poetry boom." At the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England. One of Graves's friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in his regiment. They both convalesced at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for officers. "How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies' College at Oxford," Sassoon wrote to him in 1917. At Somerville College, Graves met and fell in love with Marjorie, a nurse and professional pianist, but stopped writing to her once he learned she was engaged. About his time at Somerville, he wrote: "I enjoyed my stay at Somerville. The sun shone, and the discipline was easy." In 1917, Sassoon rebelled against the conduct of the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves feared Sassoon could face a court martial and intervened with the military authorities, persuading them that Sassoon was experiencing shell shock and that they should treat him accordingly. As a result, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh, where he was treated by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves was treated here as well. Graves also had shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then called, but he was never hospitalised for it: I thought of going back to France, but realized the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover. The friendship between Graves and Sassoon is documented in Graves's letters and biographies; the story is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. Barker also addresses Graves's experiences with homosexuality in his youth; at the end of the novel Graves asserts that his "affections have been running in more normal channels" after a friend was accused of "soliciting" with another man. The intensity of their early relationship is demonstrated in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which contains