Siegfried Sassoon in Palestine

On the rock-strewn hills I heard

The anger of guns that shook

Echoes along the glen.

In my heart was the song of a bird,

And the sorrowless tale of the brook,

And scorn for the deeds of men.

Sassoon the Young Officer

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the  words above not on the Somme but in Palestine, where he was posted for a little over a month in the spring of 1918. On a warm and pleasant morning in March 1918, Sassoon arrived in Gaza on a cattle truck. He had traveled all night with 12 other officers from base camp in Kantara, Egypt, and was relieved to escape the ragtime tunes and tiresome ribaldry of the mess. From Gaza, whose “fine hills” reminded him of Scotland, he proceeded through almond orchards and olive trees to Ludd, the railhead where soldiers and war supplies arrived and departed. Ludd’s proper name was al-Ludd, an Arabic name because it was then a Palestinian town full of Arabs. 

From al-Ludd, Sassoon and company continued to their final destination — a hilltop village with “dusky, narrow” streets eight miles northwest of Jerusalem. Captured from “Johnny Turk” barely two months earlier and turned into the division headquarters, it was called Ramallah. There was no sound of artillery here, noted Sassoon, and the silent landscape, “hoary in the twilight,” seemed infused with a sad, lonesome air. 

Sassoon was coming off his war protest/hospitalization period at Craig Lockhart hospital in Scotland.  He had become  frustrated that his protest had been neutralized, and  demanded that he be sent back to the Western Front. His appeal was initially met with an assignment training troops in Ireland.  Eventually, he was deployed to a front, only in Palestine, not France. 

The 31-year-old Sassoon arrived in Middle East flushed with celebrity and notoriety. Palestine, he knew, was a “warm-climate sideshow,” and he smarted at the thought of being shunted to guard duty.  Since his assignment now with the 25th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was mostly defensive Sassoon spent most of his time mending roads littered with the stinking corpses of camels and trampled to “liquid mud” by ambulances and long lines of gray donkeys loaded with army blankets. It was dull, plodding work. He consoled himself by reading War and Peace, but his heavy cold and the incessant rain only worsened his mood. Though he faced no direct fighting in Palestine, everywhere around him was the grim business of war. “C’est la guerre — in an Old Testament environment,” he noted drily.

What he did not foresee was how deeply he would fall in love with the natural beauty of Palestine, and how loath he would become  to return to the soul-deadening trenches of France.  Slowly, the landscape revealed itself to him, “and what had seemed a cruel, desolate, unhappy region, was now full of a shy and lovely austerity. On one serene ramble outside Ramallah he wrote, “I escaped from the war completely for four hours.” The “anger of guns” he refers to in the sonnet quoted above, which he titled “In Palestine,” was more distant soundtrack than immediate menace. 

An  Older Sassoon

It was Operation Michael, Germany's first of five spring offensives that would draw Sassoon back to France.  All available bodies were need to stem the onslaught.  He was part of a draft that departed Alexandria on 1 May. and  was back on the Western Front by early June.  He soon managed, however to catch a non-fatal shot to the head—possibly by friendly fire—on 13 July 1918.  Siegfried Sassoon's days of combat were over, but The War, as we know, would remain with him the rest of his life. Sassoon died of stomach cancer on 1 September 1967, aged 80. He was buried at St. Andrew’s Church in Mells, Somerset. On 11 November 1985 he was commemorated as one of 16 Great War poets at Westminster Abbey, alongside Rupert Brooke, and his friends Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen.

Source:  Excepted from "Siegfried Sassoon and Palestine," Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 August 2014; Siegfried Sassoon: A Life by Max Egremont ·