Regeneration Trilogy 02 - The Eye in the Door

by Pat Barker

  Lord Alfred Douglas, another defence witness, seized the opportunity of pursuing his personal dispute with Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s devoted friend and literary executor, identifying him as ‘the leader of all the sodomites in London’.

  After six days of chaos in the courtroom and hysteria in the newspapers, Pemberton Billing won the case and was carried shoulder-high through the cheering crowds that had gathered outside the Old Bailey.

  Later that year Harold Spencer was certified insane.

  Robert Ross died of heart failure, on 5 October, aged forty-nine.

  Pemberton Billing went on to have a distinguished parliamentary career.

  In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), after protesting against the war, had been persuaded by his friend Robert Graves to accept a Medical Board, which decided that he was suffering from a mental breakdown and that he should be sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh. There he came under the care of Dr W.H.R. Rivers, FRS (1864-1922), the distinguished neurologist and social anthropologist. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon reached the conclusion that, although his views on the war had not changed, it was nevertheless his duty to return to active service, where he could at least share the suffering of his men.

  After a period in Palestine he returned to France on 9 May 1918. On 13 July, returning late from a patrol, he was wounded in the scalp by a rifle shot from one of his own NCOs; he was then sent back to England, to the American Women’s Red Cross Hospital at Lancaster Gate. The fact that he was ill enough for Rivers to have found it necessary to sit up with him is recalled in a letter from Katharine Rivers to Ruth Head (unpublished letters of the Rivers family, Imperial War Museum).

  Winston Churchill’s and Edward Marsh’s devotion to duty while at the Home Office is mentioned in Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography by Christopher Hassall (Longmans, 1959).