The Heroic

 

Terry here answering our weekly question: This week the question seems particularly fitting when war is once again consuming much of the world:

Whom do you consider the greatest hero you’ve read, and why? 

 I was probably intended to write about heroes in mystery novels, but nothing in my reading experience compares to reading about real-life heroes. Siegfried Sassoon and Pat Barker have equal place in my consideration of “the greatest hero I’ve read.”

 I was introduced to Siegfried Sassoon in Pat Barker’s stunning trilogy about World War I, Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Sassoon lived a life of leisure before the war. He served in the trenches in World War I, and was appalled by the horror and brutality of trench warfare. After being wounded in action, Sassoon wrote an open letter of protest to the war department, refusing to fight any more. “I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” he wrote in the letter. At the urging of Bertrand Russell, the letter was read in the House of Commons. Sassoon expected to be court-martialed for his protest. 

 And that’s where heroism comes in. He persisted in spite of believing that his open condemnation of the conduct of the war would bring opprobrium at the least, and disgrace at worst. He was saved that fate by the efforts of fellow poet Robert Graves, who believed Sassoon was shell-shocked and should be hospitalized. In the hospital, Sasson met and spoke with others who had been damaged physically and psychologically by the war. In later writings he contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. 

 Pat Barker drew on Sassoon and some of his contemporaries for her trilogy, which explores many of the themes common to literature written during and following WWI, including the cause and effects of war, the limits of ideologies like nationalism and masculinity, and both the medical and popular reactions to the psychological traumas created in the war. 

 The series gave her the reputation as "The woman who understood war". Barker stated in an interview that "The trilogy is trying to tell something about the parts of war that don't get into the official accounts". Barker says she wrote about World War I "because it's come to stand in for other wars, as a sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and the pain followed that. I think because of that it's come to stand for the pain of all wars.” 

 What more can we ask of authors than that they lay bare the pain of brutal experiences and the fight of heroes to remain human in spite of what they go through?