Sassoon

In the late February sunlight this morning, I sat in the chill, drinking coffee, thinking of Siegfried Sassoon. We have just passed the 100th commemoration of the battle of Verdun. A century ago on July 1, 1916, the British Army walked into the machine guns at the Somme. In Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and the following two volumes of the trilogy, Sassoon lets us see the collapse of the old order and the impact of the trenches on men. There are other writers deeper, wiser, sadder – I have spent decades reading poetry, novels, primary and secondary sources. Still Sassoon gives us a picture of what the historians call, “a paradign shift” on an innocent man caught up in a Great War that killed millions as it drove a world into modernity.

In an ironically bitter poem, Sassoon wrote:

Does it matter? -losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? -losing you sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Sassoon like Owen, Thomas and the other battlefield poets earned his bitterness, his right to speak of the wounded and dead, the trenches and the home front and wrote beautifully and movingly of what was ugly and unthinkable. He often wrote of the beauties of nature noticed in between or during the battles. How long ago all this seems and how contemporary, too.