Siegfried Sassoon: the Legacy of the Great War

Abstract

At the conclusion of the Great War, there was little doubt as to whom the mantle of the greatest living soldier-poet should fall: Captain Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal Welch Fusiliers had spoken more effectively than any of his contemporaries about the horrors facing the ordinary soldier in this war, which had exploded any conceptions of chivalry and left over 18 million bodies in the trenches of the Somme, the mountain passes of Italy, the steppes of Russia and the poppy fields of Belgium. Wounded painfully in the shoulder while fruitlessly leading his company of infantry into the centre of German machine gun emplacements in April of 1917, Sassoon was moved to a London hospital at Denmark Hill where he scribbled in his diary the following lines, entitled To The War Mongers’:

I am back again from hell, With loathsome thoughts to sell; Secrets of death to tell; And horrors from the abyss. Young faces bleared with blood, Sucked down in the mud, You shall hear things like this, Till the tormented slain Crawl round and once again, With limbs that twist awry Moan out their brutish pain, As the fighters pass them by. For you our battles shine With triumph half-divine; And the glory of the dead Kindles in each proud eye. But a curse is on my head, That shall not be unsaid, And the wounds in my heart are red, For I have watched them die. (Diary, I, 158–9)