The Declaration could not have
come from a more unlikely source. Born into a wealthy upper-middle class family
in 1886, Sassoon had studied history and literature at Clare
College, Cambridge, before dropping out to pursue writing in rural England.[2]
Later, unhappy with his solitary life, Sassoon sought adventure; a day
after war was declared between Britain and Germany on 4 August 1914, he joined
the army. After a year of officer training, Sassoon left for France as a
Second Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
Throughout his time in France, Sassoon sustained numerous wounds and garnered
widespread recognition for his bravery and selfless action. Only one year
before he issued his Declaration, he received
the Military Cross, Britain’s newest and second highest decoration, for
“conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches.” Sassoon had
ventured into No Man’s Land again and again for three and a half hours, under
rifle fire and grenade explosions, in order to save wounded men and collect the dead.[3] As
this incident demonstrates, Sassoon felt a dedication to his fellow soldiers
that went far beyond mere comradeship.
Ironically, Sassoon’s Declaration
was another example of his strong connection to his men. Sassoon intended the Declaration to be a message to the
people of Britain, who he wanted to educate about the horrors of the war, which
had been hidden from them by an extensive propagandist media network controlled
by politicians and media tycoons. Sassoon, who suffered in France for almost
two years before he issued his statement, could not abide the British people’s
ignorance to the truth of the war and the realities of the front for the
typical soldier. The horrors needed to be known; the soldiers needed a voice.
Sassoon himself had already been through the fires of hell: intense loss and
sorrow had brought upon complete disillusionment and anger towards the British
people, which then escalated into a fiery hatred of the British Government and
media. Ultimately, his experience of war led him to deem his Declaration not only prudent, but
necessary. Yet, only six months after it was released, Sassoon continued to
fight the war willingly and without complaints; ultimately, he found something
worth fighting for. His story, however, is not only interesting because of his
personal experiences. Sassoon’s journey through the war, and his writing about
it, reflect the collective cultural, social, and emotional experiences of many
British soldiers in the Great War. His writings enabled the voices of those British
soldiers to be heard.
“So Red a Road”
Sassoon, like many British soldiers, went to France believing in Romantic
conceptions of war popularized by pre-war British society. Upon enlisting in
the Army in 1914, many men believed that War was a Romantic adventure. The
British people had not seen armed conflict since the Second Boer War in 1902; a
relatively small affair. The Crimean war, the last major European war, was over
sixty years in the past. Due to this historical distance, naïve and Romantic
assumptions rooted in the cultural ideals of the time were pervasive in Britain.
British historian A.J.P Taylor aptly summarized this phenomenon. “No man in the
prime of life knew what war was like. All imagined that it would be an affair
of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.”[4] Even
the language of the time reflected this Romantic, grandiose and naîve
perception of war. In his historical analysis, The Great War and Modern Memory, historian Paul Fussell describes
pre-war, Romantic language: in 1914 Britain, a friend was “a comrade;” and the
enemy was “the foe” or “the host;” a horse was a “steed;” danger was “peril;”
the army was “the legion;” the dead were “the fallen;” bravery was “valor;” and
to conquer was “to vanquish.”[5] Such
a vocabulary presented a vision of the coming war that appealed to British men
so highly that over 300,000 enlisted in the first month of the war alone. [6]
They truly believed that glory and adventure lay in France, waiting to be
seized. Fussell comments,
The Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world,
where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed
permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant. It
was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that ‘abstract words
such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names
of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments
and the dates.’ In the summer of 1914 no one would have understood what on
earth he was talking about.[7]
Sassoon would have comprehended no better than anyone else. Although he
volunteered for service in August 1914 as a private, he saw no combat until
late 1915. By then, he had received an officer’s training and risen to the rank
of Second Lieutenant, a junior officer rank. [8]
Sassoon’s first-rate education and his status as a member of the upper-middle
class afforded him the promotion.[9]
Showing favoritism based on education or social status- often intrinsically
related- was typical in the British Expeditionary Force. Connected and highly
educated members of the elite Upper class received ideal positions, far away
from combat in High Command headquarters. Similarly, middle class citizens with
secondary educations were often promoted to junior officer positions. Unlike
their senior officer counterparts, however, junior officers were stationed in
the trenches. There were of course benefits to their commission: junior
officers received a far higher income, retained a personal servant (known as a
Batman), and ate and slept in the officer’s billet.[10] However,
even these advantages offered little respite from the tribulations of the
front. Artillery shells targeted both officer and soldier; and officers offered
a more tempting target to German snipers.[11]
On the day of battle, junior officers were not only required to accompany their
men into battle, but were expected to lead them into the fray.[12] A
junior officer, therefore, faced no fewer daily challenges than members of the
working class. The suffering war was, in many ways, the catalyst that broke
down the class-system of pre-war England: both common soldier and junior
officer experienced the horrors of the trenches together.
However, before arriving in France, Sassoon was ignorant to these horrors,
and believed in the glorified Romanticism of the war. In his year of training,
Sassoon wrote many poems, reflecting his naïve understanding of warfare.[13] Shortly
before he left for France, Sassoon wrote “Absolution.”
The anguish of the
earth absolves our eyes
Till beauty shines in all that we can
see.
War is our
scourge; yet war has made us wise
And, fighting for our freedom, we are
free
Horrors of wounds and anger at the
foe,
And loss of things desired; all these
must pass.
We are the happy
legion, for we know
Time’s but a golden wind that shakes
the grass.
There was an hour
when we were loath to part
From life we longed to share no less
than others.
Now, having claimed this heritage of
heart,
What need we more, my comrades and my
brothers? [14]
Upon his arrival in France, Sassoon continued to write such Romantic
poetry. In Goodbye To All That, the
1927 autobiography of Sassoon’s good friend and fellow officer and poet Robert
Graves, Graves recounts his first meeting with Sassoon. “I had one or two
drafts in my pocketbook and showed them to Siegfried. He frowned and said that
war should not be written about in such a realistic way. In return, he showed
me some of his own poems… Siegfried had not yet been in the trenches. I told
him, in my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.”[15]
Indeed, Sassoon’s poetry were to change drastically during his first year at
the front.
For all soldiers, of course, the realities of the trenches were not what
they had imagined. Daily life was an almost constant bombardment of danger and misery.
Veteran James Lovegrove described life in the trenches.
There was so much illness of every sort amongst us. It was truly hell on
earth. Lice, rats, trench foot—that’s gangrenous condition that the men got
through standing in wet mud that we lived in. And trench mouth, where the gums
rot and you lose your teeth. And of course dead bodies everywhere. Also the
mental fear of the dreaded sniper who’d take your head off in a flash if you so
much as looked over the top of the trench...[16]
Paul Fussell
states, “The stench of rotten flesh was over everything, hardly repressed by
the chloride of lime sprinkled on particularly offensive sites. Dead horses and
dead men—and parts of both—were sometimes not buried for months and often
simply became an element of parapets and trench walls. You could smell the
front line miles before you could see it.”[17] Even
without the horror of combat, daily life on the front, was an incredibly
difficult trial.
