Body double: The heaven and hell within

Does the human species have to endure the worst that it is capable of to achieve the best that it can? Is it necessary for us to descend to an internal hell in order to rise to the redemption of the heaven that lies within us?

This is the challenging concept on which British novelist Pat Barker has based her World War I trilogy, Regeneration.

Hailed as one of ‘the 10 best historical novels’ ever written, the books span the four-year course of the murderous conflict that claimed 20 million lives, almost equally divided between combatants and civilians. It was by far the bloodiest war till date, largely because science and technology, the crowning achievements of the human mind, were harnessed to produce weapons of mechanised destruction like armoured tanks and poison gas.

With the force of an exploding shrapnel shell, Barker drives home the monstrous enormity of the mass violence unleashed, and what it did to the psyche and spirit of those who experienced it, by interweaving real-life people into the plot, including the so-called ‘War Poets’ like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Both these men, suffering from what was then called ‘shell shock’, and which today would be termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), were treated by an empathic psychologist, Dr Rivers, also a real-life figure who did in fact have the two as his patients.

In a climate of hysterical hyper-nationalism when being a ‘conchie’, a conscientious objector to the wholesale slaughterhouse of war, was considered a synonym for ‘coward’ and ‘traitor’, it posed a moral and ethical dilemma for the doctor, whose Hippocratic Oath bound him to the first principle of doing no harm, to send the young men in his care back to the death-fields of France, which his official duty obliged him to do.

To compound the dilemma, Sassoon, a decorated hero, published ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ in which he made clear his anti-war stance but was still determined to return to the battlefront to share the mortal danger the men under his command continued to face.

The narrative raises deeply disturbing questions about not just patriotism – Can it justify the legalised murder that is warfare? – but about the seemingly dual nature of humanity.

Are we condemned to endure horror to rise to heroism and altruism as so many did in the trenches of Flanders? Or, as Sassoon noted with tragic irony, does a ‘War Poet’ have to have a war in order to write poetry? Is there a brutish Hyde lurking behind the creative Jekyll?

Do we, all of us, have a literal body double, as in RL Stevenson’s allegory? Dr Rivers and a colleague conducted a series of physiological experiments employing sensory stimuli, both rough and gentle, clinically known as protopathic and epicritic, respectively, to activate divergent neural responses and the psychological effects these could have on our behaviour.

Without explicitly linking the protopathic and the epicritic response to the duality inherent in humanity, the capacity for both love and hate, for courage and cruelty, salvation and damnation, Barker suggests a connection which implies that it is the conflict between these polarities which shapes both our collective and individual destinies.

Whether it is the war-torn France of 1917, or the Ukraine of today, the ultimate battlefield, Kurukshetra, is the one within.