On November 1st 1915, Sassoon suffered his first personal loss of the War. His younger brother Hamo was buried at sea after being mortally wounded at Gallipoli. Sassoon subsequently commemorated this with a poem entitled To My Brother (published in the Saturday Review, February 26th 1916). Then on March 18, 1916 second lieutenant David C. 'Tommy' Thomas (the 'Dick Tiltwood' of Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man) was killed whilst out with a wiring party. He had been hit in the throat by a rifle bullet, and despite the Battalion doctor being a throat specialist had died of the wound. These losses upset Sassoon and he became determined to "get his revenge" on the Germans. To this end, he went out on patrol in no-man's-land even when there were no raids planned. Such reckless enthusiasm earned him the nickname "Mad Jack". Returning to the front a month later some of Sassoon's desire for revenge had lessened. When his platoon was involved in a raid on Kiel Trench shortly afterwards, his actions in getting his dead and wounded men back to the British trenches earned him a Military Cross, which he received the day before the start of the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916. During the first day of the Battle of the Somme Sassoon was "in reserve", in a support trench opposite Fricourt. He was not involved in the Battle of the Somme until July 4, when he went up to the front line from Bottom Wood, to a captured half-finished German trench called Quadrangle Trench. The 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers had a bombing-post established on the battalion's right where a trench leading eastwards towards Mametz Wood came to an end and after a gap, became another trench which in turn led into Mametz Wood itself. Sassoon went across from the bombing-post to where the one trench ended near Mametz Wood. He hoped to put a stop to the German sniper that was in action nearby. When he got to the trench he threw four Mills Bombs into it, and was surprised to see 50 or 60 Germans running "hell for leather" into Mametz Wood. For this action Sassoon was recommended for another decoration, but the repeated failure of the Allies to capture Mametz Wood (it was not taken until July 12 by the 38th (Welsh) Division who had 4000 casualties) lead Brigade headquarters to consider it inappropriate to make the award. Sassoon was sent home from France in late July after an attack of trench fever (or enteritis). From Oxford's Somerville College, he was sent home to Weirleigh for recovery. Sassoon reported to the Regimental Depot in Liverpool in December 1916, and returned to France in February 1917.
Sassoon was only back in France for two days before going down with German measles, which forced him to spend nearly ten days at the 25th Stationary Hospital in Rouen. On March 11 Sassoon rejoined the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Somme front. He was "in reserve" during the Battle of Arras before spending two days in the Hindenburg Tunnel. Sassoon participated in the Second Battle of the Scarpe where he was wounded in the shoulder. This particular incident started a train of events which culminated in Sassoon's "Declaration", for it was whilst on convalescent leave after being wounded that Sassoon talked to several prominent pacifists (including John Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell). His of "wilful defiance" was written during this time, and he returned to the Depot in Liverpool having sent his statement to his Colonel, miserably determined to take whatever punishment was handed out. Fortunately for Sassoon, his friend and fellow Welch Fusilier, Robert Graves (1895-1985) got to know Sassoon while serving out in France. The two became firm friends and spent hours discussing poetry. He was influential in saving Sassoon from a court-martial, following the latter's protest against the continuation of the War. Graves intervened, pulled strings with the authorities and managed to persuade them to have Sassoon medically boarded (or referred), with the result that in July 1917 he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh officially suffering from shell shock. It was at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met Wilfred Owen. Owen was also in the hospital after being diagnosed with shell shock. Sassoon himself wrote a good deal of poetry whilst at Craiglockhart and the material he wrote at that time was about his experiences and that he thought that many people back home in Britain were making money from war while his fellow soldiers were being slaughtered. After four months at Craiglockhart, Sassoon was again passed fit for General Service abroad. Sassoon eventually realised that his protest had achieved nothing, except to keep him away from his men; his decision to apply for General Service seems to have been based on his perceived responsibilities at the front.
