“Good morning, good morning! The General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card’, grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both with his plan of Attack.
Siegrfied Sassoon was born into a life of wealth and
privilege and in the years preceding the outbreak of war he felt no obligation
to attain either academic achievement or pursue a career but instead preferred
the life of a country gentleman, riding out, playing golf, and indulging his
great passion - poetry.
But like most young men of his background he had a sense of
duty and a deep if sometimes subdued
patriotism and as war appeared imminent he enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry and
trained as an Officer receiving his Commission the in May, 1915.
In November he received the tragic news that his much loved
younger brother Hamo had been killed at Gallipoli.
The loss affected him
greatly but served only to make him push harder for a front-line posting which
he finally received in March, 1916.
Sassoon was to prove an exceptional Officer both dedicated
to and protective of the men under his command but he was also a conflicted man
- confused by his latent homosexuality that saw bonds of affection develop with
fellow Officers that might not otherwise have been the case, and he was similarly
bewildered by his physical commitment to a war on the battlefield that he was
fast becoming disenchanted with in his heart.
Nevertheless, he was brave to the point of recklessness
earning him the nickname “Mad Jack” and in May 1916, whilst leading a
night-time raid into No-Man’s-Land his courage in rescuing a fellow soldier saw
him awarded the Military Cross.
After participating in the Battle of the Somme he was struck
down by a severe bout of dysentery and briefly repatriated home and it was now
among friends and family that he first began to express his doubts about the
war.
It was on visits home that he would become maudlin and
despondent as if amid the mud and the blood of the trenches he could lose
himself as a man of action in defence not just of his country but the men under
his command, venting his anger on the enemy and sating his melancholy in the
written word.
But in the peace and tranquility of hearth and home he could
see with unvarnished eyes the panoramic vistas of insanity.
In April 1917, he was shot by a sniper and was once again
repatriated to England for a period of convalescence where encouraged by those
such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell and the
Garsington Pacifists he was encouraged give voice to his disillusionment.
Given the possible consequences for Sassoon of doing so
these people should not perhaps be considered friends and it has been suggested
that they exploited him for their own ends, but if so it appears he was a
willing victim.
Having already disposed of his Military Cross by throwing it
into the sea on 15 June he wrote his famous Soldier’s Declaration against the
war which he sent to his Commanding Officer, and which was read out the
following month in the House of Commons and later published in The Times Newspaper:
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful 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 defence 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 that 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 men are being
sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest
against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I
may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at
home the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not
sufficient imagination to realise”.
In a war where any dissent from the front-line was frowned
upon and Sassoon himself would have regularly censored the letters of his men
this was borderline treason.
His friend, the author Robert Graves fearing that he would
be court-martialled urged him not to do it.
He had experienced first-hand how the death of Siegfried’s
younger brother had impacted upon the family, describing in his memoir of the
war “Goodbye, to All That”, how when staying a night in the dead brother’s
bedroom which had remained unaltered since his death with fresh flowers provided
every day and his favourite cigarettes on the bedside table, being woken in the
early hours of the morning by the rapping sounds and peculiar wailings of a
séance.
Sassoon’s mother
later apologised for having disturbed him.
He now feared that Siegfried was about to inflict further
grief on the family so he used his connections to interceded on his behalf.
The Military Authorities sensitive to morale at home were
prepared to listen and rather than consider him a traitor and prosecute a
well-known war hero he was instead diagnosed as having been rendered mentally
and emotionally unstable as a result of sustained front-line service and
possible shell-shock
.
He was sent to the psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart
near Edinburgh to receive psychotherapy, a fairly new treatment also known as
the “talking cure”.
At Craiglockhart he became friends with the fellow Officer
and poet Wilfred Owen who was there also recovering from the effects of
shell-shock.
Sassoon was to remain at Craiglockhart for a number of
months but endured an increasing sense of guilt that whilst he lived in comfort
and talked literature and poetry late into the night his men continued to
suffer and die on the Western Front.
His subsequent request to return to front-line duties was
accepted.
By the spring of 1918 he was back in France in time to
resist the Germans last great offensive in the war.
Ironically, given the
many risks he had taken throughout the war on 13 July he was shot in the head
possibly as the result of friendly fire and invalided out of the army.
The years immediately following the end of the war were a
troubled time for Sassoon as once more immersed into a life of privilege so far
away from the horror of the trenches and those who fought alongside him who now
endured unemployment and increased poverty, he embarked upon a series of
homosexual affairs with young men who had no understanding or even concern for
the pain suffered by those who were their seniors of just a few years.
It only served to damage him further.
In 1933, he married Hester Gatty, a woman many years his
junior, which at least provided some stability in his life and a son whom he
adored, and though they were later to separate it was to prove a signal and
transformative moment.
Siegfried Sassoon who had survived the worst of trench
warfare in the most horrific conflict then known to man lived to old age during
which time he converted to Roman Catholicism and renewed his interest in
spiritualism.
He was also to write his semi-fictional sketches from the
front, one of the great testaments of the war, and continue to produce
well-received poetry all his life but it will always be his wartime verse for
which he is best remembered and admired.
