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 Craiglockhart 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 ·

Sassoon at His Bitterest: Does It Matter?

Sassoon as a New Officer, 1915

Does It Matter?

Siegfried Sassoon

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 you’ve fought for your country

And no one will worry a bit.

Siegfried Sassoon's Gravestone at
St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset

Commentary from Poem Analysis

"Does It Matter?" is one of Siegfried Sassoon’s best-known poems. It was written in 1917 after Sassoon had grown tired of war and lost the patriotism that had defined his verse in earlier years. The poem describes the variety of injuries that men receive in war, those of the body and those of the mind. 

The poem was published a year after it was penned, in 1918, in Sassoon’s collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. "Does it Matter?" is one of the most important poems in the volume and sets the tone for the poems that followed it. 

 

100 Years Ago: Siegfried Sassoon Receives the Military Cross

Sassoon in 1915

Sassoon and his regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, arrived on the Somme in early 1916 and were assigned to trenches running through a small wood south of Fricourt village named Bois Français. The German trench opposite was labelled the Kiel Trench on maps. His unit took casualties from the start, a friend, Lt. Thomas, was killed. A major raid on the Kiel Trench was planned for 25 May. Sassoon wanted to lead it, but, having just returned from a school assignment, he saw the command the 37-man mission given to another officer, Lt. Stansfield. Sassoon was in command of an evacuating party that lay out some 20 yards beyond the British trenches and whose job was to cover the return of the raiders.

The raid was a failure. While trying to negotiate the German barbed wire, the alarm was raised and the British party became involved in a bombing fight in which several of the raiders became casualties, in particular, the advance scout for the raid, Corporal O’Brien, who had previously served under Sassoon.

Sassoon then went out into No Man's Land and met Lt. Stansfield, wounded but being assisted back to the British lines by two of the raiding party. Sassoon then discovered that O’Brien was lying badly wounded at the bottom of a deep crater. After returning to the British trenches, he came back with some helpers and managed to get a rope round the wounded corporal, who, with the aid of a stretcher bearer and others, was brought to safety. O'Brien, however, later died. For this exploit Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross.

Location of the 25 May Action

The award was presented to Sassoon by the battalion Medical Officer, 100 years ago on this date, just two days before the battle of the Somme began. On 1 July, his unit was in reserve but would soon be sent into action for the assault on Mametz Wood.

Sassoon's citation reads:

2nd Lt. Siegfried Lorraine [sic] Sassoon, 3rd (attd. 1st) Bn., R. W. Fus.

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in.

Sources  Sassoon on the Somme and Wikipedia

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew Reviewed by David F. Beer

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew

by Max Egremont

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014 (reissue)

Siegfried Sassoon

It's no secret that the Great War holds a far larger place in the consciousness of the British people than of the Americans. Thus the War Poets of 1914–1918 are taught in practically all English secondary schools and are a subject that students may choose to write on for their final exams. I first remember being introduced to Owen's "Strange Meeting" as a teenager while attending my local grammar school in Bideford in the county of Devon. The poets of the Great War still haunt us and are read for the content and quality of their verse. For many they remain popular in the canon of war literature. Moreover, their work has often had an influence on how the war has been remembered and interpreted by later generations.

Some Desperate Glory is engagingly written, effectively organized, and solidly researched—as is to be expected from the author of one of the best biographies of Siegfried Sassoon. Max Egremont looks at the work and lives (some tragically brief) of 11 of the best-known English war poets of the period—"eleven fragile young men who were unlikely warriors" (p. 263). These young men are Blunden, Brooke, Graves, Grenfell, Gurney, Nichols, Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Sorley, and Thomas. We might argue that the author should have included a few other names or that one or two could have been omitted. We might not always be happy with his choice of poems at the end of each chapter, but of course this is a judgment call and there is so much to choose from.

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The book's five chapters, each devoted to a year of the war, are followed by several samples of work by poets who were in the war that year. These chapters are sandwiched by a lengthy prelude and aftermath. The author gradually gives us a moving insight into how each poet lived, fought, and, in most cases, died in action. Some died fairly early in the war (Brooke, Grenfell, Sorley), some later (Thomas, Rosenberg), while Owen was killed just a matter of days before the Armistice. Meanwhile, Nichols was medically discharged in 1916 due to shell-shock and Gurney died in an asylum in 1937—one of numerous veterans still hospitalized due to the war many years after it had ended. Only Blunden, Graves, and Sassoon survived to lead full lives and to write notable memoirs of their experiences in the trenches. Of the three, Robert Graves lived the longest, dying in 1985.

