Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making … You learned to ration your commitment to them.
Being a Victorian taught that men must be strong, Rivers' gentle methods based on talk therapy, the interpretation of dreams, & having men accept fragility requires him to 'excavate the ground he stands on' & are in stark contrast to other methods such as electric shock therapy.
It is at the hospital that Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen whose work he was to influence. Owen, of course, was soon killed in action at the age of 25. The novel also introduces a fictional character: Billy Prior, an officer with working class origins who arrives at the hospital mute.
The Eye in the Door, Book 2, explores the ways by which society in a state at war is manipulated to justify the continuance of avoidable war. Gay men & conscientious objectors were often made into scapegoats; they were objects of derision during World War I. Through fact & fictionalised history, the novel explores how they were treated — appallingly — though it is not unsympathetic to those who meted out such treatment.
"This country is being brought to its knees. Not by Germany’ – here he’d thumped the table so hard that plates and cutlery had leapt into the air – ‘NOT BY GERMANY, but by an unholy alliance of socialists, sodomites and shop stewards," as one character rants.
The Ghost Road, Book 3, details war experiences and refers to hospitals becoming overwhelmed by the outbreak of the flu pandemic. Contrasting a Polynesian culture with European culture, it seems to highlight not just how pointless continued war is (echoing Sassoon's anti-war stance), but also how full of ghosts life is, across cultures: the dead, the imagined (through whom we sometimes insistently ask ourselves difficult questions), and the living who will, all too soon, become ghosts. Some of them already are... being alive in a state, as they may be, for which death is the only appropriate resolution.