Another poet who wrote poetry concerning the war was Siegfreid Sassoon. Sassoon was born in Kent into a wealthy aristocratic family, he was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge. Just before the outbreak of war he enlisted as a cavalry soldier and in 1915 was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. After fighting in the trenches and winning the military cross for storming a German trench, he took up an anti-war stance. He started writing poetry which reflected the true horrors he had experienced in the trenches and on the battle field. He threw his military cross in a river and made a controversial declaration that the British Government was prolonging the war for it’s own benefit:
"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. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings 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 practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize".
After making this controversial statement he was sent to Craiglockheart hospital by a friend in order to prevent him from being court-martialled by the British army. This was secretly revered by the authorities as this was an uncontroversial way of silencing his criticisms.
In Brooke’s sequence of five sonnets called ‘1914’, his most famous poem is ‘The Soldier’ which he wrote as he was travelling to Turkey on his way to the Gallipoli campaign. The actual poem reads like an epitaph on a grave stone. He foresees his death in a foreign country. The theme of the poem shows that he wasn’t as naive as other prospective soldiers, he realises war is a dark game and that his death is probable . He believes that when he dies and his body turns to dust, the dust will be a better, ‘richer’ dust that the earth in which it will be buried. The reason in Brooke’s opinion for this is that the dust will have been made by all the good things which are to be found in England:
‘A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam.’
Brooke does not contemplate his death with sadness but more as an inevitability. In death, his body will give back those values learned in England. He feels that as his body decomposes all the nutrients that England has filled it with will decompose back into the soil and fill the soil with England’s goodness.
Brooke has chosen to write his poem as a sonnet which is a style traditionally used by people writing love poetry. In this case Brooke is using the sonnet form to express his love for his country. The sonnet is divided into two stanzas. The first contains eight lines (an octet) and the second contains six lines (a sestet). The separate stanzas help the poet to deal with related ideas. The first stanza is concerned with the possibility that the poet may be killed abroad and his body buried in a foreign country. It talks about his love for his country and how England has shaped him.
In the second stanza, Brooke, scorning death, and clearly with no experience of the horrors of trench warfare during the First World War, says that should he be killed in action, his body, buried on a foreign battlefield, will symbolise everything that is wonderful about his native land.
Brooke observes the sonnet form (14 lines of iambic pentameter, divided into an octave and sestet), however the octave is rhymed after the Shakespearean/Elizabethan (ababcdcd) rhyme scheme, while the sestet follows the Petrarchan/Italian (efgefg). Brooke has also deviated somewhat from the traditional thematic divisions associated with the octave and sestet: question/predicament and resolution/solution, respectively. The octave and sestet both enjoin the reader to imagine the blissful state of the fallen soldier.
'The Soldier' is the culmination of Brooke's '1914' sonnet sequence. In 'The Soldier' Brooke invokes the ideas of spiritual cleansing (as found in 'Peace'), inviolable memories of the dead (as in 'Safety'), a hero's immortal legacy ('The Dead' III & IV), but now he combines all these specifically under the overarching framework of English heritage and personal loyalty to it. Although Dean Inge objected to the neo-paganism of Brooke's idea of resurrection,
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind[,]
'The Soldier' touched a nerve and inspired imitations. Some were close and complimentary as they sought a recognizable connection with Brooke's sonnet. For example 'To My Mother -- 1916' by Rifleman Donald S. Cox:
If I should fall, grieve not that one so weak
And poor as I
Should die.
Nay! Though thy heart should break
Think only this: that when at dusk they speak
Of sons and brothers of another one,
Then thou canst say--"I too had a son;
He died for England's sake!"
Edward Thomas (who was acquainted with Brooke) was probably musing on 'The Soldier' when he made up his little ditty to a bugle call -- 'No One Cares Less than I':
No one cares less than I,
Nobody knows but God,
Whether I am destined to lie
Under a foreign clod,
while Martin Stephen sees a "clear rebuttal" to 'The Soldier' in Charles Hamilton Sorley's sonnet 'When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead':
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Associated, as it came to be, with the discredited idealistic attitudes of 1914, Rupert Brooke's sonnet 'The Soldier' suffered a similar fate. However, Stephen finds that "the personal element" in Brooke's sonnets distinquishes them from propaganda verse: "[w]hatever else they may be, Brooke's sonnets sum up admirably a mood that was felt by many people when war broke out."
