The Old Century: And Seven More Years

by Siegfried Sassoon

The distinguished poet depicts his childhood in a country house in Kent and his experiences at Cambridge University

Genres: Nonfiction

1000 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1986

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

[Hanna]

”I now vaguely belived that I was going to be a poet, and had taken to reading Longfellow, Shelley, and Tennyson.”

”It really seemed that in order to make a success of being up at Cambridge I needed to be three people at once. […] Dutifully I attended droning lectures, desperately scribbling fragments of what I overheard snd seldom understanding what my notes were about when I perused them in private. Note-taking seemed to be physical rather than mental exercise.”

”By reading I mean that my eyes moved from line to line while I overheard rather than ’took in’ the besutifully monotonous word music of William Morris, which loitered through my mind as though it were one with the riverside sounds of that golden day in early summer. At that time I was finding much material for day-dreaming in the poems and pictures of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood. Through them I shared an imaginative existence which, as they had intended it to do, provided an ideal escape from commonplace actualities. […] I preferred to think vaguely of them as a group of people with whom I could have been happy, and I wanted their world to resemble the one which they had created for me in their works.”

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Old Century covers the first twenty-one years of Sassoon's life, and details his upbringing in rural Kent with his mother and brothers, his extended home-schooling and subsequent time at boarding school and university. The memoir is an upbeat reflection on a time before England changed forever with the outbreak of the Great War (still seven years from the end of this book).

Sassoon tells his tale of a peaceful, somewhat isolated upbringing, away from the harsher realities of the less-privileged world, with a warmth and charm that makes the book a pleasure to read. This is the first of three memoirs published by Sassoon between 1938 and 1945.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely account of growing up in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Privileged and Elysian, and wonderful to read and savour

[Kara]

Abandoned on page 165. This is about Sassoon's life prior to World War I, which, honestly, is not the interesting part of Sassoon's life.

[Christine Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly charming!