Shell Shock

SHERSTON'S PROGRESS--Siegfried Sassoon--Doubleday, Doran ($2.00).

The World War of a thousand novels from Barbusse's Under Fire to Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, is presented with unqualified horror in most, with victory or defeat equally intolerable and campaigns and assaults measured in terms of the lives they cost rather than the strategy that determined them. But the War pictured in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress is War as it appeared to a trained and disciplined British officer, winner of the Military Cross, a poet whose mind was filled with thousands of unpoetic, practical problems: getting shoes for his men, remembering the amount of water necessary for a company in a front line trench, memorizing pages of official instruction on trench warfare between bombardments. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer told how Sassoon (called Sherston in the narrative) revolted against this routine, refused to return to the front, demanded that he be court-martialed because he could not free his mind of the conviction that the War was ''being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." Refusing to court-martial a distinguished poet, exemplary officer and son of a rich and prominent family, military authorities decided Sassoon was shellshocked.

Sherston's Progress begins with his treatment in a mental hospital, covers his readmittance to active service when his desire to make a martyr of himself ebbed, his service in Ireland, Palestine, his return to his command in France. A simple, moving book, it has little in common with most War literature in its dry ironic tone, its study of Sassoon's effort to free his mind of doubt and concentrate on the task of making himself a good officer for his men. Written with a matter-of-fact detachment, it occasionally rises to rhetorical heights, as when Sassoon describes the mental hospital, where the shell-shocked patients were cheerful and normal curing the days. But at night "they lost control and the hospital became sepulchral and oppressive with saturations of War experience. . . . One became conscious that the place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid and terrifying-- men muttering uneasily or suddenly crying out in their sleep. Around me was that underworld of dreams haunted by submerged memories of warfare and its intolerable shocks and self-lacerating failures to achieve the impossible. By daylight each mind was a sort of aquarium for the psychopath to study. . . . But by night each man was back in his doomed sector of a horror-stricken Front Line where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the dead."

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