The War Poems

by Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Hart-Davis (Editor)

In later years, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis writes in his introduction, when Siegfried Sassoon had written much else in prose and verse, he was annoyed at always being being referred to simply as a war poet, but it was the Great War that turned him into a poet of international fame, and I feel sure that his ghost will forgive me for thus bringing together these magnificently scarifying poems.

Sir Rupert has arranged the poems as far as possible in the order of their composition, and the reader can compare them with the poet's movements by means of the Biographical Table which is included. Fourteen of the poems in this volume are published for the first time.

Cover illustration: Eric Fraser

Genres: Poetry, War, Classics, World War I, Fiction, Politics, British Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was born into a wealthy banking family, the middle of 3 brothers. His Anglican mother and Jewish father separated when he was five. He had little subsequent contact with ‘Pappy’, who died of TB 4 years later. He presented his mother with his first ‘volume’ at 11. Sassoon spent his youth hunting, cricketing, reading, and writing. He was home-schooled until the age of 14 because of ill health. At school he was academically mediocre and teased for being un-athletic, unusually old, and Jewish. He attended Clare College, Cambridge, but left without taking his degree. In 1911, Sassoon read ‘The Intermediate Sex’ by Edward Carpenter, a book about homosexuality which was a revelation for Sassoon. In 1913 he wrote ‘The Daffodil Murderer,’ a parody of a John Masefield poem and his only pre-war success. A patriotic man, he enlisted on 3rd August, the day before Britain entered the war, as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. After a riding accident which put him out of action, in May 1915 he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. At the training depot he met David Thomas, with whom he fell in love.
In November, Sassoon received word that his brother Hamo had died at Gallipoli. On 17th November he was shipped to France with David Thomas. He was assigned to C Company, First Battalion. It was here that he met Robert Graves, described in his diary as ‘a young poet in Third Battalion and very much disliked.’ He took part in working parties, but no combat. He later became transport officer and so managed to stay out of the front lines. After time on leave, on the 18th May 1916 he received word that David Thomas had died of a bullet to the throat. Both Graves and Sassoon were distraught, and in Siegfried’s case it inspired ‘the lust to kill.’ He abandoned transport duties and went out on patrols whenever possible, desperate to kill as many Germans as he could, earning him the nickname ‘Mad Jack.’ In April he was recommended for the Military Cross for his action in bringing in the dead and wounded after a raid. He received his medal on the day before the Somme. For the first days of the Somme, he was in reserve opposite Fricourt, watching the slaughter from a ridge. Fricourt was successfully taken, and on the 4th July the First Battalion moved up to the front line to attack Mametz Wood. It was here that he famously took a trench single handed. Unfortunately, Siegfried did nothing to consolidate the trench; he simply sat down and read a book, later returning to a berating from Graves. It was in 1917, convalescing in 'Blighty' from a wound, that he decided to make a stand against the war. Encouraged by pacifist friends, he ignored his orders to return to duty and issued a declaration against the war. The army refused to court martial him, sending him instead to Craiglockhart, an institution for soldiers driven mad by the war. Here he met and influenced Wilfred Owen. In 1918 he briefly returned to active service, in Palestine and then France again, but after being wounded by friendly fire he ended the war convalescing. He reached the rank of captain. After the war he made a predictably unhappy marriage and had a son, George. He continued to write, but is best remembered as a war poet.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

TO MY BROTHER

Give me your hand, my brother, search my face;
Look in these eyes lest I should think of shame;
For we have made an end of all things base.
We are returning by the road we came.

Your lot is with the ghosts of soldiers dead,
And I am in the field where men must fight.
But in the gloom I see your laurell'd head
And through your victory I shall win the light.

DOES IT MATTER?

Does it matter? losing your legs? . . .
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? losing your sight? . . .
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? those dreams from the pit? . . .
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know that you fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

TO HIS DEAD BODY

When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried,
Groping for friends hands, and clutched, and died,
Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fair,
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way
Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,
Slow-rising, saintless, confident, and kind
Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

SECRET MUSIC

I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell;
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty, garlanded in hell.

My dreaming spirit will not heed
The roar of guns that would destroy
My life that on the gloom can read
Proud-surging melodies of joy.

