Jun 8, 2014
Regeneration, Pat Barker
One of the paradoxes of the war - one of many - was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was...domestic. Caring. And that wasn't the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known.