Edward Thomas

These "fragile young men", even apart from the war, were by no means run-of-the-mill individuals, and Egremont details their early lives as well as their war experiences and, in the case of the survivors, their later lives. Grenfell and Sassoon were aristocrats, Owen decidedly middle class. Rosenberg and Gurney had to work for their educations, the former also being a painter and the latter a composer who eventually went mad. Sassoon and Owen were homosexuals, and Robert Nichols, raised in an atheist family with a mother who often had nervous breakdowns, suffered from insomnia and manic depression and became fascinated by religion.

Before the war, Edward Thomas was a successful writer and reviewer but had dark moments when he thought of suicide  and actually attempted it once. He recorded in his early writings that "I was born to be a ghost." Rupert Brooke of course was everybody's poster boy as a handsome poet and soldier, and for a long time his work was considered the best of the war poets. Robert Graves went on to be a prodigious scholar and writer and after a few marriages and saying "goodbye to all that" in his war memoir, went to live in Majorca. Some of these poets met during the war, notably Sassoon and Owen during their respective stays at Craiglockhart, a hospital for shell-shocked officers. Some were influenced by the work of other poets, and Egremont often gives an excellent analysis of this kind of artistic influence and how each poet's work developed as a result of it.

Rupert Brooke

Some Desperate Glory nicely weaves the story of these poets into a tapestry of their lives, their war, and their poetry. Much useful commentary is given on many of the poems. The author shows how these men suffered because of their sensitivities and artistic temperaments. He also describes how a few of them (particularly Owen and Sassoon) in some ways enjoyed the war, loved their men, and wanted to be there with them. By the end of this book we have a full picture of the course of the war, the part these poets played in it, the toll it took on them, and why their war poetry is still well worth reading today. Admittedly it is a body of poetry related to a specific time and place, but its message is just as poignant and relevant today in a world that still seems to be in love with war.

Edward Thomas, who under the influence of Robert Frost started writing poetry soon after the outbreak of war, overcame his depression sufficiently to enlist. He was killed in action at Arras on 9 April 1917, after being in France only three months. It is fitting that the title and theme of our blog takes these lines from his poem “Roads", summing up as they do what was to be the experience of so many:

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance.

David F. Beer

Siegfried Sassoon: The Inescapable War Poet

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Siegfried Sassoon—The War Poems

Portable Poetry, 2020 

As Sassoon's wartime diaries reveal, he was an extremely complex character, troubled by his homosexuality and anxious to prove his manliness in combat and so to earn the respect, perhaps even love, of his men. Also, as a poet first and foremost, he was never at ease with the majority of his fellow officers whom he found boorish, dull and snobbish, hence his delight in meeting other poets and literary men such as Graves, Owen and de Sola Pinto. Both on his own account, and for the reputation of poets, he wanted to prove himself a hero and did so in several gallant actions. But in seeking to protest against what he thought of as the excessive suffering of his men in an unduly prolonged war he allowed himself to be influenced by pacifists who had little respect for men in uniform and were disappointed that he did not provide publicity for their cause by going to prison.

Brian Bond, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (2008)

"The Hero" by Siegfried Sassoon, 1886–1967

"Jack fell as he'd have wished," the Mother said,

And folded up the letter that she'd read.

"The Colonel writes so nicely." Something broke

In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.

She half looked up. "We mothers are so proud

Of our dead soldiers." Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.

He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies

That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.

For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes

Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,

Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how "Jack," cold-footed, useless swine,

Had panicked down the trench that night the mine

Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried

To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,

Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

Sassoon's Letter to The Times

Siegfried Sassoon was born into wealth and had led a privileged life before the war, with much hunting and cricketeering and some literary dabbling to pass the time. War brought something else out in him, though, and he fought with distinction with the 38th Welsh Division at the Somme. He earned the nickname "Mad Jack." In 1917 while on convalescent leave in England, advised by Bertrand Russell, he turned defiantly against the war. He tore the Military Cross ribbon from his uniform, tossed it in the River Mersey and sent this letter to The Times, where it was published:

Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.

