in Britain and France. Although the books are fictional, they feature several historical figures such as William Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Lewis Yealland, Lewis Carroll, as well as many, many more. They explore the effects of war on the minds of soldiers and civilians, the ethics of psychological treatment, the spectrum of sexuality, and different forms of duality. In general they mix serious philosophical discussions with fascinating characters and an in-depth portrait of wartime England. The first book, Regeneration, mainly takes place at Craiglockhart. Its principal subjects are the relationships between Rivers, his patients, and the other men at the hospital, as they attempt to deal with their trauma and the overarching philosophical and ethical questions in their treatment and past experiences. Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen, and Rivers has some extremely challenging patients, including Billy Prior, who is a central character for the next two books. In the second book, The Eye in the Door, Prior leads a double life in many complicated ways—as a bisexual, Ministry of Munitions employee and friend of a pacifist family, who observes sexual and social class hierarchies from a working-class background, and who struggles against a developing split personality. Throughout all this, he maintains a relationship with his girlfriend Sarah Lumb, whom he met in Regeneration. The government is prosecuting pacifists, and prejudice against homosexuals rises when a “black list” starts to circulate in the paranoid wartime society. Sassoon and River’s stories also continue. In the third book, The Ghost Road, several main characters return to the front. Rivers, taking care of his sick sister and worrying about his patients who are back in the war, remembers his experiences as an ethnographer in the Pacific Melanesian Islands before the war, as he meditates on different methods of curing and cultural views towards death. Regeneration was made into a movie in 1997, called Regeneration in the UK and Behind Enemy Lines in the US. It was directed by Gillies McKinnon and starred Jonathan Pryce as Rivers, James Wilby as Sassoon, and Jonny Lee Miller as Prior.
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