However, the terrible effects of loss made the realities of daily life
even harsher. In March, Sassoon suffered a deep emotional blow that would prove
to be the start of a long process of disillusionment. On 19 March, Sassoon
received news that David Thomas, his good friend and most beloved comrade, had
been killed only a few miles from Sassoon’s station near Morlancourt, France.[18] Thomas’
death was devastating; Sassoon had truly loved him.[19] For
months afterwards, Sassoon had to remind himself that his friend was gone. Some
diary entries simply begin, “Tommy dead….”[20]
Others end, “And Tommy’s dead.”[21] Sassoon’s
poetry from this time is saturated with imagery of loss, pain, and grieving. On
30 March, Sassoon wrote “A Working Party.” The poem ends, “And as he dropped
his head, the instant split / His startled life with lead, and all went out. /
That’s how a lad goes west when at the front—/ Snapped in a moment’s merciful
escape, / While the dun year goes lagging on its course / With widows grieving
down the streets in black, / And faded mothers dreaming of bright sons / That
grew to men, and listed for the war, / And left a photograph to keep their
place.”[22] His
loss of Tommy was a wound that could never truly heal. Ultimately, Sassoon’s
loss drastically shifted his perception and understanding of the war.
Of course, Sassoon was not alone. No soldier at the Front, let alone
Sassoon, was prepared for the loss the war would bring. “You lost people every
day,” commented one British soldier succinctly.[23] Some
soldiers watched entire groups of friends and comrades die in a single
incident. War veteran Harry Patch lost six of his best friends in one shell explosion.
The experience was understandably traumatic. “We were a little team together,
and those men who were carrying the ammunition were blown to pieces. I reacted
very badly. It was like losing a part of my life. It upset me more than
anything. We had only been together for four months, but with hell going on
around us, it seemed like a lifetime.”[24] In
a letter to his family dated 28 May, 1915, officer Lieutenant John Allen of the
Worcestershire Regiment, then new to the Front, wrote, “It has been
heart-breaking seeing men one had got to like only in a day or so killed—or
worse, receive wounds of which they die. It has been bad enough for me. It is
unspeakably worse for those who have been their soldier friends, who have
drilled, slept, eaten, worked, and now died together.”[25] Sassoon
himself lost the entirety of his original company over the course of the war. Historian
Richard Emden comments, “A dead body was just that, a dead body, and you were
just glad it wasn’t you. Apparent indifference by men to the fate of fellow
soldiers should not be surprising…The death of a close friend was entirely
different… The loss of one or more of these friends would be a severe blow.
Burying these dead…was a traumatic experience and often haunted survivors.[26]
Emden also claims that upon the death of friends, soldiers would often
run rampant with a lust for vengeance and blood, or become overwhelmed them
with misery and despair.[27]
Sassoon’s reaction to his loss was a combination of both rage and depression. From
March to July 1916, Sassoon’s grief over Tommy’s death drove him to engage in extremely
hazardous night “raids” into No Man’s Land to scrounge for supplies, take
prisoners, or gather intelligence. Few soldiers ever went out on such missions;
the risks were simply too great. If the enemy noticed a raider, even for a
second, an alarm went up and flares were sent into the sky, revealing his
position. Death was almost certain. Yet, Sassoon went out almost every night
for months, and described these near suicidal ventures as “great fun,” and
“most exhilarating.”[28] His
company began to refer to him as “Mad Jack,” and he became famous for his insane
bravery.[29]
While they were perhaps right to admire his bravery, it is clear that
Sassoon no longer cared whether he lived or died. He had become controlled by a
vengeful wrath; his naïve vision of the war as a glorious patriotic adventure
was replaced with a desire for blood. As Sassoon put it, he fought purely for
“Hun chasing…”[30]
In his diary entry for 1 April, Sassoon wrote, “I used to say I couldn’t kill
anyone in this war; but since they shot Tommy I would gladly stick a bayonet
into a German by daylight. Someone told me a year ago that love, sorrow, and
hate were things I had never known (things which every poet should know!). Now I’ve known love… and
grief… and hate has come also, and the lust to kill.”[31] The
hunger for murder was overpowering; all other desires were secondary to
Sassoon’s furious rage. In a poem written 2 April 1916, Sassoon wrote, “In my
heart there’s cruel war that must be waged / In darkness vile with moans and
bleeding bodies maimed ; A gnawing hunger drives me, wild to be assuaged, / And
bitter lust chuckles within me unashamed.”[32]
But Sassoon’s fury soon drowned in blood. Only two month later, on 1
July, Sassoon and his company plunged into the Battle of the Somme, one of the
most vicious and bloody British offensives of the war. The Somme is famously
known as a quintessential Great War battle; barely any ground was exchanged,
and the casualties were astronomical. The horrors that soldiers experienced
were arguably among of the worst in the war. Veteran W. A. Quinton wrote about
a gas attack on the Somme.
Black in the face, their tunics and shirts fronts torn open at the necks
in their last desperate fight for breath, many of them lay quite still while
others were still wriggling and kicking in the agonies of the most awful death
I have ever seen… One poor devil was tearing at his throat with his hands. I
doubt if he knew, or felt, that he had only one hand, and that the other was
just a stump where the hand should have been. This stump he worked around his
throat as if the hand was still there, and the blood from it was streaming over
his bluish-black face and neck. A few minutes later and he was still except for
the occasional shudders as he breathed his last.[33]
Others
witnessed similar horrors. One man recalled his first attack on the Somme.
The first
time you go over it’s all a blur. One minute you’re standing waiting and
shaking like a leaf, the next you’re over and running like mad, head on into
machine gun fire, with shells screeching and bursting overhead. I set off with
me mates all around me... I can’t find the words to describe how bad it was.
Two of my best pals were killed before we’d covered fifty yards. I saw one
shell burst some way off to one side of me… It blew the men directly beneath it
to pieces… Even the big deep puddles on the ground were turning red with blood.
[34]
Paul Fussell summarized the first day of battle,
By 7:31 the
mere six German divisions facing them [the British] had carried their machine
guns upstairs from the deep dugouts where during the bombardment they had
harbored safely—and even comfortably—and were hosing the attackers walking
toward them in orderly rows or puzzling before the still uncut wire. Out of the
110,000 who attacked, 60,000 were killed or wounded on this one day, the record
so far. Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the
wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.[35]
As Fussell mentions, the British themselves famously suffered almost sixty
thousand casualties on 1 July alone. The entirety of the “Great Offensive,” as
the British media dubbed it, saw over 400,000 British casualties before its
close at the beginning of November.[36]
Sassoon’s company luckily participated in only a few days of the attack.
