Regeneration

The film starts by referring to Siegfried Sassoon's open letter s:Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration dated July 1917, inveighing "against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed". The letter has been published in ''The Times'' and has received much attention in England particularly because Sassoon is considered a hero for several (perhaps suicidally rash) acts of valour - and has been the recipient of the Military Cross which we see Sassoon throwing away. With the string-pulling and guidance of Robert Graves, a fellow poet and friend of Sassoon, the army decides to send Sassoon to Craiglockhart Hydropathic, a psychiatric facility in Scotland, rather than court-martialling him. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon meets W. H. R. Rivers, a Freudian psychiatrist who encourages his patients to express their war memories as therapy.