ABSTRACT
In terms of the War, however, it is Sassoon’s least dramatic time. Since he is returning to France, a country he already knows, there is none of the thrill he experienced in discovering Ireland, Italy and Palestine. Even the promise of action, to which he almost looks forward, is withheld while his battalion, trained for the Middle East, is retrained for trench-warfare. When he is invalided home for the third time in July, he has spent no more than a week in the Front Line and completely misses the dramatic engagements which follow in August. By the time Sassoon received Graves’s letter, which had gone first to Palestine, he had almost certainly left Marseilles. His three-day stay there had proved a gentle re-introduction to France. Sassoon was in a romantic mood and it is hard not to suspect that he was falling in love again, a suspicion his diary reinforces.
