The book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon covers about the English/ French war. The book is organized by chronologically but Siegfried Sassoon does jump around telling about life in the war. Siegfried Sassoon is a young man in army school for officers. He has a servant, whose name is Flook and sort of privileged. Flook is India. He called the school a holiday for officers taught to kill (France). Infantry Officer George Sherston nick name Kangaroo, has no idea how he got it. He is a bomber; he gets to blows stuff up and goes into WW1. The enemy at the time is Germany. Kangaroo is titled 2nd lt. in year 1916. 18 months approx. fought in server locations, they included Somme- isle of Man-New Zealand-England France. He was all over and he wanted to be a hero and get glory for it.
Fighting the Germans, they rode horses. He really did not want to kill, but you had to in self-defense due to he was on the front line. Front line was a harsh one, one loses humanities. (a no man’s land.) Very detailed images of the battle field of bombs, death, gun fires and thankful for being alive. They would recover tools, weapons from No man’s land. That is the French front and is very stressful. Wet weather gave him sore feet and trench mouth. They would use candles for light. He goes into the war obedient, the reality is for glory and he is disillusioned. Men used canaries’ when they dug tunnels because if a bird died they knew it was poison. War made him want to kill after seeing his friends killed and still wondered about the young German boys dead. “Eight little niggers minus one dead”, as he said they painted faces with ash so they would not be seen in the night when they were out. Soldiers seemed like grey ghost in the night. A days rest, food and sleep worked wonders. No one recognized its existence. On the front and then off and repeat all over again. He was in charge of getting the men settled. Newspapers did not report on the gory stuff, the dead were happy to die for courage.
New Zealand he got sick and was put in the hospital and recovered in a Red Cross hospital. He loved to read while he was in there. His throat and shoulder were injured badly two times and got sick two times from enteritis/ German measles. It took him month to recover. He was gratefully for being alive. He started to lose faith in England. Things just were not as he believed and people back home suffered too. Places were neglected and food rations. When he went back in service, he hated horses getting killed. He wanted the newspapers to report the reality of the war. He took on a double life; he took on a job as a cadet battalion. He wrote a letter about the war instead of waiting to go to jail. He had got court marshaled; they did not want to court marshaled him. Last resort said he was insane and he should be lock up. He decided to shut up. In the interview he had shell shock and was admitted to the military hospital. The authors approach was his point of view of what he had seen and had experience in while he was in the war. The literary qualities was boring and full of slang that is very British and it makes your brain numb if you are not use to reading and understanding this type of reading. The understanding I have got from just reading the book is war is hell and I would never want to experience or have a loved one go through it. I did not enjoy reading the book, it did have some graphic descriptions that were a bit too much to handle. I have read other books on this topic and they were not as graphic and detailed as this one but it did give an insight on how newspapers did not want to put the reality of what the soldiers had to go through. It was more detailed on what the men had to deal with and what they went through and heard/seen.