From Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
“Wandering along the sand dunes I felt outlawed, bitter and, baited. I wanted something to smash and trample on, and to a paroxysm of exasperation I performed the time-honoured gesture of shaking my clenched fists at the sky. Feeling no better for that, I ripped the M. C. ribbon off my tunic and threw it into the mouth of the Mersey. Weighted with significance though this action was, it would have felt more conclusive had the ribbon been heavier. As it was, the poor little thing fell weakly on to the water and floated away as though aware of its own futility. One of my point-to-point cups would have served my purpose more satisfyingly, and they’d meant much the same to me as my Military Cross.”
From Pat Barker’s Regeneration
” It wasn’t heavy enough to sink, so it just.. bobbed around There was a ship sailing past, quite a long way out, in the estuary, and I looked at this little scrap of ribbon floating and I looked at the ship, and I thought that me trying to stop the war was a bit like trying to stop the ship would have been.You know, all they’d've seen from the deck was this little figure jumping up and down, waving its arms, and they wouldn’t've known what on earth it was getting so excited about.”
The film Regeneration (1997) dir:Gillies MacKinnon, Screenplay by Barker and Allan Scott
Sassoon stands by some water. He is wearing military uniform, and one medal is pinned to his chest. He unpins it and hurls it into the water. (Suggesting that he’d prepared for the moment by pinning it on specially, and that this was not an unpremeditated gesture.)
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So do you think the confusion over medal-versus-ribbon comes in with the Regeneration movie? Do you think the screenplay writers were even conscious of the fact that they were committing an error, or were they recreating a scene which they already thought they knew by heart? Until a couple of days ago the fact that Sassoon’s MC was floating in the Mersey was something I thought I knew about the First World War, and something I thought I’d read about (though I clearly hadn’t) in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.
I don’t know about other people, but my visualisation of the scene was definitely influenced by the Regeneration film. It’s a strong image, and I was mildly surprised when I checked the text and found it was ribbon only.
Pat Barker was co-scriptwriter, and she certainly knew this version was not accurate, since her book mentioned ribbon-only. But it’s hardly the most significant inaccuracy in the movie.
I don’t think it comes in with Regeneration. What does Fussell say, I wonder (away from my books at the mo’).
Who knows whether Barker actually had control of that bit of the script, or whether the change took place during shooting? Most audiences simply wouldn’t understand the throwing away of a scrap of material: it’s hard to see how it could have worked unless the Sassoon character described it in retrospect (as in the book and the memoirs).
I wonder if he actually threw the ribbon at all. Isn’t it fairly typical of the tone of the book to have his grandiose fist shaking gesture undercut by the failure of the ribbon to disappear? And it seems to me that tearing off a ribbon is something much easier to imagine in print than to achieve in reality. What’s the odds Sassoon spent five minutes trying to unpick the stitching, then gave up and went home with a couple of threads hanging loose?
Someone on the Great War Forum said that the medal throwing comes from Goodbye To All That, so it could be Graves who was the big fat liar. The forum seems to be down at the moment, so I can’t link to it.
You’re right.
Graves writes about going to see SS after the protest:
“He looked very ill; he told me that he had just been down to the Formby links and thrown his Military Cross into the sea.”
Which sounds much more like a medal than a ribbon. Whenever he told a story, Graves always went for the most dramatically effective version.
Certainly, when he wasn’t busy name-dropping…!