To the world's end I went, and found
Death in his carnival of glare;
But in my torment I was crowned,
And music dawned above despair.

[Christmas Carol ꧁꧂ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5★

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon. Did his parents think being bullied was character forming??? What a choice of Christian names.

On ANZAC Day I didn't get as far through Sassoon's poems as I hoped. A holiday, Airbnb, tax returns have all eaten into my reading time. But I appreciated what I read.

Suicide in the TrenchesSassoon's most popular poem on the Poem Hunter website. Shows the depth of Sassoon's disenchantment. 5★

Aftermath You want The Great War romanticized? Don't read Sassoon!

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--

5★

A Letter Home On first acquaintance, Sassoon couldn't stand Robert Graves. Later they became close friends. With this poem (indeed a most powerful form of letter!) Sassoon was mourning his dead lover, homesick, missing Graves friendship. Gentle, wistful rather than angry. Didn't get the last part. Please someone - enlighten me! 4★

Blighters. Short, angry, raw 4★

The Glory of Women Satirical, on the lack of understanding shown by those who would never fight. 5★

So I didn't get far but was amazed by what I read.

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

As noted in my Wilfred Owen review – I am by no means a great poetry reader*: and as such, not best placed to provide a review of a collection of poetry. We were force fed the War Poets of the Great War whilst at school – a process which was both counter-productive and alienating (from the poems). Only now have I felt able to revisit these poets with a clear, open and comparatively unsullied mind.

Sassoon is forever defined by his poems of the Great War and as a ’War Poet’ due to his literary output during and shortly after the Great War. This was something which was apparently very much to Sassoon’s’ chagrin – he survived the war and lived on until 1967 and produced much verse and prose in that time which was, as far as subject matter was concerned, unrelated to the Great War. This collection here includes purely poetry related to the Great War.

As with Wilfred Owen (although in a somewhat different style) Sassoon provides here a wealth of well-crafted and intelligent poetry containing powerful, shocking and haunting imagery concerning the horrors and the savagery of war. This chronologically ordered collection can, I think be divided into three broad categories:

The earlier more optimistic and hopeful poems – almost embracing the purpose of going to war
The mid period more vitriolic poems – of disillusionment, cynicism and the realities of trench warfare
The more reflective and retrospective poems written after the Great War had finished


A few of the poems that stand out for me from this collection are as follows:

Absolution
In the Pink
Suicide in the Trenches
Aftermath
The redeemer
To my brother
Ex service
A footnote on the war
Atrocities
Does it matter

Whilst I did on the whole prefer the poems of Wilfred Owen and found them personally more affecting – the poetry here of Siegfried Sassoon is undeniably haunting, so very powerful and painfully evocative of a horrific period in world history. The proximity to, and the close relationship with, the everyday possibility of death and oblivion, as well as the ghosts of comrades sadly departed – is sadly ever present throughout.

*With the possible exception of: Oscar Wilde, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philip Larkin, Benjamin Zephaniah, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Ted Hughes.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This letter, "A Soldier's Declaration," explains why Siegfried Sassoon is a great poet of WWI, and it contains all of why I love him. Enjoy.

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

Siegfried L. Sassoon, July 1917

[Alice-Elizabeth (Prolific Reader Alice) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong collection of military/war poetry by Sassoon, some of those included were written in the trenches itself during WW1. With the Faber and Faber edition I have, the little notes that were included throughout offered some very interesting background as to where, when and what the poems came to be. The visual and sometimes brutal realities and then towards the end, the sense of relief when all the fighting ceased. Emotional and raw, this flowed well for me!

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. No surprise here. Sassoon is one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century. Here he uses direct rhyme schemes in a modernist style. I found a third of the poems to be quite beautiful and image provoking. One drawback is that he rarely uses anything other than direct rhyming conventions.

A lot of Sassoon's poems here ooze resentment both towards British families back home with little understanding of the horrors of the war and towards an establishment that makes heroes of the young men whose lives were thrown away frivolously.

The other great World War I writers often mentioned are Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. Sassoon influenced and befriended each during the war. I love the writings of all three.

They each had a lot in common with their war experiences. I think Owen's war poems are the most beautiful and heart wrenching. I think Graves autobiography is the best at balancing the horrors of the shelling and frequent illnesses with the banality and boredom. I think Sassoon's poems are the best at describing the frustration, futility and resentment in as little words as possible.

