"I knew a simple soldier boy"Siegfried Sassoon (1918) - Considerthe presentation of the ordinary soldier in the writing of the Great War.

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Phil Dudson                                                              5NB                                                              5/9/2007

   “I knew a simple soldier boy”

                              Siegfried Sassoon (1918)

   

   Consider the presentation of the ordinary soldier in the writing of the Great War.

   

   World War 1, the ‘Great War’ from 1914-1918, began as a conflict between Austria – Hungary and Serbia on July 28th 1914, but was soon to become a global war involving thirty-two nations. The immediate cause of the war between Austria – Hungary and Serbia was the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia.

   

   Soon the world was at arms and fighting each other in one of the most brutal and horrifying wars ever known. Battles at the Somme, Ypres and Vimy Ridge were particularly terrible because of the large loss of life they were responsible for. Allied leaders, such as Field Marshall Douglas Haig seemed to be sending thousands of innocent men to their deaths.

     

   Hostilities between the Allies and Central Powers continued until the signing of the Armistice on November 11th 1918, a total period of four years, three months and fourteen days. Casualties to land forces amounted to approximately twenty-seven million with another ten million civilian casualties.

   

   Most of the twenty seven million casualties are those of the ‘simple soldier boys’ and not the leaders of the First World War. These highly regarded men instructed the ordinary soldiers from positions so far away from the fighting and the terror that they were not always aware of what they were sending these men into. The ‘ordinary’ soldiers did not always fight however; they often waited for months on end, in terrible conditions just waiting for something to happen. This waiting was almost as traumatic as the fighting itself.

     

   Siegfried Sassoon’s short, but powerful poem, “Suicide in the Trenches” gives us an insight into the horror that the soldiers had to try and overcome. The first stanza is short and simple with the opening line, ‘I knew a simple soldier boy’. This simplicity is reflected in the two rhymes, ‘boy’ and ‘joy’, ‘dark’ and ‘lark’. This gives the impression of an easy uncomplicated life for the ‘simple’ soldier who has not yet had to experience the horrors of war.

   

   The second stanza is a total contrast of the first, which is where we get a description of the real conditions in which the ‘simple’ soldier lived. The poem mentions ‘glum’ conditions in a winter trench with lice infestations and a shortage of the one thing that must have kept most men sane during their time in the trenches, alcohol. Then a powerful, abrupt line stops the flow of the poem, ‘He put a bullet through his brain’ shows how this ordinary soldier resorted to suicide to escape the horrors of the war. This would have been a disgrace and unpatriotic and the next line describes the reaction to his action, ’No one spoke of him again.’ This is significant because it seems that the death of a young soldier is just ignored, maybe because of the disgrace of committing suicide while fighting for his country. This stanza presents the ‘ordinary’ soldier as a suicidal, depressed shell of his former self.  

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   The third stanza is Sassoon’s strong warning to crowds cheering the young soldiers on. The last line, ‘The hell where youth and laughter go’ is an interesting way to describe the war. By calling it hell, the place where sinners go after they die, he is saying that the soldiers may as well already be dead, because death is so inevitable at war. Sassoon shows us in this poem how innocent ‘soldier boys’ are converted into suicidal wrecks.

     

   However, this is not the only view of the ‘ordinary’ soldier, Rupert Brooke wrote ...

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