3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

July, 1917.

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 the 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 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 prolonging 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 practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise

Sassoon was saved from a court martial for insubordination by the intercession of fellow Royal Welch Fusilier Robert Graves and was sent to Craiglockhart military hospital in Edinburgh to be treated for shell shock. There he met and encouraged fellow poet Wilfred Owen. Both Owen and Sassoon would return to the field, but their subsequent writings would emphasize the sufferings and sense of betrayal felt by the common soldiers of the war. 

Editor's Note:  We have published over a dozen articles over the years on Sassoon and his writings. [He's just a fascinating subject, who produced a lot of material about the war.] If you are interested you can find them HERE.

George Sherston's Stay at a Convalescent Hospital

Siegfried Sassoon's Sketch of His Hospital Ward
from His Diary

In 1917, Siegfried Sassoon's alter ego in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer was wounded when a piece of shrapnel shell passed through his lung after he incautiously sticks his head over the parapet at the Battle of Arras. After many stops along the British Army medical network he found himself in a London Hotel converted to a wartime convalescent hospital.

A Selection from: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

By Siegfried Sassoon

With an apology for my persistent specifyings of chronology, I must relate that on May 9th I was moved onto a Railway Terminus Hotel which had been commandeered for the accommodation of convalescent officers. My longing to get away from London made me intolerant of the GreatCentral Hotel, which was being directed by a mind more military than therapeutic. The Commandant was a noncombatant Brigadier-General, and the convalescents grumbled a good deal about his methods, although they could usually get leave to go out in the evenings. 

Many of them were waiting to be invalided out of the Army, and the daily routine-orders contained incongruous elements. We were required to attend lectures on, among other things, Trench Warfare. At my first lecture I was astonished to see several officers on crutches, with legs amputated, and at least one man had lost that necessary faculty for trench warfare, his eyesight. They appeared to be accepting the absurd situation stoically ; they were allowed to smoke. The Staff Officer who was drawing diagrams on a blackboard was obviously desirous of imparting information about the lesson which had been learnt from the Battle of Neuve Chapelle or some equally obsolete engagement. 

But I noticed several faces in the audience which showed signs of tortured nerves, and it was unlikely that their efficiency was improved by the lecturer, who concluded by reminding us of the paramount importance of obtaining offensive ascendancy in No Man's Land.

In the afternoon I had an interview with the doctor who was empowered to decide how soon I went to the country. One of the men with whom I shared a room had warned me that this uniformed doctor was a queer customer. ‘The blighter seems to take a punitive pleasure in tormenting  people,' he remarked, adding, 'He'll probably tell you that you'll have to stay here till you're passed fit for duty.'  But I had contrived to obtain a letter from the Countess of Somewhere recommending me for one of the country houses in her organization; so I felt fairly secure. (At the period of the War  people with large houses received convalescent officers as guests.)

The doctor, a youngish man dressed as a temporary Captain, began by behaving quite pleasantly. After he'd examined me and the document which outlined my insignificant medical history, he asked what I proposed to do now. I said that I was hoping to get sent to some place in the country for a few weeks. He replied that I was totally mistaken if I thought any such thing. An expression, which I can only call cruel, overspread his face. ‘You’ll stay here; and when you leave here, you’ll find yourself back at the front in double quick time. How do you like that that’ In order to encourage him, I pretended to be upset by his severity; but he seemed to recognize that I wasn't satisfactory material for his peculiar methods, and I departed without having contested the question of going to the country. I was told afterwards that officers had been known to leave this doctor’s room in tears. But it must not be supposed that I regard his behaviour as an example of army brutality. I prefer to think of him as a man who craved power over his fellow men. And though his power over the visiting patients was brief and episodic, he must have derived extraordinary (and perhaps sadistic) satisfaction from the spectacle of young officers sobbing and begging not to be sent back to the front.

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I never saw the supposedly sadistic doctor again; but I hope that someone gave him a black eye, and that he afterwards satisfied his desire for power over his fellow men in a more public-spirited manner. Next morning I handed the letter of the Countess to a slightly higher authority, with the result that I only spent three nights in the Great Central Hotel, and late on a fine Saturday afternoon I travelled down to Sussex to stay with Lord and Lady Asterisk.

Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War

By Charles Glass

Penguin Press, 2023

David Beer, Reviewer

Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital

“They roll about,” wrote Brown of his subjects, “gripping at the sides of the stretcher, or rolling on the floor, tearing at their hair with their hands, contorting themselves in every possible way, foaming at the mouth, becoming purple in the face, their eyes staring out of their heads, all their muscles tense” (p. 245).

Sadly, we’re all familiar with the term PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, and many of us know people who suffer from it. During the Great War, however, the condition and its causes were only meagerly understood—if at all. In the eyes of the official Army hierarchy a soldier suffering from such trauma would likely be considered as simply having “the wind up,” a coward who deserved severe treatment. Fortunately, there were a few medical pioneers in psychology who eschewed this attitude and who, sometimes influenced by the work of Freud, practiced humane treatment in dealing with cases of "shell shock." This book is about two of the most noted psychiatrists in the field at the time, Drs. William H. R. Rivers and Arthur Brock, and two of their well-known patients, soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

If you’ve read Pat Barker’s excellent novel Regeneration, you may already know something about the main characters in Glass’s non-fiction book. You might be familiar with the enlightened and humane treatments practiced at the Craiglockhart war hospital in Scotland, where so many of the more privileged shell-shocked British officers were sent. They were lucky. As Glass points out, there were far less pleasant ways to be treated for this condition.

Sassoon and Owen

But I feel Soldiers Don’t Go Mad is essentially more about relationships than medical treatments: the relationship between army hospitals and the army hierarchy, between doctors and patients, between officers and their regiments, and above all between two patients, the quietly homosexual Sassoon and Owen—both of whom became the most noted [English-language] poets of the war. At Craiglockhart they had a profound effect on each other despite the typical British class barriers:

The rapport born that afternoon was not between equals. Owen played disciple to Sassoon’s master. Sassoon was six years older, a half foot taller, an established poet, a decorated warrior, and a Cambridge man. Owen had never published, harbored fears that senior officers suspected him of cowardice, and could only dream of Cambridge (p.153). 

A centrally important figure in this study, as is to be expected of anything to do with Craiglockhart at the time, is Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. His relationship with his patients was natural and friendly, and he earned the trust and affection of Sassoon, Owens, and many other patients—although he was painfully aware his job was to heal men so they could be returned to combat.  He was an unassuming scholar with an anthropological background who had entered the field of psychiatry and served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1917 to 1919. He did not enjoy the best of health and at times had to force himself out of bed in the morning to attend to his patients even though feeling quite ill. His work with his patients was of the utmost importance to him. 

In many ways this book seems like a novel despite being non-fiction. Author Charles Glass has an impressive resume as a writer. He is the author of seven books and has been a longtime war correspondent, covering wars for some 50 years in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. It would be interesting to know why he chose this story of mental illness, poetry, and human relationships in the midst of World War One. He has certainly written an insightful and haunting book that makes for a very interesting read, one that I highly recommend.

David Beer

“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

Not Always Antiwar: An Early Poem of Siegfried Sassoon, MC

Thanks to "Finest Hour: The Journal of Winston Churchill," an interesting and revealing bit of poetry has come to the editor's attention. It shows that prior to his arrival on the Western Front, Siegfried Sassoon, now considered the preeminent antiwar soldier-poet of the Great War, was of a like mind to, say, Rupert Brooke. Here is what he wrote prior to his actual service at the front:

Because We Are Going

Because we are going from our wonted places
To be task-ridden by one shattering Aim,
And terror hides in all our laughing faces
That had no will to die, no thirst for fame,
Hear our last word. In Hell we seek for Heaven;
The agony of wounds shall make us clean;
And the failures of our sloth shall be forgiven
When Silence holds the songs that might have been,
And what we served remains, superb, unshaken,
England, our June of blossom that shines above
Disastrous War; for whom we have forsaken
Ways that were rich and gleeful and filled with love.
Thus are we heroes; since we might not choose
To live where Honour gave us life to lose.

