Memoirs of an Infantry Officer · Chapter
At the Depot explained
Sherston returns to Clitherland Camp, a training depot for the Flintshire Fusiliers, where he is reunited with old comrades like David Cromlech, Bill Eaves, and Young Ormand.
What happens
Sherston returns to Clitherland Camp, a training depot for the Flintshire Fusiliers, where he is reunited with old comrades like David Cromlech, Bill Eaves, and Young Ormand. The chapter contrasts the dull, mechanical routine of the camp with the nostalgic pleasures of golfing at Formby and hunting with the Cheshire Hounds. Sherston reflects on the war's grim trajectory, remembering the Army School at Flixécourt as a lost idyllic time. He also engages in literary debates with Cromlech, who dismisses Milton in favor of other poets. The chapter ends with Sherston attending a Medical Board in Liverpool, where he is quickly passed fit for General Service, marking his return to the front.
Themes in this chapter
Nostalgia for Peacetime England
Sherston's hunting expeditions with the Cheshire Hounds and his time on the golf links at Formby serve as a deliberate escape from the war, evoking a prewar world of rural sports and traditions.
Dehumanization and Animal Instinct
The camp is described as 'manufacturing' soldiers, and the recruits are seen as 'droves of victims,' highlighting the mechanical and dehumanizing nature of the war effort.
Disillusionment with Authority
The easygoing, convivial Majors and the Colonel are portrayed as complacent, while the real work is left to hard-worked sergeant-instructors, suggesting a critique of the officer class's detachment.
Psychological Strain and Survival
Sherston's habit of remembering the war on waking, his need for 'compensations' like hunting, and his reflection on the war's 'torment and frustration' illustrate the psychological toll of the conflict.
Characters to notice
- David Cromlech
Sherston's hut-mate, recovering from a lung wound, now an 'old soldier' and argumentative as ever, engaging in literary debates.
- Bill Eaves
The Cambridge scholar, also returned to the camp, quietly making the most of his few remaining months before being killed in February.
- Young Ormand
Another old comrade at the camp, pulling wry faces about his next Medical Board which would pass him for General Service.
- Major Macartney
The second-in-command, a reserved and dignified man with a trembling hand, who sits long in the mess, perhaps thinking of Ireland.
- Dottrell
Writes to Sherston from the First Battalion, describing the cold and mud at Beaumont-Hamel, advising him to stay away until the weather improves.
- The Colonel
Sits at the top table in the mess among the easygoing Majors, later going to the anteroom for his game of Bridge.
Key passages
“What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”
The new recruits were no longer willing volunteers but were being sent to war as a mass of sacrificial offerings.
Highlights the shift from volunteerism to conscription and the dehumanizing scale of the war.
“It was, in fact, very like achieving the impossible, when I sat in my hut of an evening, cogitating with luxurious deliberation, consulting a map and calculating how my hireling could meet me at such and such a station, measuring the distance from there to the meet, and so on in the manner known to enthusiastic young sportsmen.”
Planning his Saturday hunting trips was a complex and absorbing challenge that provided a welcome distraction from the war.
Shows Sherston's immersion in the details of a peacetime activity as a form of psychological escape.
“He made short work of most books which I had hitherto venerated, for David was a person who consumed his enthusiasms quickly, and he once fairly took my breath away by pooh-poohing Paradise Lost as 'that moribund academic concoction.'”
David Cromlech casually dismissed literary classics that Sherston revered, such as 'Paradise Lost,' showing his iconoclastic and quick-moving intellectual passions.
Illustrates the intellectual companionship and the clash of literary tastes between the two friends.
