Siegfried Sassoon and the First World War.




Siegfried Sassoon (1886 - 1967) has etched his place in history and the public imagination as the paradoxical pacifist First World War soldier and poet. His was the fate to reach maturity at a fulcrum point in British, European and indeed human history. Although probably not aware of it at the time, the significance of those events and subsequent ones, increasingly became apparent with the passage of time, and may be detected in his book, 'Sigfried's Journey', published - "in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards" - in 1945. The allusion to Wagner's opera is hard to miss.

The period to which the memoirs relate, from 1916 to 1920, is only twenty-five years prior to the publication of the book, in which the world had again been plunged into a cataclysm of destruction and suffering, impossible to quantify. It adds a certain poignancy to the stand he took in the former conflagration - a 'war to end all wars'. We now have the vantage point of a century and more than seventy years, to view the end of both.

Despite the undisturbed flow of human development, as with the accelerating vehicle, there are points at which history 'changes gear'. Arguably, 1918 and 1945 could be regarded as such. The wars that preceded them ensured that the world would never be quite the same again - scientifically, technologically, culturally. The consequences of this, twenty year old Sassoons of today have to face, as did he. The particular circumstances have changed, although the basic moral imperatives have not. The very survival of living species turns on the human capacity to learn and adapt. 

To read the book therefore is to enter a significantly different world in which although waning, Britain still regarded itself as head of a great empire, ruler of the seas and globally intellectually pre-eminent. Although conceived by Germans in the British Library, socialism was yet to become a fully fledged political force, most notably in Russia. The Marxist idea that found its moment after war, was to cause untold suffering and colour the rest of the century - as indeed it still does.


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The patriot's view of war is illustrated in Rupert Brook's 'Soldier': 

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever 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 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.

It can be contrasted with Wilfred Owen's later cynical 'Dulce et decorum est' shaped by experience of the disgusting trenches:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through 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-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the 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 and stumbling

And flound’ring 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,

Obscene as cancer, 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.

For those unfamiliar with Sassoon - if there are such - a few biographical details may be useful. 

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC, was the son of a Jewish father and Anglo-catholic mother and brought up in wealthy circumstances in a neo-gothic mansion called 'Weirleigh' in Kent. Affluence did not protect him from adversity: his parents separated when he was four, his father who had been deserted by his Iraqi family for marrying a non Jew, died of TB when only 34.

Typically for his social milieu he moved from private school to Marlborough and thence to Clare College Cambridge where he read history from 1905 - 7 but left without a degree. Maybe we see in this the character defect - or attribute, depending on your point of view - of defiance, that resulted in later non-conformity and resistance to prevailing social norms.

He began the war at the very beginning (4.8.14) as a patriotic volunteer but ended it as a reluctant soldier, after expressing publicly his disaffection with it, for which he was compulsorily hospitalised.

In some ways we may view Sassoon as almost lucky as regards the war. His entry was first delayed by a riding accident in which he broke his arm. In November 1915 following the death of his brother Hamo in the Gallipoli campaign he was sent to France as a Second Lieutenant where he demonstrated exceptional personal bravery. He was nick-named 'Mad Jack' by his men for his near suicidal exploits, although he inspired dedicated confidence from them. 

Soon after he records in his own words: "I found myself deposited at No. 5 General Service Hospital, Somerville College, Oxford. My nine months in France....had been ended by some sort of gastric fever. It was impossible not to feel intensely thankful that I was absolved from taking any further part in the Battle of the Somme." 

In that campaign nearly 420,000 British soldiers were killed, injured or missing, including it must be said several of my grandparent's siblings.

At the end of this spell of convalescent leave he declined to return to the front. He instead composed a pacifist declaration which was read out in Parliament and gained widespread publicity. In it he stated his opinion that, "the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest". Not unexpectedly this did not go down at all well with the government, but in place of Court Martial, he was hospitalised in Scotland for 'shell shock', which effectively silenced him and kept him for a time out of the public eye, as well as the war.

Notably at this time he was thrown together with Wilfred Owen who was also recuperating at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh. Owen was from a completely different social background and one gets the feeling that Sassoon made this rather obvious when they first met. However as time went by, impressed with Owen's obvious talent, the friendship grew more profound. Owen returned to France and was killed on the 4th November 1918, aged 25 and only a week before the Armistice.

