Chapter 4

• p-38 Anderson: "My wife was on the lawn having tea with some other ladies, they were all wearing white"
• p-38 Anderson had been wearing uniform, then was naked, he was then chased by the ladies and his father in law and two orderlies
• p-38 "A pair of lady's corsets. They fatened them round my arms and tied the laces" "Like a strait-waistcoast?" "yes"
• p-39 - "I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience"
• p-40 "I have a wife and child to support" - shows how he is a responsible man with traditionally masculine values.
• p-41 "I just stood there and watched him bleed to death. His face twisted. It pumped out of him" Anderson can no longer support his wife and child because his occupation - a surgeon - encounters blood, and he goes into relapse when he sees blood. Emasculating and depressing scene.
• p-42 Anderson is a surgeon himself "What do you do when the doctor breaks down?" Places health sector workers in the most strong willed category of workers. Sustaining their own mental health whilst dealing with so many scarring cases.
• p-47 "Your father's dead too, isn't he? How old were you when he died?"

  "Eight"

  Sassoon left with the absence of a father from an extremely young age. Could be why he clings onto Rivers as a father figure.
• p-48 Sassoon details his relaxed free time "Hunting, cricket. Writing poems" AO4: "We've watched you playing cricket And every kind of gameAt football, golf and polo, You men have made your name,But now your country calls you To play your part in war,And no matter what befalls you, We shall love you all the more,So come and join the forces As your fathers did before" - Oh what a lovely war.
• p-51 - War imagery is attached to natural imagery as Burns leaves CL. The natural world is disturbed by his case, it's inhumane ("hardly human") and belongs only to the horror's of war.
• p-51 "A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine gun fire" "Until his way was barred by a fence whose wire twitched in the wind" "His mud encumbered boots like lead weights pulling on the muscles of his thighs"
• p-52 "His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching thighs remembered and he listened for the whine of shells"
• p-52 "Looking up, he saw that the tree he stood under was laden with dead animals. Bore them like fruit"
• p-53 "He started to run but the trees were against him. Branches clipped his face, twigs tore at him, roots tripped him"
• p-53 "roughness of the bark against his knobbly spine. He pressed his hands between his knees and looked around the circle of his companions. Now they could dissolve into the earth as they were meant to do. He felt a great urge to lie down beside them, but his clothes separated him" Burns is associating himself with the animals. He wants to be dissolved, taken from the earth only to regenerate again. He then understands only animals can be taken to death this way, and humans must die a more dignified way, so his small sense of humanity saves him from succumbing to death on the hill.
• p-53 "His naked body was as white as a root. He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed, but because they looked incongruous, they didn't seem to belong with the rest of him" Burns has a scarcity of human qualities, he has been emaciated to the extent he is "hardly human" so his psyche has automatically associated him with animals the way his brain now fucntions.
• p-55 "Never mind that. You're back, that's all that matters" Always trying to find the redeeming feature.