Sassoon on the Armistice

 In his autobiography, Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon gives an account of the writing of this poem:

"One evening in the middle of April I had an experience which seems worth describing for those who are interested in methods of poetic production. It was a sultry spring night. I was feeling dull-minded and depressed, for no assignable reason. After sitting lethargically in the ground-floor room for about three hours after dinner, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to take my useless brain to bed. On my way from the arm-chair to the door I stood by the writing-table. A few words floated into my head as though from nowhere. In those days I was always on the look-out for a lyric — I wish I could say the same for my present self — so I picked up a pencil and wrote the words on a sheet of note-paper. Without sitting down, I added a second line. It was if I were remembering rather than thinking. In this mindless manner I wrote down my poem in a few minutes. When it was finished I read it through, with no sense of elation, merely wondering how I had come to be writing a poem when feeling so stupid." (140)

Everyone Sang 

by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Source: www.arabesques-editions.com/

The Great War Poets of Westminster Abbey

Recently in an article on Siegfried Sassoon, we mentioned he had been included on the "Poets of the First World War Memorial" at Westminster Abbey.  I thought it would be of interest to our readers to present an article on the memorial and the list of 16 poets honored. MH

Click on Image to Enlarge

The Memorial and Dedication

The idea for this memorial came from the Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, who initially thought that five or seven poets could be chosen to represent all the poets of the Great War. He consulted with eminent historians and authors to ask for their suggestions. From those suggestions, a final list of 16 representative poets was drawn up and funding was obtained.

A floor stone it is located today at the South Transept of the Abbey, Poets' Corner.  The stone is of dark green Westmoreland slate, cut by Harry Meadows. The inscription in red lettering around the names reads:

My subject is War, and the pity of War. 

The Poetry is in the pity

The date "1914+1918" appears at the base.

On 11 November 1985,  Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, unveiled the memorial, followed by the oration for the dedication service, given by Professor Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. The readings from the honored poets were by Jill Balcon, Ted Hughes, Stephen Lushington, and Richard Pasco. 

Poets' Corner Setting

About the Poets

Sixteen poets of the Great War are remembered on this memorial. None of the poets are actually buried in the Abbey. Listed here are their names and their works chosen for reading at the dedication.

Richard Aldington (1892–1962) who served in the trenches and achieved success with his novel Death of a Hero based on his war experiences.

*** "On the march"

Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) whose words "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old…," from his war poem "For the Fallen," are heard each year on Remembrance Sunday. He was buried at Aldworth in Berkshire.

*** "They went with songs to the battle"

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) who fought at Ypres and the Somme and later became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and wrote poems on rural life as well as the war. He is buried at Long Melford in Suffolk.

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) "The handsomest young man in England" died en route to the Dardanelles and is buried on the Greek island of Skyros. His War Sonnets included "The Soldier" with the famous lines "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England."

*** "The Soldier" and "The Dead"

Wilfrid Gibson (1878–1962) of Northumberland, whose poetry also dealt with rural themes.

*** "A Lament"

Robert Graves (1895–1985) was badly wounded on the Somme but was the only one of the poets still living at the time of the unveiling. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and his novels include I, Claudius.

*** "Two Fusiliers"

Julian Grenfell (1888–1915) whose celebrated poem "Into Battle" appeared in the same year that he was killed at Ypres.

*** "Into Battle"

Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was gassed during the war and never fully recovered, being taken into care for the last years of his life. He also composed many songs.

*** "To the poet before battle"

David Jones (1895–1974) had a Welsh father but was born in Kent and served throughout the Great War. His epic work was In Parenthesis on the subject of war.

Robert Nichols (1893–1944) had early success with his poem "Invocation" in 1915, but he later turned to writing plays.

*** "By the wood"

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), from whose Collected Poems the quote on the stone is taken, won the Military Cross and was killed just a week before the Armistice.

*** "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Futility"

Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968) had a distinguished war record and was poet, critic, and writer on fine art, and was knighted in 1953.

*** "The Refugees"

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) was killed in action. The publication in 1937 of his Collected Works confirmed his importance as a writer of realistic war poetry.

*** "Break of Day in the Trenches"

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) won the Military Cross and was invalided out. His volume of bleak anti-war poems, Counter Attack, was published in 1918, but his reputation became established in the following decade. He was buried at Mells in Somerset.

*** "The Hero" and "Reconciliation"

Charles Sorley (1895–1915) was killed at the battle of Loos aged only 20 so left comparatively few complete poems but was well regarded by his contemporary poets.

