A disarming look at the reality of war

IT must be the ugliest of ironies but the horrors of war consistently produce haunting prose. The Vietnam generation, led by Tobias Wolff and Tim O'Brien, has gradually created a literature inspired by a sense of unease, anger and humanity. But there have been earlier classics such as Erich Maria Remarque's fictionalised masterpiece All Quiet On the Western Front (1929) or Norman Mailer's edgy, cryptic The Naked and The Dead (1948). Aside from Orwell's impassioned writings, including Homage to Catalonia (1938), and T. E. Lawrence's ambiguous account The Mint (1936), British war literature has been dominated by Waugh's trilogy Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1954) and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Only with the publication of J. G. Ballard's magnificent Empire of the Sun (1984) did a truly classic British second World War novel emerge.

Prior to Waugh's essentially comic tone, Britain's earlier war generation favoured verse. But the celebrated lyric outrage of the doomed poets of the Great War palls as does even Robert Graves's urbane autobiography, Goodbye To All That (1929) when compared with satiric poet Siegfried Sassoon's unforgettable, thinly fictionalised autobiographical trilogy Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an In fan QV Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). Now, relaunching its famous Faber Library a uniform series of titles originally published between 1930 and 1990 Faber has chosen Memoirs of an Infantry Officer as the first title.

Sassoon's wartime experiences and his treatment under the legendary neurologist W. H. R. Rivers feature in Pat Barker's war trilogy Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and last year's Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Her work may encourage readers to either return to or discover the pleasures of Sassoon's direct, honest intelligence and the grace of his vivid, descriptive, conversational prose.

The second volume is the best of the trio. Sassoon's jaunty, disarming voice subtly registers his change in attitude as war becomes less a jolly adventure taking place in the mud of France and more something he protests against.

Reflective rather than introspective, he is an observer conscious of the changing sky, the unbroken silence, the search for an enemy he can't even see. Early in the narrative he says he is in the middle of reading Thomas Hardy and recalls thinking "I didn't want to die not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native".

One senses Sassoon's awareness of watching history being created with every weary gesture, each sudden death. "Soon they [his comrades] had dispersed and settled down on the hillside, and were asleep in the daylight which made everything seem ordinary. None the less I had seen something that night which overawed me. It was all in the day's work an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.

Battlefield experiences are interspersed with leave time spent back in England and a later stay after he is wounded. While recuperating he stays at a lavish country home. There, he mentions his growing doubts about the war only to be told by his hostess "But death is nothing, life, after all, is only the beginning..."

Dead heroes not survivors, and certainly not wrong headed "anti war idealists" interest these bountiful aristocrats. She reminds her guest "it isn't as though you were heir to a great name. No I can't see any definite reason for your keeping out of danger." Sassoon survived four tours of duty in France, was decorated and died aged 81 in 1967.

Harrowing images of almost religious symbolism appear throughout the narrative with its constant references to ghosts, the dead. A pair of hands protrude through the mud "one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture ... Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud stained mind." He sees all and presents himself as a witness, not a hero. "Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull." Witty, realistic and honest, Sassoon's achievement is to tell us what it was like at the Front, to make us think he neither lectures nor laments.