In those days, however, Sassoon witnessed horrors he had never imagined.[37] The
atrocities were too much for him to handle. Watching dozens of his friends and
subordinates die in the poorly planned and unsuccessful attacks of July took
its toll. His thirst for combat quickly faded. Sadness and confusion replaced
his rage and bloodlust. Very suddenly, reality set in. Since Tommy’s death in
March, Sassoon had been blinded by his quest for vengeance; he had only lived
to kill. But what was he really fighting for? What of the others at his side,
fighting the same war? In his anger, he had seldom considered the suffering of
his fellow men; he was too lost in his own despair. But after the horrible
events of the Somme, Sassoon could no longer ignore their pain.
More specifically, however, he could no longer justify it. Popular
opinion held that the war was in defense of democracy, liberty, and honor.
However, none of these values were important or tangible to those on the front.
They were vague concepts and ideas, and Sassoon could not see how they necessitated
or validated the suffering borne by the British soldiers. Very quickly, Sassoon
became disillusioned with the war and the reasons for it being waged. Sassoon’s
poems of this time reflect this stark disillusionment with the war and the
pointless agony borne by his men. On 12 August, he drafted a poem in his diary,
sarcastically entitled “For England.”
He ducked and cowered
and almost yelped with fear,
thought ‘Christ! I
wish they wouldn’t burst so near!’
Then stumbled
on—afraid of turning back—
Till something
smashed his neck; he chocked and swore;
A glorious end;
killed in the big attack…[38]
Sassoon’s sarcasm is palpable: the soldier’s end is not “glorious,” but
pointless. That same day, Sassoon also wrote “Via Crucis.”
Mud and rain and
wretchedness and blood’.
Why should jolly
soldier-boys complain?
God made these before
the roofless Flood—
Mud and rain.
Mangling crumps and
bullets through the brain,
Jesus never guessed
them when He died.
Jesus had a purpose
for His pain,
Ay, like abject
beasts we shed our blood,
Often asking if we
die in vain...[39]
Here, Sassoon’s message is clear. The turning point of the poem, “Jesus
had a purpose for His pain…” reflects Sassoon’s extreme disillusionment with
the reasons for the anguish and death of the British soldier. At this time, Sassoon
quoted Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts several
times in his diaries and memoirs as an apt expression of this disillusionment.
I have beheld the
agonies of war
Through many a weary
season; seen enough
To make me hold that
scarcely any goal
Is worth the reaching
by so red a road.”[40]
These feelings of pointlessness and injustice merely brought Sassoon’s
anger and misery into sharper focus. His friends were dying all around him, and
he found no reason to excuse their suffering.
Sassoon’s sentiments were not unique; many soldiers questioned the
reasons for the misery and death on the front. The lyrics to a popular song
sung by British soldiers went, “We’re here / Because / We’re here / Because /
We’re here/ Because we’re here.”[41] Another
song reflected a similar idea. “Oh I’m Henry Dubb / And I won’t go to war /
Because I don’t know / what they’re all fighting for…”[42] One
veteran later commented, “We fought because we were told to… Why should the
British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I
never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those lives lost for a war
finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that? It’s just an argument
between two governments.”[43]
Others put it more bluntly. Gunner Alfred Finnigan, of the Royal Field
Artillery, angrily exclaimed, “The First World War was idiotic. It started out
idiotic and it stayed idiotic. It was damned silly, all of it.”[44] Roland
Leighton, in a letter to his fiancé, famous British author Vera Brittain, described
the injustice of the war:
…blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of
youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory
or another’s Lust of Power. Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden
thing… look at… this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell,
supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered
clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a
thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a fetid heap of
hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that
Victory is worth the death of even one of these?[45]
In 1917, Sassoon’s friend, student, and fellow
officer and poet Wilfred Owen, wrote “Dolce Et Decorum Est.”[46]
…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.[47]
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.[47]
The
suffering and the dying of the war brought most British soldiers, including
Sassoon, to conclude that no political, social or cultural motives could justify
the cost.
A Callous Complacence
Sassoon’s own inability to validate the war became only one small part of
his discontent with it. In August 1916, while recovering in England from a bad
fever, Sassoon had another experience that changed his perception of the war
and its meaning. On 12 August, Sassoon visited his Uncle Hamo and his friend
Mr. Horniman.[48]
While with them, conversation turned to the war, and Sassoon was shocked to
discover the ignorance and stubbornness of their opinions. In his non-fictional
memoir, Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon
describes the encounter.
How had Uncle Hamo and Mr. Horniman managed, I wondered, to make the war
seem so different from what it really was? It wasn’t possible to imagine
oneself even hinting to them, that the Somme Battle was—to put it mildly—an
inhuman and beastly business. One had to behave nicely about it to them,
keeping up a polite pretence that to have taken part in it was a glorious and
acceptable adventure. They must know what it was costing in lives of course;
the casualty lists had told them that. But when Uncle Hamo’s well-meant remark
had reminded me of our battalion raid in the Fricourt sector I had felt that no
explanation of mine could ever reach my elders—that they weren’t capable of
wanting to know the truth. Their attitude was to insist that it was splendid to
be in the front-line…[49]
While the
elderly men’s perspectives on the war were perhaps insensitive, Sassoon gleaned
that the two men simply did not know better, as the horrific aspects of the war
“never got into the newspapers.”[50]
Sassoon was correct. In truth, a group of influential political, military,
and media moguls controlled the British media’s output during the war. From its
outbreak in August 1914, the media portrayed the war as a Romantic adventure to
defend beautiful mother England; a once in a lifetime opportunity that men of
all walks of life were honor bound to seize, enjoy, and participate in. There
was neither an honest acknowledgement of the war’s horror, nor an exposure of
the vast scale of misery and anguish on the Western Front. [51]
Such censorship and manipulation of war information was known in Government
circles as “cooking the news” and was done (even in groups which acknowledged
its occurrence) under the guise of “protecting the public” and “keeping support
for the war.”[52]
Knowledge of and participation in the manipulations went to the very pinnacle
of power in the British government. On 19 September 1916, Lloyd George, the
British Prime minister from December 1916 to 1922, admitted to his close advisor
Lord Riddell that, “The public knows only half the story. They read of the
victories; the cost is concealed.”[53]
In 1917, he commented further, “If the people really knew… the war would be
stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t—and can’t know. The correspondents
don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.”[54] As
George mentions, the correspondents did not write the truth; many battles or
defeats were simply not mentioned by the media.[55]
Historian Trevor Wilson comments, “A good deal of First World War propaganda,
certainly, was… founded, by omission if not commission, on falsehood.”[56] Veteran
Cecil Withers commented, “When the war was going on, its horrors were kept
quiet and the full display of dreadful things only came out afterwards. These
things were carefully hidden at the time. There was wartime censorship and the
most grueling things were concealed.”[57] Another
veteran claimed, “It looked well in the papers, a report that our troops had
advanced. They seldom said how many yards for how many men.”[58]
Yet, for all the propaganda, the public had the opportunity to glean the
cost of the war. Casualty reports, known as “Rolls of Honour” were often
extremely accurate, and released in every paper. These reports were so
accurate, in fact, that soldiers on the front, who of course knew just how
badly the news was cooked, seldom read anything else. The validity of this
publicly released data, of course, meant that the public was aware of one
thing: death. As the veteran above noted, the people never really knew how many
yards had been exchanged for how many lives. But, from the casualty reports, they
could see how roughly many men recently died. Historian Trevor Wilson notes in
his historical analysis, The Myriad Faces
of War, that despite the media’s tactic of misinformation, “…two things
were evident to British civilians. One was the fearful cost.” [59] The cost was indeed fearful; and certainly available
for realization. From the declaration of war in August 1914 to the time Sassoon
came home on convalescence in 1916, hundreds of thousands of men had died.[60] Therefore,
the more general cost of the war was likely something which the public could
have realized, had they not been swept away by the relentless tide of Romantic
nationalism presented by the British media.
