SOURCE: "Treating War's Insanity," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4599, May 24, 1991, p. 20.

In the following highly positive review of Regeneration, Wormald praises Barker for the psychological insights into personality formation that make the book more than an excellent historical novel.

On April 12, 1917, Captain Siegfried Sassoon was wounded in action on the Hindenburg Line; ten days later, recovering at Denmark Hill Hospital in London, he wrote "The Rear-Guard", and later appended a note citing the poem's "strength" as a refutation of Edmund Gosse's idea that he "was suffering from severe shock". Readers of his War Poems are likely to side with Sassoon; they will also notice how his "Hindenburg Line Material" continued to blend, in that spring and early summer, with the experience of his convalescence, to produce a series of often savage but also revealingly consistent poetic oppositions. "The Hawthorn Tree", the sight of it blossoming in a...