Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Simon Weinberg is dead. And, on a November morning, six people gather at his funeral — brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives. Mourning allows them special privilege and, for a few hours, they are isolated in another world under a lingering sun, in the shadow of the deceased. Conversations After a Burial explores that ineffable moment of mourning, when the newly deceased is still almost palpable, the moment in which one can maintain the memory of a breath, the intense moment between the absence and the return to everyday existence, between loss and life.

This is Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of his experiences in the trenches during World War I, between the spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917. The narrative moves from the trenches to the Fourth Army School, to Morlancourt and a raid, then to and through the Somme.