To Sassoon, then, Hamo and Horniman’s dedication to the false Romanticism
presented by propagandist reporting, even in the face of the information
provided by casualty reports, was shocking.[61]
How could such intelligent men have lacked the critical thought and
understanding needed to read the signs and dig past the lies and omissions of
the media? Sassoon began to see the British people as gullible fools, not only
willing but wanting to be tricked
into thinking that the war was honorable, just and good; even as their loved
ones perished pointlessly in battles of mass destruction. He could not abide
the glorification, idealization and devotion that the British people exhibited
towards what they could see to be the
wholesale slaughter of British men. In a poem written around this time,
entitled “The Fathers,” Sassoon poignantly addresses the painful ignorance of
the British people.
Snug at the club two
fathers sat,
Gross, goggle-eyed,
and full of chat.
One of them said: ‘My
eldest lad
writes cheery letters
from Bagdad.
But Arthur’s getting
all the fun
At Arras with his
nine-inch gun.’
‘Yes, ‘ wheezed the
other, ‘ that’s the luck!
My boy’s quite
broken-hearted, stuck
In England training
all this year…”[62]
The foolishness of the old men in believing that their sons were having “fun”
clearly demonstrates Sassoon’s disgust with the ignorance of the British public.
The truth, however, was not as simple as Sassoon’s disillusionment led
him to believe. In fact, the media’s method was so effective because it
manipulated the British preconceptions of war, popular before 1914. While
British soldiers had already witnessed events that disproved their initial, Romantic perceptions of war, British
civilians had not. They had no reason to abandon the Romantic ideas they were
taught to believe, especially with a media system constantly supporting those
beliefs, and soldiers who never dissented. They were also easy lies to swallow;
if the papers were accurate, the deaths of family members and friends on the
Front, however many, were not horrible and meaningless ends, but noble
sacrifices for country and loved ones. The media constantly reinforced these
sentiments.[63]
Indeed, by 1916, most soldiers had begun to understand the British
people’s vast ignorance regarding the war. Returning from France for leave or convalescence,
most English soldiers realized the effectiveness of the media’s censorship. In
a letter to his mother, dated 6 November 1916, Major Francis Sainthill Anderson
wrote, “I now go farther still in my opinion of the War—I won’t express it on
paper, because being a soldier by profession it would not be considered
suitable—Your attitude is wrong like
everyone else’s at home, who don’t realize it… Europe is mad and no one
realizes it.”[64]
A popular song sung by British soldiers on marches went, “Nobody knows how
tired we are, / Tired we are, / Tired we are; / Nobody knows how tired we are,
/ And nobody seems to care.”[65] Veteran
Richard Beasley explained, “You see, back then there was no TV nor radio, only
newspapers. So the press ‘made’ public opinion… The whole nation was up in
arms…”[66] Another
veteran claimed that the British people had no idea what was going on in
France, and that the media was keeping it that way.[67] The
misinformation accepted by the British people during the war was, to these men,
unimaginable.
Ends Evil, and Unjust
Sassoon’s experience with Uncle Hamo and Mr. Horniman in August drove him
to search for answers: how could the British people be so gullible as to
believe such things, and so lazy as to not see through them? Who was in charge
of the lies? With these questions in mind, Sassoon set out to find the truth.
What he discovered, however, took him down a radical road.
Early in August 1916, while on convalescence due to sickness, Sassoon met
Lady Ottoline Morrell, an English aristocrat and outspoken liberal with
connections to the most important pacifists of the day. Upon this encounter,
Lady Ottoline invited Sassoon to stay at her home, Garsington Manor. He
dutifully agreed.[68] During
his visit, some time between 11 and 20 September (Sassoon’s journals from 13
August to 23 December are curiously missing), Ottoline threw a small dinner
party, attended by many prominent British pacifists. That night, Sassoon enjoyed
an evening discussion with famous philosopher Bertrand Russell and Lady
Ottoline’s husband Philip Morrell, a far left wing politician and member of
parliament. [69]
Sassoon wrote about the meeting many years later in Siegfried’s Journey. “The war was described as being waged for
unworthy motives and it was the duty of the courageous minority to stand out
against the public opinion, which supported its continuance and prolongation.”[70]
More importantly, Phillip told Sassoon that he had received information from
one of his many “parliamentary connections” that “the Germans had made
tentative peace overtures through neutral channels,” and the British government
had declined to pursue them.[71] It
was a crushing blow to Sassoon.[72]
In Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon
comments, “That this should have an unsettling effect on my mind was not
surprising. It was the beginning of a process of disillusionment which
afterwards developed into a fomentation of confused and inflamed ideas…”[73] To
be sure, Sassoon had never approved of the government’s role in the war;
especially their intentional manipulation of information. However, he had thought
that this manipulation was merely a tool used to keep support for a war that politicians
believed was being fought for moral and justice reasons. Morrell’s evidence,
however, made Sassoon reconsider their motivation.[74] On
4 January 1917, Sassoon quoted a Copenhagen newspaper article in his journal.
“’The sons of Europe are being crucified in the barbed wire enclosures because
the misguided masses are shouting for it. They do not know what they do, and
the statesmen wash their hands. They dare not deliver them from their martyr’s
death.’” Sassoon comments, “Is this true?”[75]
The article made Sassoon consider: Were British politicians intentionally continuing the war?
Sassoon’s semi-fictional memoir, Memoirs
of An Infantry Officer, reveals more. In a meeting with Thornyton Tyrell
(Sassoon’s pseudonym for Bertrand Russell), Tyrell asks “’It amounts to this,
doesn’t it—that you have ceased to believe what you are told about the objects
for which you supposed yourself to be fighting?’” and Sassoon agrees.[76] [77] Simply
put, Sassoon had begun to believe that the government was lying about its
reasons for waging war against Germany.
