“Enemies” by Siegried Sassoon

Commentary by David F. Beer

We can all probably recall what first got us interested in the Great War. In my case it was a literature course many (too many) years ago, where I first encountered Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem “Strange Meeting,” with its haunting account of death and loss in war. I later learned that Owen’s poem might have been inspired by one written the previous year by his friend and fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon titled “Enemies.” Both take us into a mystical, otherworldly existence where the dead appear to the poet as transfigured beings who are still close to the living. Here is Sassoon’s poem:

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.

                          (6 January 1917)

What is going on here? Sassoon is the observer/narrator. A soldier who meant a lot to him has been killed but now appears in that strange alternate universe where the dead may go, a place without war. Although possibly a place of regret, it is also free of anxiety—where no one is troubled any longer. Soon the soldier is joined by other dead who were killed by the narrator in revenge for his death: “Germans that I shot/When for his death my brooding rage was hot.”

None of the ghost soldiers can fully understand that they are dead or even why they had to die. Even the British soldier is not sure at first, but then, Christ-like, his young and now untroubled face smiles and the hand of his former enemy unites with his, offering acceptance, peace, and reconciliation.  Mystically, the face of love in an alternate existence has brought understanding that is not available to the living.

The poem conveys a great deal in two short stanzas of iambic pentameter and a regular rhyme scheme. For some reason it’s not often found in the selections of Sassoon’s work in war poets anthologies; however, I did find it in Martin Taylor’s 1989 collection, Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches, where it comes right before Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” LINK