My father had two uncles who survived the trenches in France during WW1. One was gassed and suffered lung damage. The other wasn't quite right after experiencing post traumatic stress disorder. At least this is how my father described them. When I was a little boy my sister was a caregiver for an 85 year old WWI vet. I vividly recall the frail old man proudly showing me his medals and uniform after fetching them from his trunk of war memorabilia. Sadly I know nothing of his story.

Anyway these are the things that entered my mind while reading these poems.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost forgot about this book. Until a discussion here made me remember my favourite poem from this collection (Suicide In the Trenches). So today I spent about an hour (!) trying to find the book in one of the boxes underneath my bed (yes, I have to keep boxes full of books there). After finally finding it, I thought I'd read one or two poems but I couldn't stop.

Siegfried Sassoon lived from 1886 until 1967 which means he personally witnessed both World Wars. After some pretty casual years living with his mother and not working (apparently the family had enough money), he volunteered in 1914. In the military he had a reputation for getting himself into dangerous situations unnecessarily. Funnily enough, after being wounded repeatedly and spending some time back in England, he refused to go back to the front by openly speaking up against the war. The government didn't punish him however but sent him to a special military hospital instead (probably because he was already quite famous at the time). After a while, he returned to the front voluntarily.
Moreover, Sassoon was gay. He also admitted and accepted this but still got married and had a son with his wife before they got divorced.
And he converted to Catholicism in 1957.

I'm telling you all this because these seemingly contradictory characteristics are all mirrored in his works.

As is to be expected with poems about war, the tone is mostly dark and bears a certain foreboding. It's not an easy read, no matter which of the poems you pick. Nevertheless, the writing is beautiful and elegant and full of meaning (often layered even).
My personal favourite, as mentioned above, is

Suicide In the Trenches:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenched, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
*******
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sassoon knew both Graves and Owen. These poems written during, or after, the Great War are at once dark, forbidding, cynical, and beautiful. Some poems are addressed to men Sassoon knew, such as Graves; while others address those who stay at home - from women, to the old men, to the boycotts. Some are addressed to the nameless dead. If you are interested in the Great War, you should add this to your reading list.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humbling.

[Márcio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though motivated by patriotism at the very beginning of World War I, Siegfried Sassoon, a distinguished British poet and soldier, became one of its fiercest critics.

(...)
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesu, make it stop!

The poems contained in this book vary from heartfelt to ironic, bitter, and never indifferent towards the horrors of war, shining its lights towards the ghosts of dead friends, of rotten bodies eaten by rats, of suicides, of soldiers' vain hopes to keep on living while life is vanishing from their bodies, of crippled soldiers, of mothers knitting for the sons while they are dying in the trenches of a foreign land, of rotten bodies along the roads, etc. This is war, the worst invention invented by humans, who are gifted by a rational mind to take irrational actions.

Yet, those who govern (and don't go to war) are the ones deaf for claims. When his 1917 Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration was read in the House of Commons, it resulted in his being declared "unfit for service", and he was sent to be treated for neurasthenia at Craiglockhart, where he met Wilfred Owen, a fellow poet, and a friend. Unfortunately, Owen died in the war.

Let no one ever from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals. Were there anything to say for it, it should not be said for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss."

-Siegfried Sassoon, "The Kiss"

Here was a man endowed with a tremulous sensitivity to all the nuances of beauty ("yellow lilies islanded in light," etc., etc.), who, finding himself in the midst of unthinkable carnage and suffering and hypocrisy and horror, had the goodness to put his keen perceptive abilities and his flinty intelligence to work documenting it, so that those in power could be brought to see and feel and remember and, moreover, to act accordingly. His courage, both moral and physical, and his moral clarity, which finds a mirror in the utterly modern clarity of his poetic line, make him a continuing inspiration in our times.

[Anitra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sassoon is a surgeon of a poet. He can cut out your heart in ten lines. He should have lived in the twitter era. If anyone could make 140 characters sting or sing it would be Sassoon.