In his memoir, Sassoon also relates a slightly augmented account of his
talk with Morrell. In this version, Morrell reveals the additional information that
the British government’s “aims were essentially acquisitive; what we were
fighting for was the Mesopotamian Oil Wells.”[78]
Of course, no member of the British government would ever admit to
intentionally prolonging the war for the acquisition of oil, and it is unclear
whether or not this account is fictional. It is possible that Morrell did say such things, and that Sassoon
immediately believed in a political scandal to continue the war for oil. Whatever
really happened, the account does
demonstrate Sassoon’s thoughts at this time: after his meeting with Russell,
Sassoon began to believe that there was a large scale, government conspiracy to
continue the war. Later in his memoir, Sassoon writes that he had jotted his
beliefs on a piece of scrap paper. He wrote that the “fighting men are victims of conspiracy among (a) politicians; (b)
military caste; (c) people who are making money out of the War…”[79]
While Sassoon does not state what kind of conspiracy he imagined, we can
gather from Morrell’s Oil Well claim in his memoir, as well as evidence from
his diaries, that the conspiracy was one for wealth and power.[80]
While Sassoon had believed that
British politicians and media tycoons manipulated the news in order to keep
popular support for the war, it now seemed that these men were sustaining the
war for sinister and self-interested reasons.
Quite suddenly, everything became clear to him. His men on the front were
not only dying pointlessly, but were also being orchestrated and used, like
pawns on a chess-board; all for the financial and political benefit of a few, influential
men. Perhaps the military and government had even colluded to create the
current stagnation of the war. His feelings of disillusionment and frustration
turned to disbelief, rage, sadness and disgust. In a poem entitled “Fight to A
Finish,” Sassoon wrote,
The boys came back.
Bands played and flags were flying,
And Yellow-Pressmen
thronged the sunlit street
To cheer the
soldiers who’d refrained from dying,
And hear the music
of returning feet.
‘Of all the thrills and
ardours War has brought,
This moment is the
finest.’ (So they thought.)
Snapping their
bayonets on to charge the mob,
Grim Fusiliers broke
ranks with glint of steel,
At last the boys had
found a cushy job.
I heard the
Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;
And with my trusty
bombers turned and went
To clear those
Junkers out of Parliament. [81]
The hatred
in Sassoon’s poem is palpable. It is astonishing that such a work was published
at all; pro-war aristocrats, media tycoons (the “yellow-pressmen,”) or
Parliament members could not have taken the murderous message of the poem in
good humor. However, it was
published, and Sassoon’s message was
clear. His fury had finally found a distinct set of enemies on which to focus.
Ironically, his newfound foes were not the Germans in France, but politicians
and aristocrats who were betraying the British “side.” In June, Sassoon
bravely- but somewhat foolishly- lashed out.
On 15 June 1917, he wrote his “Soldier’s Declaration.” It reads,
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military
authority, because I believe 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 have seen and endured the
suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong 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
practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous
complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of
agonies they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to
realize.[82]
This statement was the remarkable culmination of Sassoon’s
disillusionment with the war. Aspects of every one of his most influential
experiences and cynical sentiments can be seen in it: his belief that the war
was “evil and unjust,” an opinion spawned by his loss of Tommy in March 1916
and the events at the Somme between July and August 1916; his disgust at the
“callous complacence” of the British people, gathered from his experience with
Uncle Hamo while on convalescence in August 1916; and his final conclusion that
the war was “being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end
it,” derived from the claims of Philip Morrell at Garsington Manor in September
1916 and his subsequent convalescence from until February 1917. Yet, what is
far more remarkable about this statement is that it also reveals the common
suffering of the British soldier. In his one-page protest, Sassoon managed to
express the truth of the British soldier’s anguish in France, their feelings of
injustice about the war, and their outrage at the ignorance of the British people.
However, the Declaration also
highlights Sassoon’s deviation from the experience of the typical British
soldier: it is unlikely that any British forces on the front were aware of the
September, 1916 peace “overtures,” or believed that the war was being
deliberately prolonged. If they were, none revealed their knowledge with a
protest like Sassoon’s. Additionally, few other soldiers in the war were as expressive
of protest or disillusionment as Sassoon. In his memoir, Sassoon claims that
Morrell once said, “if once the common soldier became articulate the War
couldn’t last a month.”[83] The
“common” soldier, however, was not
articulate. Most were uneducated and untrained in the ways of formal rhetoric
or verbal expression. Even among those officers who had such education, only a
handful actively expressed their discontent and disillusionment with the war
through prose or poetry. [84]
None of these officers claimed to believe in a political conspiracy, or issued
formal protests to the war. Some
soldiers chose alternate forms of protest and refused to fight, but, the
British executed most of these men for ‘cowardice’, a blanket term used to
describe both desertion and refusals.
From 1914 to 1918, over three thousand British men were executed in this way.[85]
However, it is impossible for historians to determine the exact reasons for
these men’s refusal or inability to fight. As such, Sassoon’s declaration stands
entirely unique in both intention and execution. Yet, this deviation from the
experience of the soldiers who remained in the trenches eventually brought Sassoon
to an understanding of the war, which many other soldiers acquired by
alternative means.
Sassoon knew that he had risked his life with his statement. His Declaration was a willful act of
disobedience and treasonous under the provisions of the Defense of the Realm
Act, a restrictive measure enacted by Parliament at the outbreak of the war.
Had the release of the Declaration
gone as Sassoon planned, the military would have likely ordered his immediate
imprisonment and execution. This brutal result, however, was Sassoon’s goal. He
wanted to cause a public scene in order to make the British people realize their
own “callous complacence” regarding the war. He wanted the suffering of the
British soldier to come to light, even if it required his death. In Memoirs of An Infantry Officer, Sassoon
comments that he “had, so to speak, received the call,” and that he had sought
out the “shortest road to martyrdom.”[86]
He also claims that he “ didn’t care two damns what they did to me as long as I
got the thing off my chest…”[87]
His protest, therefore, was not only an act of supreme understanding, but also an
expression of his real and tangible dedication to the lives and safety of his
fellow soldiers.
Sassoon waited almost a month to publish the statement. When he finally
sent the Declaration to his
commanding officer, on 4 July, he also mailed it to over fourteen other people. [88]
Among these recipients were mentors, teachers, friends, publishers, fellow
writers, liberal pacifists, and “ignorant” British aristocrats. Before the statement
could be relayed to the High Command, however, Robert Graves, Sassoon’s good
friend, fellow poet and officer, asked Sassoon’s commanding officer to deal
with Sassoon gently.[89]
The commanding officer, wishing to help Sassoon, and avoid the public controversy
Sassoon so desperately wanted, gave him a medical hearing. The hearing, which was
certainly rigged by either Graves or Robbie Ross, Sassoon’s influential pacifist
friend, declared him “shell-shocked,” and spirited him away to Craiglockhart, a
mental hospital for the rehabilitation of traumatized officers.[90]
Sassoon’s life had been saved almost entirely by his friends; without the
effort of Robert Graves, or Robbie Ross, Sassoon would have gotten exactly what
he wanted. The two men were aware of Sassoon’s intentions, but did not want
their friend to die. They only acted out to protect his life. However, they also did not believe that
Sassoon’s protest would have the effect he wanted. But, Sassoon’s social class
was also undoubtedly a major factor in the mercy his commanding officer and
hearing showed him. If he had been a lower-class soldier, it is likely that he
would have simply been shot for cowardice outright.
