"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."
-Siegfried Sassoon
A Soldiers Declaration
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon was born into a wealthy English family in 1886. As WWI started, Sassoon enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. After suffering the death of his fellow officer and his brother, Sassoon earned the nickname "Mad Jack", for his near-suicidal attempts against the German lines. After being wounded, he returned to England. Sassoon was aggravated about methods used by the British army and published A Soldiers Declaration in 1917. His anger towards war was reflected in his poetry, which both he and Wilfred used as a theraputic method to relive stress. Sassoon was diagnosed with shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart Military Hospital where Rivers treated him and where he met Wilfred Owen.
Sassoon's Medical Case Sheet Written by Rivers, Click to Enlarge
Survivors
by Siegfried Sassoon
No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're longing to go out again, -
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, -
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride....
Men who went out to battle grim and glad; Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
Counter-Attack
by Siegfried Sassoon
We'd gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved 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.
Continue to Wilfred Owen