War, Duty, and Loyalty Theme Analysis

Regeneration takes place in 1917, during World War I. Although Germany is already exhausted and wants a “negotiated peace,” Britain and its allies are committed to fighting for a more thorough victory. For soldiers fighting and dying in a war that could clearly be resolved—though it would not suit certain aristocrats’ profit margins or ideals—this raises the ethical dilemma of whether their sense of duty should compel them to sacrifice their lives for a cause that seems rather questionable, as argued by Second Lieutenant Sassoon, a decorated officer turned conscientious objector. Ultimately, through Sassoon’s anti-war arguments and Dr. Rivers’s psychiatric work with traumatized soldiers, the novel suggests that even one’s noble sense of duty or loyalty should not compel a person to fight in or support a futile war.

As both Sassoon and Rivers recognize, duty to nation and countrymen demands that young men fight in their nation’s wars, especially since others will have to if they do not. Rivers is sympathetic to Sassoon’s argument that the war should be ended, since the Germans are ready to surrender and the lives being lost at this point seem wasted for the sake of national pride. However, he also believes that it is the soldiers’ duty to fight, and his duty to mend their minds and return them to the battlefield. As a British citizen (though serving in Scotland), Rivers is dominated by “his belief that the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations,” suggesting that duty to both nation and countrymen may override one’s own ethical objections to fighting. Although Sassoon enters the story as a conscientious objector to the war—his superiors send him to the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in part for minor mental breakdowns, but mainly as an attempt to discredit him as insane—he is a decorated and venerated officer with several medals for bravery, demonstrating that Sassoon recognizes his duty to his country. Even more than duty to country, Sassoon is motivated by his duty to his men, and he chafes against the relative comfort of Craiglockhart while his soldiers risk their lives on the front, suggesting that even when a war seems pointless, duty to one’s fellow soldiers often encourages one to keep fighting.

In spite of his own sense of duty toward his men, Sassoon’s anti-war argument points out that although an individual’s duty as a soldier suggests that he should follow his nation into war, the people vouching for such wars are not the people making the sacrifices themselves. This suggests that the expectations of duty placed upon soldiers are often woefully unjust. Sassoon’s anti-war declaration states that he rejects the “political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed,” and he later argues that “the people who’re keeping this war going […] [are] feathering their own nests,” demonstrating his belief that the war is being prolonged not to defend France or England, but for ulterior motives by people in power, even when the monthly death tolls reach as high as 102,000. The many horrors that Rivers’ patients recount to him reinforce this notion that the war is not inherently noble, and has no higher purpose. For instance, Prior recounts a time when his unit was forced to repeatedly advance on a German trench and be gunned down by their artillery, sustaining huge losses—not for any strategic goal, but simply because his superiors believed “the pride of the British Army requires that absolute dominance must be maintained in No Man’s Land at all times.” Such loss of life for something as nominal as the “pride of the British army” seems undeniably unjust and banal. Rivers originally regards this practice of society’s old men sending young men to die for their own purposes as the “bargain […] on which all patriarchal societies are founded”—if the young men in society are willing to sacrifice themselves for the selfish wishes of the old men, those young men who survive will in turn inherit the right to sacrifice their own sons in the next war. This mindset highlights the illogic of fighting wars merely to fulfill society’s expectations of a male duty, and suggests that this unjust mindset only perpetuates one dreadful war after another.

Although Rivers continues to do his duty as a psychiatrist and tries to maintain his belief in one’s duty to wage war, he ultimately realizes that the horrific costs of war are unjustifiable, and any society that devours its own young men is not worthy of loyalty. While Rivers sits awake at night holding Burns (a young former officer whose mind has been so traumatized by the war that his life is effectively shattered) in the midst of a terrifying hallucinatory episode, the psychiatrist thinks to himself, in a near fury, that “Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing.” Rivers’ realization argues that no sense of duty or ethical argument about saving future generations can possibly justify the horrific costs that war inflicts on a nation’s young men. Although Rivers was once a patriotic young man, by middle age the “sheer extent of mess” (the number of young minds and lives he’s seen utterly wrecked by war trauma) convinces him that “a society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.” Regardless of one’s righteous sense of duty, any nation that so freely sacrifices its own young men for financial or political gain does not deserve one’s loyalty, meaning that none should feel compelled to fight a futile or pointless war.

Regeneration refrains from embracing outright pacifism, allowing that some wars may be necessary in extreme circumstances. Even so, the novel and its characters utterly condemn wars waged for an ulterior motive or the interests of certain elites, as so many wars are.