At first, the Declaration received
none of the publicity Sassoon hoped for. In fact, the military navigated
Sassoon out of the spotlight so swiftly and quietly that scarcely anyone heard
about it, save those who received the declaration first hand. But, on 30 July, a member of Parliament read the
statement aloud to the House, and on the 31st, The London Times published it.[91] Other
newspapers soon followed.
However, despite Sassoon’s status as a decorated war-hero, reputed for
his bravery and selflessness, his Declaration
was portrayed as the act of a mad man. The British people swallowed the media’s
story with ease; few civilians bothered to think of Sassoon’s protest as anything
other than what they were told by the papers. Indeed, in Sassoon’s time at
Craiglockhart, he received only a smattering of letters that considered his Declaration serious, let alone correct.[92] But,
even if Sassoon had been executed, the Declaration
still would not have had effect he hoped for. After all, it is probable that
the only reason the media covered the Declaration
in the first place was Sassoon’s new label as “shell shocked.” In truth, even
if they had printed it without the
implied aside of “crazy,” it is unlikely that the public would have considered it
any more significant than the disillusioned message of a single soldier. Only two pacifist newspapers, the Labour Leader and The Herald, supported Sassoon’s actions.[93] The
soldiers in France, while they believed him heroic, evinced no significant
response to the Declaration.[94] There
was little that they could do to contribute. It seemed as though Britain, both
at home and abroad, could not find its way out of the cave. Sassoon had fought,
and lost, an impossible battle.
“Love Drives Me Back”
At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met Captain
William Rivers of the Royal Army Medical Corps, a psychologist whose friendship
and guidance changed Sassoon’s life, understanding of the war, and his part in
it. Rivers was a “great and good man,” and in the months of Sassoon’s
“recovery,” the psychologist became a father figure to the poet. In Sassoon’s
semi-fictitious war memoir, Sherston’s
Progress, he comments that Rivers “understood me better than I understood
myself.”[95]
Although Rivers listened to Sassoon’s anti-war sentiments and sympathized with
his views, he also presented persuasive arguments to Sassoon about the nature
of his protest, pacifism and the war. Sassoon was constantly out-argued by the
psychologist’s cogent contentions.[96]
After many months of such discussions, Sassoon’s protest came into sharp
focus. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon spent much of his time lounging, playing golf,
reading, and writing poetry. The hospital’s publication, The Hydra, even published several of his poems. Sassoon was a long
way from the trenches. However, with all of his leisure time, he had not
advanced the cause of his protest at all. Sassoon finally realized that he had
“taken a holiday.” In October 1917, he recognized that his comfort and safety
at Craiglockhart insulted the sacrifices of his friends and comrades in France.
While I continued to clean my clubs, some inward monitor became
uncomfortably candid and remarked, ‘This heroic gesture of yours—“making a
separate peace”—is extremely convenient for you, isn’t it? Doesn’t it begin to
look rather like dodging the Kaiser’s well-aimed projectiles?’… ‘Twelve weeks
ago you may have been a man with a message. Anyhow you genuinely believed
yourself to be one. But unless you can prove to yourself that your protest is
still effective, you are here under false pretences, merely skirmshanking
snugly along on what you did in the belief that you would be given a bad time
for doing it.’[97]
Indeed, Sassoon’s protest had become something of a selfish act. Far from
attaining the martyrdom he had aspired to, he had ended up being cosseted at
Craiglockhart. He realized that he could not change the reality of the war; he
would never inspire the public to demand peace. He could, however, help his
friends in France, by fighting for and with
them. His purpose was clear: on 6 January 1918, Sassoon returned to the
Front.[98] One
of Sassoon’s poems speaks powerfully about his love for his fellow soldiers,
and about his return to France. Shortly after he went back to the front,
Sassoon wrote “Banishment.”
I am banished from the patient men who
fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my
pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds
of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my
sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they
died,—
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how
vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must
dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and
riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them
through
hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand
forgiven.[99]
As “Banishment” demonstrates, Sasoon’s poetry reverted to his pre-war, Romantic
style upon his return to France. However, here, the focus of this Romanticism was
not Britain, but his fellow soldiers. Other poems from this time are just as
Romantic. On 10 August 1918, Sassoon wrote “Can I forget?”
Can I forget the
voice of one who cried
For me to save him, save him, as he
died?...
Can I forget the
face of one whos eyes
Could trust me in his utmost
agonies?...
I will remember you;
and from your wrongs
Shall rise the power and poignance of
my songs:
And this shall comfort me until the
end,
That I have been your captain and your
friend.[100]
Of course, the
soldierly brotherhood and love discussed here by Sassoon gave purpose for many
soldiers of the Great War.[101] Lacking
a tangible goal to fight for, soldiers fought for the only thing they knew and
cared for: each other. Veteran Harry Patch commented,
We were part of the battalion, but at the same time we were a little
crowd on our own. You could talk to your pals about anything and everything. I
mean, these boys were with you night and day, you shared everything with them.
We each knew where the others came from, what their lives had been and where
they were. You were one of them- we belonged to each other. It’s a difficult
thing to describe, the comradeship between us. I never met any of their people
or any of their parents, but I knew all about them, and they knew all about me
and mine. There was nothing that cropped up, doesn’t matter what it was, that
you couldn’t discuss with them in one way or another. If you scrounged
anything, you always shared it with them. You could confide everything to them.
They would understand.[102]
In 1915,
Captain Ivar Campbell wrote “There is one thing cheering. The men of the
battalion… Laughing in mud, joking in water—I’d ‘demonstrate’ into Hell with
some of them and not care.”[103] Another
veteran wrote,
In spite of all differences in rank, we were comrades, brothers, dwelling
together in unity. We were privileged to see in each other that inner, ennobled
self which in the grim, commercial struggle of peace-time is all too frequently
atrophied for lack of opportunity of expression. We could note the intense
affection of soldiers for certain officers, their absolute trust in them. We
saw the love passing the love of women of one ‘pal’ for his ‘half-section’…[104]
The
brotherhood of the soldiers was, perhaps, one of the only redeeming qualities
of the War. Sassoon would have certainly agreed, as no doubt would have
millions of other men.[105]
Ironically, Sassoon’s war ended when one of his own soldiers accidentally
wounded him in the head in June 1918.[106] His
wound earned him a ticket home. Following his convalescence and duties as a
training officer, Sassoon was honorably discharged on 11 March 1919. [107] He retired to a relaxing life of socialist
journalism, literature and poetry.[108] Of
course, the horrors of the war haunted Sassoon until his death in 1967 at the
age of 80. But, he remains one of the most reputed writers of the Great War,
and highly regarded soldier-poets of all time. Ultimately, the British people
came to see his Declaration as a
heroic cry in the darkness, which they had treated with unjust disinterest.