In November 1917 he was passed fit for General Service and returned to the Regimental Depot, from whence in January 1918, he was posted to Limerick. In February 1918 from Craiglockhart he moved to St. Hilaire and the Front Line at St. Floris where his old foolhardiness took over, despite the responsibility of being a Company Commander. Sassoon decided to attack the German trenches opposite them, and he went out with a young Corporal. His actions were paid for with a wound to his head on July 13, 1918, and Sassoon was sent back to England. That was the end of Sassoon's War. After a period of recovery he was placed on indefinite sick leave until after the Armistice, eventually retiring officially from the Army in March 1919. Much of Sassoon's poetry written during the War was scorning, clever and witty in nature. Several poems, particularly those in ‘Counter-Attack and Other Poems’ are aimed at those on the Home Front. Sassoon later wrote two autobiographies and he married in 1933 and his son George was born in 1936, with his marriage ending in 1945. He did not serve during the Second World War, but lived quietly at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where he died in 1967, one week short of his eighty-first birthday. He is buried at St Andrew's Church, in Somerset.
You would think that Wilfred Owen’s style of writing in his poetry would not be as different as it is to Siegfried Sassoon’s. I would think this if it were otherwise proved because of their relationship during the war while they were in the same hospital in Britain recovering from shell shock. It was Sassoon that encouraged Owen to write poetry and that Sassoon’s style of writing would have rubbed off on Owen. For example Sassoon wrote about war to make a serious point to people at home and to sometimes even blame them for things that he thought those at home could control. Owen though wrote more for his mother to accompany his letters that he wrote to try and give her a picture through poetry as well as his letters. He would write of what he experienced but as if he was just an invisible person who was watching those, who fought he with going through the tortures of war. I think was not too explicit in the poems that he sent to his mother but was in others.
Sassoon used his poems to hit out at those at Home in Britain whom he considered to be making a profit out of the War, or those whom he felt were helping to prolong the War. Only a few of his poems were actually about the generals and other senior officers, the two best known of these being Base Details and The General. This is a complete contrast to Wilfred Owen’s style of writing. In my point of view because I feel that Owen tries to portray a picture of what was happening to him during his experiences in the ‘Great War’. In these he tries to put people off going to war. Not necessarily because he paints the picture of the blood bath, that this war was (although he does in a few of his poems for example Dulce et Decorum est). But because of the effects it has on the people who lost their loved ones or how a country suddenly becomes depleted in its youth of young men. He manages to make a picture of the suffering without writing about blood and disease all the time.
An example of what the two poets’ were complete in contrast in writing is two poems, which they both wrote in 1918. Wilfred Owen wrote ‘The Send-Off’, and Siegfried Sassoon wrote ‘Memorial Tablet’. The poem by Owen talks of unhappy soldiers leaving their home country bound for France with ‘faces grimly gay’, ‘So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went’. The part mentioning ‘like wrongs’ to me suggests that these men who were on the train were conscripts because they were hushed-up like people with a mental health problem afraid that if they were to open their mouths to talk they would be shot for disobeying orders. The poem then goes on to say ‘Shall they return to beating of great bells?’ followed by ‘A few, a few, too few for drums and yells’. This tells the reader that very few of these conscripts ever returned from their living hell.
Siegfried Sassoon’s poems often describe things he saw in a lot more detail with him describing what exactly he saw and thought, but did write about how some were pushed into going to war and going out to fight. It was these people that Siegfried thought were prolonging the war for longer than was necessary. In the ‘Memorial Tablet’ Sassoon writes of how one particular boy or young man was pushed into going to war by a ‘squire’ this boy or young man was killed by a shell ‘and then a shell Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell’. At a memorial service for the dead the squire who sits ‘in his pew’ and ‘he gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare’, is thinking of what he has done. It is his fault for pushing this boy or young man to go to war and he is now dead. This was the sort of thing that Sassoon was trying to get at in his writing. Trying to make people stop and think that this war was being prolonged for longer than it needed to be and it should be finished before more men needlessly died.
