FICTION

REGENERATION by Pat Barker (Dutton: ($20; 256 pp.). We remember World War II for the horrors it inflicted on civilians: Auschwitz, Hiroshima. We remember the Great War that preceded it for the horrors endured by soldiers: those hopeless, suicidal offensives on the Western Front. We wonder at the bravery--or the social conditioning, which may be much the same thing--that led so many to die so uncomplainingly. As in most other wars, overt protest from the ranks was rare, if threatening to those in authority.

In 1917, when British casualties in Flanders were running as high as 100,000 a month, poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated infantry officer, issued one of those rare protests--a five-paragraph statement to Parliament entitled “Finished With the War.” Friends in high places saved Sassoon from court-martial; instead he was sent to “recuperate” at a hospital for shell-shock victims in Craiglockhart, Scotland, where he was treated by Dr. William Rivers, an anthropologist, neurologist and pioneer Freudian therapist.

Pat Barker’s moving novel about these two historical figures skillfully sutures together fact and fiction. Rivers believes that his job is to return his patients to duty, but his confrontation with Sassoon forces this humane and enlightened man to admit what he has begun to suspect--and what a visit to a colleague, who treats “war neurotics” with electric shock, confirms: These soldiers are protesting, in the only way their stoical upbringing allows.

“Just as (the other doctor) silenced the unconscious protest of his patients by removing the paralysis, the deafness, the blindness, the muteness that stood between them and the war,” Rivers thinks, “so, in an infinitely more gentle way, he silenced his patients. . . . He knew the extent of his own influence” in muzzling Sassoon, who does return to the front.

Barker (“Union Street”) makes both her fictional and her real characters (including poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen) complex and credible. She vividly evokes the period: pub and drawing room and battlefield, hospital wards full of amputees and munitions factories whose fumes stain the skins of women workers yellow. Best of all, she attends to the moral nuances of a time when it was hard to distinguish the lesser insanities from the greater one.