This, of course, is no surprise. Few soldiers had the poetic gifts
necessary to make readers or listeners understand as Sassoon could. Indeed, his
experiences and his expression of those experiences illuminate much more than just
one man’s story. His remarkable ability to demonstrate the burdens of the soldiers
in the Great War through his own sorrows is one of the most meaningful and
touching expressions in war literature. It is almost impossible to understand how
powerfully Sassoon cared for his men, just as it is impossible for those of us
blessed with peace to understand the love that develops between soldiers. We
can, however, comprehend that this love and dedication drove him to a level of
understanding and expression that speaks for a generation of men who suffered
some of the hardest and most horrible experiences in history together. His
words spoke both for himself and for those unable to speak for themselves. Through
his voice, future generations will know of the loss, injustice, and horror borne
by a generation of doomed youth.
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[1] The London Times, 31 July 1917, 8,
http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/927/193/178285029w16/purl=&dyn=sig!1?sw_aep=Kenyon
(Accessed November 2011).
[2] John Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon (London: Richard Cohen
Books, 1999), 36.
[3] The London Gazette, July 27, 1916
(http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/29684/supplements/7441 Accessed
November, 2011).
[4] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 21.
[5] Ibid., 22
[6] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane,
1998), 198.
[7] Fussell, 21.
[8] Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915-1918 (Bristol: Faber and Faber,
1983), 9.
[9] Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the
Public-School Ethos (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1987), 163.
[10] Ibid.,, 164.
[11] In the beginning of the
war, Germans snipers targeted officers in order to disorganize and disorient
British units on the front. At that time, officers were easily distinguishable
by the swords they wore in their belts (yet another antiquated, Romantic
tradition.) Following the end of 1914, the custom of carrying a sword was
quickly abandoned for this very reason, and the casualty rate of officers
quickly fell almost twenty per cent. (J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 87.)
[12] Parker, 164.
[13] Michael Thorpe, Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study
(London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 15-17.
[14] Siegfried Sassoon’s Collected Poems: 1908-1956 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1947), 11.
[15] Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That, 2nd ed.
(New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 174-175.
[16] Terry Cunningham, ed., 14-18 The Final Word (London: Stagedoor
Publishing, 2003), 22.
[17] Fussell, 49.
[18] Sassoon Diaries, 44.
[19]
Sassoon’s “love” for Tommy is a hotly debated
topic. Many believe it to be indicative of Sassoon’s homosexuality. Sassoon and
Tommy had been friends for many years, but it is known that Tommy was in a
relationship with a woman in Britain. However, it is true that Sassoon’s love
for Tommy seems to transcend simple friendship. Therefore, while it would seem
that he was in love with Tommy, there is no way to be sure. Additionally, there
is no way to be sure of Tommy’s feelings for Sassoon. For more on Sassoon’s
sexuality, see note 105.
[20] Ibid., 53.
[21] Ibid., 46.
[22] Ibid., 49.
[23] Max Arthur, Last Post: The Final Word from our First
World War Soldiers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005), 41.
[24] Ibid., 124.
[25] Laurence Houseman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (Philadelphia:
Pine Street Books, 2002), 29.
[26] Richard van Emden and Steve
Humphries, Veterans: The Last Survivors
of the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 1998), 124.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Sassoon Diaries, 51.
[29] Jean M. Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of A War Poet
(London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1998), 245.
[30] Sassoon Diaries., 68.
[31] Ibid., 52.
[32] Ibid.
[33]Brian MacArthur, ed., For King and Country (London: Little,
Brown, 2008), 101.
[34] Cunningham, 60.
[35] Fussell, 13.
[36] Ferguson, 293.
[37] Sassoon Diaries, 84-87.
[38] Ibid., 101.
[39] Ibid., 102.
[40] Ibid., 114.
[41] John Brophy and Eric
Partridge, The Long Trail: What the
British Soldier Sang and Said in the Great War of 1914-1918 (London: Andre
Deutsch Limited, 1965), 37.
[42] Ferguson, 179.
[43] Arthur, 136.
[44] Ibid., 105.
[45] MacArthur, 130-131.
[46] From the Latin of Horace,
“Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori:” literally, “it is glorious and good to
die for one’s fatherland.”
[47] C. Day Lewis, ed., The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 55.
[48] Sassoon Diaries, 101.
[49] Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey (New York: The
Viking Press, 1946), 21-22.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Of course, pacifist and
liberal prints, which attempted to reveal the truth of the war, were available. But they were generally
considered extremist, unpatriotic, and inaccurate.
[52] Alice Marquis, “Words as
Weapons: Propaganda in Britain and Germany during the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no.
3 (July): 472
[53] Lord Riddell’s War Diary, 1914-1918 (London: Ivor Nicholson &
Watson, 1933), 210.
[54] Lloyd George, The History of the Times, vol. 4 pg.
345, quoted in Phillip Knightley, The
First Casualty (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 109.
[55] Marquis, 477.
[56] Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the
Great War, 1914-1918 (New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1986), 732.
[57] Arthur, 88.
[58] Michael Moynihan, ed., People At War, 1914-1918 (Newton Abbot:
David & Charles, 1973), 122.
[59] The Myriad Faces of War, 396
[60] John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Random
House, 1999), 136
[61]Roberts, 87.
[62] Sassoon’s Collected Poems, 74.
[63] Martin J. Farrar, News From the Front: War Correspondents On
the Western Front, 1914-1918 (Gloucestershire, GB: Sutton Publishing
Limited, 1998), 65-133.
[64] Houseman, 30.
[65] Brophy, 37.
[66] Cunningham, 73.
[67] Cunningham, 41.
[68] Wilson, 288.
[69] Ibid., 287.
[70] Siegfried’s Journey, 31-32.
[71] Ibid., 32.
[72] Morrell was, in fact,
correct in his claim. In his war memoir, Lloyd George writes that German
“emissaries in the United States were angling for intervention by President
Wilson with a view to an early and favorable peace…” in August 1916. But,
George claims that he and some other parliament members felt that Britain had
entered the war for specific reasons (namely the liberation of Belgium), and to
abandon those causes when they had not been achieved would be wrong. Although
he admits that others, including the Prime Minister, were considering the
chance for peace, George ignored the dissent. In a September press interview
with an American newspaper, he made it clear that Britain still felt like it
had a responsibility to continue the war. To the public, it seemed to be a
restatement of Britain’s war aims; but, the interview sent a clear message to
the Germans: Britain wanted no peace. (Lloyd George, War Memoirs of Lloyd George (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1937), 278-280.)