Sassoon made suggestions in the drafting of Owen's memorable 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' as follows: 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Sassoon was eventually persuaded to return to the war, first out of danger in Palestine, and then back to the Front in July 1918. After this period of enforced absence, he was awarded the Military Medal on the 27th July 1916 for his courage and determination for bringing in the killed and wounded. However he was almost immediately wounded again, when he was shot in the head by a fellow British soldier who had mistaken him for a German.  As a result, he spent the remainder of the war in Britain where he relinquished his commission on health grounds on 12 March 1919.

Despite his obvious - reckless even - bravery, Sassoon is remembered principally for his ethical and public stand against the horrors and stupidity of war and for its depiction in both prose and poetry. Despite injury and sickness, he unlike millions of others, survived it all.

To read his 1945 memoir of 1916 England, one is transported to a different day and age. He refers to reading at home to the light of candles in preference to gas or electricity, and to the reassuring tick of the 18th Century Grandfather Clock, far removed from the shattering noise of heavy artillery. His contacts in Cambridge and elsewhere, are a Who's Who of the great and the good, not open to someone like Wilfred Owen. This we are continually reminded was - and perhaps still is - a class-ridden society, that talent and celebrity could only go so far to mitigate.

It may be worth quoting a passage to illustrate the point: "Dining in Hall at St John's I sat between Dr. Rivers and Dr. Liveing. Since his silver beard was tinged with brown I assumed him to be in his seventies. .....  In fact Dr. Liveing was in his 92nd year. He was a very distinguished scientist.... devoted to chemistry and had been appointed the first Professor of such in Cambridge in 1861.  Dr. Liveing remained active for several more years... until three years short of his century he died as a result of being knocked down by a lady on a bicycle. Talking to Rivers later on I remarked that I had met more Fellows of the Royal Society than in all of my previous year."  

Note how relatively recent - effectively two life times - is the academic study of chemistry and how far it has advanced in the human understanding of materials, for good or ill, in that brief time.

There follows a list of names and subjects: Dr Bonney, geologist; Dr Seward, botanist; Dr Haddon, eminent anthropologist; Sir Horace Darwin, "who specialised in being human and delightful"; Sir Joseph Larmor, mathematics and Natural Philosophy; Cyril, Rootham, composer. He had previously visited Thomas Hardy at his home in Dorset and was friends with Rupert Brooke and many other of the era's notable literati and famous. He also had a brief spell supporting Philip Snowden (later to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and enobled 1st Viscount Snowden, PC) in his unsucessful 1920 election campaign on an anti-war ticket.

Now reading the names we have to wonder how many of even the elite of the period are recalled or feted for their contribution to the sum of human knowledge or wisdom? We are reminded that all but a tiny proportion of the earth's population are destined for total obscurity, to be remembered by just a few for a short while, even if very lucky. That is the fate of us all. Yet the desire for transient fame infects many.

In the meantime we all should come to an opinion on the human capacity to incite and engage in warfare, that still to this day blights humanity. We need to realise that most violence in the world originates with governments and those in positions of power, often prepared to even fabricate the circumstances to make it possible! We cannot afford to be neutral on such a subject and in this regard Sassoon remains an iconic inspiration to us all.

As a summation of the ultimate futility of war, can we do better than this:


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As a summation of the ultimate futility of war, can we do better than this blank verse?

Counter-Attack by Siegfried Sassoon.

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;

He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;

And then, of course, they started with five-nines

Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.

Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst

Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror

And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...

Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...

And started blazing wildly ... then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

See: https://www.tes.com/news/start-siegfrieds-journeybook-weekbooks

The work goes on:


VETERANS FOR PEACE UK POLICY GROUP REPORT SATURDAY 30 JUNE 2018

Statement of Purpose: We, veterans of the armed forces having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace. To this end: a. We will work toward increasing public awareness of the costs of war b. We will work to restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations c. We will work to end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons To achieve these goals, members of Veterans for Peace pledge to use non-violent means and to maintain an organization that is both democratic and open with the understanding that all members are trusted to act in the best interests of the group for the larger purpose of world peace. We urge all veterans who share this vision to join us. (Ben Griffin)