For a man who had been so emotionally engaged with the war,
with its people, and the events occurring around him, Sassoon’s poetry has a
disturbingly dispassionate and matter-of-fact quality that resonates with the
gravity of resignation and despair.
It has an earnestness lacking in so many others, an
acid-tongued cynicism that slices through the solemnity and maudlin
introspection of regret and loss that lights up the fog of despondency but
barely and without relief:
“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 crumbs and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindled eye
Who cheer when soldiers march by;
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go”.
(Suicide in the
Trenches)
Rupert Brooke
The 27 year old Rupert Brooke was already an established
poet feted by the literati and those such as the Bloomsbury Set before the
outbreak of World War One, though he was as much admired for his boyish good
looks as he was his literary abilities attracting in equal measure the
attention of both men and women, which caused him some early confusion.
He was the son of a Master at Rugby Public School and had a
sheltered, if not gilded childhood, but one which allowed him to dream and his
dreams of an idyllic England were ones he expressed in his poetry, though always with
wit and humour.
His was not an England of ship-building, blast furnaces and
mines but one of panoramic vistas, country Churches, and lakes glimmering in
the summer sun.
When the opportunity came to fight for his rural idyll he
embraced it and he is looked upon with scorn now by some critical of his
unquestioning belief in country and unbridled patriotism.
But Brooke never lived long enough to experience the
meat-grinder war of the Western Front and his idealistic verse reflected the
feelings of many swept up in the enthusiasm of those early months of the war.
Brooke’s connections ensured that even with no military
experience, or indeed the required training, he was commissioned as a
sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Reserve but the patriotic Rupert’s war was to
be a short one.
On 23 April 1915, he died in delirium en-route to Gallipoli
from the effects of a mosquito bite.
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away’
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven”.
(The Soldier)
Wilfred Owen
Born in the small market town of Oswestry on the border of
England and Wales into a solid middle-class family that espoused the
traditional values of sobriety, hard work, belief in country and the
established social order, the young Wilfred Owen also immersed himself in his
Welsh heritage especially the stories of the Bards and from an early age he
expressed his desire to be a poet.
Owen was resident in Southern France where he had taken a
teaching post when war was declared but unlike Brooke and Sassoon he displayed
no great desire to become involved.
Indeed, it seemed as if the war was occurring in some
far-away place and had passed him by, and it wasn’t until late October, 1915,
that he at last out of a sense of guilt returned to England to enlist for
Officer training in the First Artists Rifles.
Commissioned as a Lieutenant he spent the first year of his
service in England where he came to like the feel of his uniform and certainly
the respect that seemed to come with it.
He was sent to the France on 31 December, 1916, but he had
little time with which to dwell upon his new surroundings for within the week
he had been transferred to the front-line fully experiencing its rich panoply
of horrors – the constant shelling, the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun, the
fear of the ever-present sniper, and the dread of gas.
The brutality of it
all, and the fact that there were people out there who wanted to kill him, came
as a profound shock.
It was all a little too much for the dream-like Owen who
began composing the first of the more than 650 letters he was to write home to
his mother complaining of the filth and dreariness of it all and of the
contempt he had for the dullards under his command whom he described as
unimaginative lumps.
The difference in attitude towards the common soldier with
whom they served of the aspirational middle-class Owen and the more
aristocratic Sassoon was stark, though Owen’s opinion would change over time.
Having had more than one brush with death in April, 1917,
Owen was blown high into the air by a trench mortar which left him with severe
concussion. Badly shaken he was diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock and
evacuated back to England where he found himself at Craiglockhart at the same
time as Siegfried Sassoon.
The two men quickly became close friends spending long
nights together discussing poetry during which time Sassoon, whom Owen admired
greatly describing him as great, or even greater, than Shakespeare, encouraged
him to write and write.
Owen was to act on his friend’s advice and almost all of the
poetry we now remember him for was written in the fifteen months of life he had
remaining to him.
His shell-shock meant that he could have completed his
military service in England and despite Sassoon threatening him with violence
if he did so he followed the example previously set by his friend and
volunteered to return to the Western Front to be with his men.
In July 1918, he returned to active service in time to
participate in the Allied push towards final victory.
On 4 November 1918, he was leading his men in a crossing of
the Sambre-Oise Canal when he was shot and killed.
On 11 November, as the Church bells in England rang out at
the announcement of the Armistice and people took to the streets to celebrate
the end of the war, Owen’s parents received a knock on the door and the
telegram informing them that their only son had been killed in action a week earlier.
In 1919, in recognition of the great courage and endeavour
he displayed in leading his men in a series of actions the previous autumn he
was posthumously awarded the Military Cross.
Wilfred Owen is acknowledged by many to have been the
greatest of the war poets more adroit and technically gifted but also more
adventurous in his use of language experimenting with rhyme and vowel sounds to
recreate the intense suffering of the common soldier often with a simplicity of
language that reflected the simple sense of duty upon which they had entered
the fight and endured its torments.:
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks’
Knock-kneed, coughing like old hags we cursed through the
sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shot. All went lame, all blind,
Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick boys! – an ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out at stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen are all honoured
with a plaque at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
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