Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

The second volume of Siegfried Sassoon's lightly fictionalized memoirs picks up George Sherston as a young infantry officer on the Western Front. Where the first book mourned a lost countryside, this one plunges straight into the mud, the raids, and the slaughter of the Somme in 1916. Sherston is brave to the point of recklessness, then wounded, then increasingly sickened by the waste around him. His disgust hardens into a public protest against the conduct of the war, a declaration that might have ended in court-martial but instead sends him to a hospital for shell-shocked officers. Published in 1930, it is the sharpest and most political book of the Sherston trilogy. This free PDF and EPUB edition keeps that testimony in print.