Regeneration by Pat Barker is a classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young - published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I just don't think our war aims - whatever they may be - and we don't know - justify this level of slaughter. ' The poets and soldiers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are dispatched to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland in 1917. There, army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating brutalised, shell-shocked men. It is Rivers' job to fix these men and make them ready to fight again. As a witness to the traumas they have endured, can he in all conscience send them back to the horrors of the trenches?