***  "All the Hills and Vales Along"

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was encouraged to write by the American poet Robert Frost. He was killed at Arras, and his work is now highly regarded. He is the source of the title of this blog.

*** "Lights Out" and "In Memoriam-Easter 1915"

Source: Westminster Abbey Website

The Death of Wilfred Owen

 

On 1 April 1917, near the town of St. Quentin, budding war poet Wilfred Owen led his platoon through an artillery barrage to the German trenches, only to discover when they arrived that the enemy had already withdrawn. Severely shaken and disoriented by the bombardment, Owen barely avoided being hit by an exploding shell, and returned to his base camp confused and stammering. A doctor diagnosed shell shock, a new term used to describe the physical and/or psychological damage suffered by soldiers in combat. Though his commanding officer was skeptical, Owen was sent to a French hospital and subsequently returned to Britain, where he was checked into the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers, in Scotland.

Owen’s time at Craiglockhart—one of the most famous hospitals used to treat victims of shell shock—coincided with that of his great friend and fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who became a major influence on his work. After their treatment, both men returned to active service in France, though only Sassoon would survive the war. Owen came close, but on 4 November 1918, he was shot by a German machine gunner during an unsuccessful British attempt to bridge the Sambre Canal, near the French village of Ors. In his hometown of Shrewsbury, near the Welsh border, his mother did not receive the telegraphed news of her son’s death until after the fighting had ended. Because of his prominence as war poet, Own is well commemorated at the site of his death with a plaque dedicated by the Western Front Association (WFA) and is buried close by at the communal cemetery. Regular contributor Steve Miller has made the pilgrimage to the site and has provided the set of photos below. 

Source:  History.com

The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army

by  Gary Sheffield

Aurum Press Limited, 2011

David Woodward, Reviewer

King George V and General Haig

One of Haig's first serious biographers was his chief intelligence officer, John Charteris, who published Field Marshal Earl Haig in 1929, the year after the death of the commander-in-chief of the BEF (December 1915 to April 1919). Wellington commanded only 67,000 men in 1815 at Waterloo; a century later Haig led a force of 1,000,000 men to victory over the German Empire. Charteris suggested that "when the final record is written, the final judgment given, Haig will stand out alone and without rival as the greatest of the great soldiers who led the armies of their country to battle in the gigantic conflict waged in France and Belgium." (p. 397) 

A "final judgment" on Haig, however, appears to elude the biographer, in part because the public's image of the war has evolved over time, with Haig serving as a barometer of how the war is perceived. Haig died a national hero, but soon after the nation mourned his death, trench poets and memoirists such as Siegfried Sassoon created an image not of a necessary and heroic struggle, but one of futility and needless bloodshed. "Haig's reputation, which had risen so high," writes Gary Sheffield, "had the furthest to fall." (p. 3) And fall it did, reaching a low point during the Viet Nam War and its aftermath, a conflict considered by many to be an equal exercise in futility. Even today Haig is demonized in popular culture. A recent copy of Discover Britain (formerly Realm) includes the following quote attributed to Haig as he watched a tank demonstration in 1916: "The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous."

John Terraine did his mightiest to rescue Haig's reputation, which was being savaged by the "butchers and bunglers" school of thought. He wrote numerous books, including a study of Haig's command (1963) and an account (1981) of the last hundred days of the war when the BEF breached the Hindenburg Line. It is fair to say that Terraine had more success with historians than he did with the general public, which largely remained wedded to a hostile version like the one found in Denis Winter's Haig's Command: A Reassessment (1991), a study noteworthy for its polemical approach and questionable documentation. A scholarly work by Gerard De Groot (1988) was much more balanced, but it virtually ignored the BEF's successful offensive from early August to the Armistice that played a major role in Germany's defeat. This was also true of Tim Travers's The Killing Ground, a work of immense scholarship. Winter, Travers, and De Groot were followed by Andrew Wiest, Walter Reid, and Gary Mead, all of whom found more to applaud than criticize in Haig's command. Two British historians, Gary Sheffield and J.P. Harris, the latter the author of Douglas Haig and the First World War (2009), are the latest to try to put Haig's command into scholarly perspective. Sheffield comes well prepared to the task. He has written extensively about the Western Front, and he and John Bourne recently edited and published Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (2005).