He sucks you in with banality (the happy young soldier, the troops marching past a general) and then smacks you with a harsh reality (happy soldier commits suicide, the general gets these jovial troops slaughtered). Or he does the opposite when he describes a heart broken man mourning his brother's loss and then ends it with a banal comment about how such men have lost "all patriotic feeling". A century on, he makes you want to scream and yell at the doting old fathers.

I used to call poetry 'sweetened condensed thought' but that's not adequate anymore because there's nothing sweet about Sassoon or others I've read since but there is that element of condensation. Of taking these huge events, feelings and impressions and expressing them in so few words.

He was an amazing talent and this is a great compilation of poems.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
CONTENTS

I

PRELUDE: THE TROOPS
DREAMERS
THE REDEEMER
TRENCH DUTY
WIRERS
BREAK OF DAY
A WORKING PARTY
STAND-TO: GOOD FRIDAY MORNING
"IN THE PINK"
THE HERO
BEFORE THE BATTLE
THE ROAD
TWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTER
THE DREAM
AT CARNOY
BATTALION RELIEF
THE DUG-OUT
THE REAR-GUARD
I STOOD WITH THE DEAD
SUICIDE IN TRENCHES
ATTACK
COUNTER-ATTACK
THE EFFECT
REMORSE
IN AN UNDERGROUND DRESSING-STATION
DIED OF WOUNDS

II

"THEY"
BASE DETAILS
LAMENTATIONS
THE GENERAL
HOW TO DIE
EDITORIAL IMPRESSIONS
FIGHT TO A FINISH
ATROCITIES
THE FATHERS
"BLIGHTERS"
GLORY OF WOMEN
THEIR FRAILTY
DOES IT MATTER?
SURVIVORS
JOY-BELLS
ARMS AND THE MAN
WHEN I'M AMONG A BLAZE OF LIGHTS
THE KISS
THE TOMBSTONE-MAKER
THE ONE-LEGGED MAN
RETURN OF THE HEROES

III

TWELVE MONTHS AFTER
TO ANY DEAD OFFICER
SICK LEAVE
BANISHMENT
AUTUMN
REPRESSION OF WAR EXPERIENCE
TOGETHER
THE HAWTHORN TREE
CONCERT PARTY
NIGHT ON THE CONVOY
A LETTER HOME
RECONCILIATION
MEMORIAL TABLET (GREAT WAR)
THE DEATH-BED
AFTERMATH
SONG-BOOKS OF THE WAR
EVERYONE SANG

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This made me cry <3
I read this partly because I’ve always considered Sassoon to be my favourite poet, but haven’t read too much of his work; and I read this partly because I wanted to see a first-hand account of what the First World War was like, after reading In Memoriam. There are a handful of poems in here that Alice Winn directly referenced when writing her novel, and catching them made me feel vindicated and heartbroken. I never saw myself as someone who would get interested in WW1, but the more I learn the more I want to know. It’s funny how things can catch your heart when someone puts them beautifully into words!

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45199

As we mark the centeniary of the beginning of WW1, a war that I refuse to call 'Great, I shall dip into some Sassoon over the next four years even though I have marked it 'read'.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an eminent English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy". (wiki sourced)

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 ⭐

[Isca Silurum · Rating 5 out of 5]

The human condition.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, menacing, filled with sadness, and quite beautiful. Some of the most poignant poetry of the first WW.

[livia · Rating 5 out of 5]

starlight overhead - blank stars. i'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.

le poesie di guerra peel you open like a fruit

[Sophie]

Can‘t think of an adequate rating for this and not sure that "enjoyed" is the correct word for my experience with this, but I‘m glad I read it.

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one reads this book strictly for the poetry. Being over a century old, many of Sassoon's forms can seem hokey or trite in themselves. That's not to say there are no turns of phrase worth lingering upon, rather it's simply not the primary motive for most readers.

The reader approaches this text in an attempt to be present in war, the First World War. Many of these poems were written while Sassoon was actively engaged, fighting in France, as well as spending time in Egypt, Palestine, and in military hospitals. We read to see what comes out when a person is in their darkest space in the darkest kind of conflict.