[73] Siegfried’s Journey, 32.
[74] Morrell’s evidence,
however, is unlikely to have been the only reason for Sasson’s change of heart.
On 12 December 1916, only two months after Sassoon’s visit to Garsington, the
Germans proposed an official peace
negotiation to the Entente powers. The following day, their statement was
published in The Times, where Sassoon
would certainly have read it. However,
The Times portrayed the attempt (not
necessarily falsely) as an attempt to undermine the British government’s
influence over its citizens. The British public understandably responded with
outraged cries of scandal and sinister motives. The British government, either
legitimately or to encourage their citizens, reacted similarly. The peace
attempt quickly failed: both nations and their governments made public
statements of distrust and hatred, leading to two months of political bickering
and childish pseudo-diplomacy. The peace negotiations became nothing more than
theatricality, and were ultimately put aside. Given that the incident failed
because of the public’s response to the portrayal of the incident in the media,
as well as political immaturities and failed diplomacy, it is a wonder that
Sassoon does not discuss it extensively in any of his narratives. On 22 December
1916, a single, angry sentence shows that Sassoon was aware of the attempt, and
was following it in the papers. However, there is no mention of its failure,
nor any outraged tirade about the media or public. Such a rant could have been
contained in the missing journal entries any time between 13 and 22 December.
As is, however, there is no evidence to prove that the incident had a profound
effect on his thinking. Even so, given the recent incident at Garsington, as
well as his obvious disillusionment with the British public and media, it is
hard to imagine that the peace attempts of December 1916-February 1917 did not
have an effect on his concept of politics in Britain. (Esther Caukin Brunauer,
“The Peace proposals of December, 1916- January, 1917,” The Journal of Modern History 4, vol. 4 (December, 1932), 544-571,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1899360 [accessed February 2012.]), (The London Times, December 14-15 1916,
January 4-15 1917, http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark
/0/1/1/purl=rc6_TTDA?sw_aep=Kenyon. [accessed February 2012.])
[75] Sassoon Diaries, 115.
[76] Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (New
York: Coward, Mcann, Inc., 1930), 284.
[77] It is possible, of course,
that any account from Sassoon’s memoir is incorrect. The memoir is full of
manipulated and fabricated information. These words may never have been uttered.
However, Sassoon certainly met with Russell some time in early 1917. At the
very least, Sassoon believed that his government was lying about the reasons
for the war from this time on.
[78] Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 278-279.
[79] Ibid. 287
[80] Sassoon’s reference to
“people who are making money out of the War” refers to the media tycoons such
as Lord Northcliffe and Viscount Astor. Over the course of the war, these men
became integral parts of British politics, and made fortunes off of their
control of the media. Lord Northcliffe, a media tycoon who owned many of the
prominent British papers, was made Viscount in 1918 for his work in the war. As
I have already argued, these men and their partners, to a large degree,
controlled public opinion regarding the war, while benefiting enormously from
the sales of its information. It is likely, then, that Sassoon believed these
tycoons were working intimately with British politicians in order to prolong
the war and thus expand their profit. In fact, Sassoon was correct in some
respects: Northcliffe was a close ally of Lloyd George, and the two often
worked with each other throughout the war. Whether or not the two were actively
conspiring to continue the war for profit, however, is still unknown.
[81] Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (London:
William Heinemann, 1918), 29.
[82] Sassoon Diaries, 174.
[83] Memoirs of An Infantry Officer, 278.
[84] Among these were Robert
Graves, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, and Isaac Roseberg. However,
these men’s writings, like Sassoon’s, were generally only printed in far
liberal, pacifist newspapers and magazines. Mainstream media, of course, never
printed such things.
[85] Ian F. W. Beckett, The Great War, 1914-1918 (London:
Pearson Education Ltd., 2001), 227-228.
[86] Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 280.
[87] Ibid., 280-281.
[88] Sassoon Diaries, 177.
[89] Wilson, 383.
[90] Ibid., 384.
[91] The London Times, 31 July 1917, 8,
http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/927/193/178285029w16/purl=&dyn=sig!1?sw_aep=Kenyon
(Accessed November 2011).
[92] Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston,
“Sherston’s Progress” (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 7.
[93] Wilson, 385.
[94] Ibid., 381.
[95] “Sherston’s Progress”, 4.
[96] Ibid., 11.
[97] “Sherston’s Progress”, 38.
[98] Wilson, 432.
[99] Counter-Attack, 44.
[100] Sassoon Diaries, 278.
[101] After his treatment of
Sassoon, Captain W. H. R. Rivers wrote a scientific study on the subject of
“kinship” among soldiers.
[102] Arthur, 123.
[103] Houseman, 61.
[104] MacArthur, 227-228.
[105] Love amongst soldiers (especially that of the Great
War) has long been scrutinized and analyzed by historians, psychologists, and
literature analysts alike. Given the nature of brotherly love, some have
discussed its similarities with homosexuality. Of course, Sassoon’s own
sexuality is a contentious topic. Historian Jean M. Wilson discusses Sassoon’s
sexuality ad nauseam in his book, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of A War Poet,
asserting that the poet was most certainly homosexual. In Pat Barker’s Regeneration,
a fictional representation of Sassoon’s experiences in 1917, Sassoon discusses
his apparent asexuality, yet his homosexuality is implied. It is true that, late in his life, Sassoon
engaged in a series of affairs with both men and women; his only marriage after
the war produced one son, but ended in alienation and divorce. However,
Sassoon’s sexuality, while complicated and interesting, is irrelevant to his
war story, just as sexuality is irrelevant to soldierly love. After all, as
many LGBT groups remark, “Love has no orientation.” The assertions of those who
say that soldierly love is the same as, derived from, or is akin to are
entirely misplaced. Jean M. Wilson is one such contender; in his biography of
Sassoon, the historian claims that Sassoon’s homosexuality is what allowed him
to love his men so deeply. In fact, this claim, as well as others like it, show
just how fully such contenders miss the point of Sassoon’s legacy and the
legacy of soldier love. There was never anything sexual about Sassoon’s
connection with his men, nor is there any aspect of sexuality in soldierly
love. Sassoon did not willingly return to a virtual hell on earth in order to
become sexually involved with any of his soldiers. He returned because he loved
them and risked life and limb to help them. Sassoon’s story was not the story
of a homosexual, heterosexual, or even asexual man. The essence of his story is
not even one of men. It is the story of a human who loved others (even those
who he did not know) more deeply than he loved himself.
[106] Vivian de Pinto, “Memories
of Siegfried Sassoon”, Journal of the
Royal Welch Fusiliers 17, no. 1 (March 1968): 15.
[107] Parker, 173.
[108] Sassoon Diaries, 282.
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