SASSOON, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber & Faber, 1931.
8vo. Original cloth with decorations by Barnett Freedman, pictorial endpapers, with frontis and an additional 15 coloured illustrations within the text by Barnett Freedman; pp. 310, [ii]; very good.
First edition with Barnett Freedman's illustrations. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer was one of Barnett Freedman's first major commissions for Faber and Faber, though he would go on to be quite prolific, designing dozens of covers for editions of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Leo Tolstoy. At the outbreak of the WWII he was appointed as an Official War Artist, and travelled with the British Expeditionary Force in France alongside Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, whose influences are evident in his designs. In June 1944 he travelled to France to record the aftermath of the D-Day Landings.
The narrative of Sassoon's second work in the Sherston trilogy is, like its predecessor, a fictionalised account of Sassoon's life during and immediately after WWI. Sherston, the protagonist, is wounded when a piece of shrapnel passes through his lung after he incautiously sticks his head over the parapet at the Battle of Arras in 1917. Sassoon later wrote that Sherston "is but one insignificant person caught up in events beyond anyone's comprehension".Harman, 2001.
#2120802