Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

In Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man we meet George Sherston, a young man coming of age in the idyllic English countryside just before the Great War tears through Europe. The book ends with his enlistment in the Yeomanry, and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer begins with him deployed deep in the trenches of France. We follow Sherston as he’s transferred to Army School, then back to the trenches, then to the Battle of the Somme. At the Somme he’s wounded, and as he convalesces the psychological weight of the war that has been piling up on him finally causes a break and makes him turn to pacifism. George Sherston is Siegfried Sassoon’s literary alter-ego. This roman-a-clef, and the George Sherston series as a whole, is a fictionalized account of Sassoon’s real life and experiences during the Great War. Several real-life people are portrayed under pseudonyms, like the soldier David Cromlech for Robert Graves and Dick Tiltwood for David Cuthbert Thomas, a man who would go on to be the subject of some of both Sassoon’s and Graves’ war poetry. The memoir was a huge success, moving more copies than even the previous entry in the series, and earning Sassoon his place as one of the leading literary voices of the First World War.