As one might expect from an author suffering from what we now call PTSD who lost many friends and companions and fought suicidally, even as he was morally opposed to the war, there is a lot of resentment. Many of these poems are open attacks on military leadership, on those who shirk responsibilities, and anyone back in Britain who praised the troops without understanding their position. Interestingly, he reserves no hostility for the Germans he is fighting, at one point even asking the parents of slain soldiers to consider the grief of German parents instead of choosing resentment themselves.

So it is that when the pall of war finally lifts in the last poem, the reader is lifted with it. But one must ask, looking behind, to what are we lifted? Just as Sassoon asks, is the absence of death life itself?

Some of the images seem so sincere and so grim as to be hyperbolic, impossible to take seriously. It is incumbent upon the reader to accept the author's sincerity, to imagine one's self into a situation in which detached irony is impossible, where extreme imagery is appropriate imagery. And in making the effort to approach that place, it becomes slightly more possible to know the author. It is a worthwhile challenge.

[Wendy Slater · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siegfried Sassoon's poetry was written during WW1 as an English Infantryman. The poet describes the horrors and reality of war from an English soldier's perspective. The poet writes about the pointlessness of war and the disconnect of certain people in power about the atrocious reality of being an infantryman.

Without a doubt, Sassoon's poetry is beautifully written and plays a pivotal part in chronicling the atrocity of war. As an infantryman, he writes from the perspective of existence in the trenches. And as a man, he tenderly conveys the reality of a man's longing for a women's touch--either from a mother, sister, or a romantic interest.

The poet also uses themes of nature. For example, Sassoon captures the pain, agony, and reality of hearing the beautiful birds singing near death and destruction.

Beautiful poetry.

[busé]

“He’s young; he hated war; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
But Death replied: “I choose him.” So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.”

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is some great work here, but I think that Sassoon would be better had he employed blank verse more often. Some of the rhymes break the spell cast by the rhetorical points he makes.

[eva ⚘ · Rating 4 out of 5]

( read the poem “they” for uni )

[Brian O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrowing, bitter and heartbroken. Beautiful verse.

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw, poignant, incisive, mournful, and unrelenting, Sassoon details his time in the war (and the haunting aftereffects) through this collection of piercing poems.

Just a few of the specific poems that particularly moved me (if I listed all of them, we’d be here all day):

The Poet As Hero
You've heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented,
Mocking and loathing War: you've asked me why
Of my old, silly sweetness I've repented—
My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry.


You are aware that once I sought the Grail,
Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
And it was told that through my infant wail
There rose immortal semblances of song.


But now I've said good-bye to Galahad,
And am no more the knight of dreams and show:
For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,
And my killed friends are with me where I go.
Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs;
And there is absolution in my songs.


Enemies
He stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends. Perhaps he longed
For days he might have lived; but his young face
Gazed forth untroubled: and suddenly there thronged
Round him the hulking Germans that I shot
When for his death my brooding rage was hot.


He stared at them, half-wondering; and then
They told him how I’d killed them for his sake—
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men;
And still there seemed no answer he could make.
At last he turned and smiled. One took his hand
Because his face could make them understand.


Survivors
No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

“And in those seven odd years I have erected/A barrier, that my soul might be protected/Against the invading ghosts of what I saw/In years when Murder wore the mask of Law.”

Sassoon is one of these people whose life and political views are almost as interesting as much of his work. I would like to read his autobiography to get a deeper feel for his broader thoughts on other issues. Of course he features quite a bit in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, albeit in a semi-fictional sense, when he is recovering at Craiglockheart in Scotland, where he met fellow war poet, Wilfred Owen. For me his best work in this collection came from when he was convalescing there.

I have to be honest I much prefer prose over poetry and although I can appreciate and understand that this has its merits, it doesn’t reach the same depths in the same way as the longer forms do. Sassoon witnessed so much horror, and his personal accounts can make for confronting reading, but not all of these poems are great and there were plenty of mediocre ones which I thought really missed the mark.

“Trampling the terrible corpses-blind with blood./O German mother dreaming by the fire,/ While you are knitting socks to send your son/ His face is trodden deeper in the mud.”