Sheffield notes that he "deliberately refrained" from reading Harris's biography until he had the first draft of his manuscript in hand. There is much that these two formidable historians agree upon. Sheffield rightly gives Haig credit for making the BEF into a first-rate fighting machine by 1918. So does Harris, who praises Haig for keeping the throttle wide open as the BEF advanced to victory during the last hundred days of the war. They both recognize that Haig was quick to embrace the new military technology: smoke, gas, tanks, and aircraft, for example. They also attempt to put Haig in the context of the war that he had to wage, a war that could only be won by defeating the German Army, with Berlin concentrating its forces in France and Flanders, not in the outer theaters. Modern weaponry, mass armies and strong defenses made the cost of victory extraordinarily high.

At the same time Harris and Sheffield recognize Haig's failings as commander-in-chief. He was frequently overly optimistic about the results he expected his offensives might achieve; this breakthrough mentality contributed to his ignoring the cautious and less costly tactics of the French Army; he mishandled his artillery on the Somme by spreading it too thin; he frequently mismanaged battles by failing to achieve "joined-up" operations because of poor liaison between divisions, corps, and armies. Sheffield makes a case for continuing the Passchendaele offensive into November, while Harris argues that he recklessly endangered the Allied cause, both politically and militarily. Sheffield also justifies Haig's continued belief in horse soldiers. "Far from being an egregious folly, a romantic throwback to the days of Napoleon," Sheffield contends, "Haig's plan to use a cavalry-based all-arms force to exploit success and fight its way forward was a sensible response to the tactical situation." (p. 173)

Sheffield's work is highly recommended. His biography is well researched, judiciously argued, and especially well written. He concludes, "Douglas Haig might not have been the greatest military figure Britain has ever produced, but he was one of the most significant—and one of the most successful." (p. 380) One can be assured that this will not be the final word on Haig, as his command of the BEF continues to serve as a barometer of how one views World War One.

This review originally appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The Journal of the World War One Historical Society

Delayed 10 Years, the World War I Publishing Boom Is Still with Us

By Modris Eksteins from the British Library Website

War boom   

For a decade publishers, convinced that the public did not wish to read about the war, resisted war material. Then suddenly in 1928–29, everything changed. The public couldn’t get enough of the war. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, first serialized in a Berlin newspaper in December 1928, led the way. It depicted the destruction of an entire class of students, one by one, not in order to make the world a better place but simply on account of the cupidity, arrogance, and narrow-mindedness of its elders. The book became a huge international success, the first genuine modern bestseller, rushed into some 30 translations around the world and filmed by Hollywood. In Germany, Remarque was joined on the bestseller lists by Arnold Zweig, Ludwig Renn, and Ernst Glaeser; in England by the memoirists Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as the dramatist R.C. Sherriff, whose play Journey’s End had 594 performances at the Savoy and Prince of Wales theatres in London from 1929 to 1931. London buses were plastered with the words "All roads lead to Journey’s End." The notion of the "lost generation" became common coinage. "It is time," wrote the respected American critic and veteran Malcolm Cowley in 1933, the year the decorated soldier Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, "for us to admit … that all of us fought in vain." The German Führer of course disagreed. For Germany, he claimed, the war had been a spiritual victory. Yet he, too, wished to reshape the world on the basis of his own experience, his personal struggle—Mein Kampf, as he called it.

The end of history?

For many, fiction had displaced historical writing. The study of history, a dominant intellectual impulse of the late 19th century, was too constrained by rules; fiction represented freedom. In the 1920s everyone seemed to be waiting, not for the comprehensive historical account but for the supreme literary masterpiece that, like Homer’s Iliad or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, would invoke and explain all. For Ernst Kantorowicz, author of a widely applauded biography of the medieval emperor Frederick II, the genres blended. At a conference of German historians in 1930, he stirred up a hornets’ nest when he suggested that "historical scholarship and historical fiction are, despite their mutual animosity, rightly interchangeable concepts."

All is not quiet

Many of these issues, particularly the ongoing crisis of authority and the concomitant disintegration of category and definition, still resonate. Novelists and filmmakers keep being drawn to the First World War as a major source of this process of deconstruction and liberation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Timothy Findley, Jane Urquhart, Sebastian Faulks, and Pat Barker, among others, have used the war as a setting to probe contemporary concerns about art, gender, social relations, psychology, and remembrance.