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.
“Counter-Attack”
Not only did Sassoon inveigh against the conditions the soldiers were forced to endure, but he sharply pointed up the contrast between the lives of those who controlled the course of the war and those of the men who fought. “Base Details” is typical of Sassoon’s laconic and satirical style at this time. The punning title suggests not just the idea of a centre of operations, but also the baseness of the conduct of those so far removed from the trenches, “guzzling and gulping in the best hotel”, that they fail to conceive of the war as anything other than a “scrap” in which heavy losses are not real lives but merely numbers. Sassoon’s bitter scorn is also directed at those in England whose jingoism allows the carnage to continue, whether this is men discussing their sons (“My eldest lad / Writes cheery letters from Bagdad. / But Arthur’s getting all the fun / At Arras with his nine-inch gun”) or the songs of popular entertainment (“I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls, / Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, Sweet Home”, / And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls / To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.”).
For many years after the war, a series of semi-autobiographical novels, three of which were collectively published as the immensely popular The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1937), continued Sassoon’s exploration of the futility of war.
After the war, Sassoon became involved in pacifist politics and in 1919 became the literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald newspaper. He spent the 1920s searching for a new poetic voice, and in 1924 marked the beginning of a new period with the poem “At the Grave of Henry Vaughan”, which voiced the religious leanings Sassoon had always felt: “And this lowly grave tells Heaven’s tranquillity / And here stand I, a suppliant at the door”. Much of his later poetry was religious in tone—he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957—and this was the poetry that he valued most highly, despite the fact that his reputation continues to rest on his war poetry. His Collected Poems 1908-1956 was published in 1961.
Suicide in the Trenches
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Owen, Wilfred (1893-1918), British poet. From early youth he wrote poetry, much of it at first inspired by religion. He became increasingly disapproving of the role of the Church in society, and sympathetic to the plight of the poor. In 1913, he went to France and taught English there until 1915. Owen made the difficult decision to enlist in the army and fight in World War I (1914-1918). He entered the war in October 1915 and fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 but was hospitalized for shell shock in May 1917. In the hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and novelist whose grim anti-war works were in harmony with Owen's concerns. Under Sassoon's care and tutelage, Owen began producing the best work of his short career; his poems are suffused with the horror of battle, and yet finely structured and innovative. Owen's use of half-rhyme (pairing words which do not quite rhyme) gives his poetry a dissonant, disturbing quality that amplifies his themes. He died one year after returning to battle and one week before the war ended in 1918. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for serving in the war with distinction. Full recognition as a highly esteemed poet came after Owen's death.
Owen's considerable body of war poetry, traditional in form, is a passionate expression of outrage at the horrors of war and of pity for the young soldiers sacrificed in it. Nine of these poems form the text for the choral War Requiem (1962) by the English composer Benjamin Britten. Only four of Owen's poems were published during his lifetime; collected editions were issued in 1920, 1931, and 1964.
2 poems
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Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917)
What passing bells for those 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 for them from prayers or 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 the eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
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.
(2) Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum est (1917)
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 floundering 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.