The Ghost Road

Pat Barker Viking £15.00 pp 278 ISBN 0 670 85489 1

Only a handful of men survive who fought in the first world war, but it retains its fascination for new generations; in no war before or since were so many young men conscripted to die. Pat Barker's three books are fiction with some historical characters, including the neurologist W H R Rivers and the war poets Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Owen. The books examine the conflicting emotions of soldiers who developed psychological disturbances—shell shock—after their experiences in the trenches. Rivers had no doubt that it was …