There are some wonderful lines in here and some memorable poems, with “Counter-Attack” probably being the stand out one for me, but overall I don’t think that the war poets come close to the standard of the fiction and memoirs that came out of the Great War. The likes of Ernst Junger, Erich Maria Remarque, Charles Yale Harrison and Robert Graves do more for me.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saved this up specially for Anzac Day, as a the-personal-is-political gesture. I mean no disrespect to those who have fought in wars for the New Zealand government (I hesitate to say 'for New Zealand' here) and to those who lost friends and family to the war, but there's a maudlin sentimentality to the way we approach the two Word Wars in this country that makes my gut churn.

I think this is only going to get worse as we approach the 100th anniversary of the First World War. If I was in charge of the country, instead of the inevitable events and junkets and speeches and memorial services, I'd order 24-hour readings of books like Archie Baxter's 'We Shall Not Cease' and Robert Graves's 'Goodbye to All That' and let the voices of those who were there speak.

I'm not an admirer of Sassoon's poetry per say, but I find his war history fascinating: inflamed with patriotism he enlisted prior to the declaration of war, and remained in the Army until he relinquished his commission on health grounds in 1919. He was wounded repeatedly, and spent large chunks of the war in hospital and rehabilitation. He was known as an almost reckless solider and leader, and his men loved and trusted him:

He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out. 'British patrols' were Siegfried and his book of poems. 'I'd have got you a D.S.O., if you'd only shown more sense,' stormed Stockwell.

And yet Sassoon quickly lost faith in the war, feeling that what had been started on valid grounds was now being needlessly and callously prolonged in a political land-grab fuelled by mens' lives. Famously, in 1917 he refused to return from convalescent leave to the front and, encouraged by pacifist friends, wrote an anti-war statement that was read in parliament and published in the Times. Instead of being court-martialled, he was sent by a medical board to Craiglockhart Hospital, to be treated for neurasthenia (shell shock). Here he met the psychologist and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who became almost a father figure to him - this part of Sassoon's biography is wonderfully fictionalised by Pat Barker in Regeneration. Almost unbelievably - and yet somehow weirdly consistently - he returned to the front under a year later, after spells with the Army in Ireland and Palestine.

Sassoon kept diaries and wrote poems throughout the war - often poems were sent to magazines and papers straight after being finished and were published within days. His early war poems are rather sickly - his later ones are often angry, as he blasts the complacent, sentimental patriotism he sees in England, and exposes the true face of war - the gnawing rats, the rain and the deathly mud, casual death, mouldering bodies, trench suicide. There's also a lot of love, and a sense of responsibility, almost a fatherly duty, towards the men he leads.

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy, petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. 'Poor young chap,'
I'd say - 'I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die - in bed.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

['Crumps' are the sound of shells exploding - the instinctive flinch that accompanies the crump of shells and singing hiss of bullets features strongly in Graves's book, and of course all stories of shell shock.]

The Dream

I

Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent
Of summer gardens; these can bring you all
Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall:
Sweet songs are full of odours.
While I went
Last night in drizzling dusk along a lane,
I passed a squalid farm; from byre and midden
Came the rank smell that brought me once again
A dream of war that in the past was hidden.

II

Up a disconsolate straggling village street
I saw the tired troops trudge: I heard their feet.
The cheery Q.M.S. was there to meet
And guide our Company in...
I watched them stumble
Into some crazy hovel, too beat to grumble;
Saw them file inward, slipping from their backs
Rifles, equipment, packs.
On filthy straw they sit in the gloom, each face
Bowed to patched, sodden boots they must unlace,
While the wind chills their sweat through chinks and cracks.

III

I’m looking at their blistered feet; young Jones
Stares up at me, mud-splashed and white and jaded;
Out of his eyes the morning light has faded.
Old soldiers with three winters in their bones
Puff their damp Woodbines, whistle, stretch their toes:
They can still grin at me, for each of ’em knows
That I’m as tired as they are...
Can they guess
The secret burden that is always mine?—
Pride in their courage; pity for their distress;
And burning bitterness
That I must take them to the accursèd Line.

IV

I cannot hear their voices, but I see
Dim candles in the barn: they gulp their tea,
And soon they’ll sleep like logs. Ten miles away
The battle winks and thuds in blundering strife.
And I must lead them nearer, day by day,
To the foul beast of war that bludgeons life.

[Shriya Uday · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strongly agree with the introduction that his war poems were his best work. It's because they were his truest writing, where he did not care to erase any part of the narrative or try to emulate a certain style