Siegfried Sassoon: Innocence Lost in the Trenches of the Great War

Like many young men of his class and social standing, Siegfried Sassoon enlisted as soon as the Great War seemed inevitable. He was already in uniform (albeit brand new) when war was declared and Big Ben fell silent.

In the four years that passed before the great bell tolled again, the poet would undergo a complete change in ethos and philosophy. It was this traumatic journey of emotion and mind that caused millions of fighting men to identify with him.

There were war poets before Siegfried Sassoon. As long as armies have squared up against each other upon a battlefield, bards have been there to pen verses about victory and loss.

But they tended towards the heroic.

It was all patriotism and glory, the Light Brigade charging or Paul Revere riding desperately through the night. The emotion was there, but framed in such a way to stir the spirit and urge others to follow in their footsteps.

There had been war poems that could break a reader's heart when read with all due imagination. Aneirin's Y Gododdin, written circa 600 CE, would bring tears to the hardiest soul. But the horror was generally muted by metaphor, and its soldiers seemed fantastical.

You would have to read between the lines to fully appreciate the scenes that inspired such verses.

While Sassoon's brand of lyrical realism made him the darling of those living the literal reality, it understandably rendered him a thorn in the side of the War Office.

They urgently needed people to enlist, in order to become 'part of the war machine which needed so much flesh and blood to keep it working' (as Siegfried put it).

His popular poems didn't exactly sell the idea.

However, everyone could be impressed with Siegfried Sassoon's heroic exploits on the battlefield. The administration happily pinned medals upon him. His brothers in arms received yet another story to recount in their dug outs, some in wonder, some in awe, some in wondering what the Hell just happened.

Sassoon entered the Great War expecting to be a storybook hero. His idealism may have quickly drowned in flooded trench water and blood, but an echo of it remained in the way he conducted solo acts of gallantry. He became his own legendary figure.

He was awarded a Military Cross when, on May 26th, 1916, he remained out in the open and under fire in France. There were British men lying wounded and/or dying, and Siegfried wouldn't rest until he'd dragged every one of them to safety.

Yet there was also a recklessness to his behavior, which could - in some lights - be seen as a wish to permanently end his experience of war.

After his brother Hamo and Siegfried's friend David Thomas were both killed in battle, he took to 'patrolling' No Man's Land alone. He escaped unscathed, but it was enough to worry his commanding officers into sending him home on leave.

Inconvenient truths in poetry and uncomfortably strange heroics were one thing, but in 1917, Siegfried Sassoon crossed a line that the British government could not easily overlook.

Devastated by yet another death - this time his friend David Cuthbert - and egged on by philosopher Bertrand Russell, Sassoon suddenly embraced the tenets of pacifism.

He threw the ribbon from his Military Cross into the River Mersey. Then found a depressing symbolism in the fact that it was too lightweight to sink in those mighty tidal waters.

In a letter sent to his commanding officer, and read out in the House of Commons, he accused the British establishment of secret hawkishness.

Government and generals alike were prolonging hostilities unnecessarily, at the cost of millions of lives and misery. They were peddling 'a war of defence and liberation', which was really one of 'aggression and conquest'. In consequence, Sassoon wrote that he was 'finished with the war' and hereby resigned his commission.

Had he been anybody else, Siegfried would have risked court martial. The penalty for which ranged from imprisonment with hard labor through to being shot at dawn. There were certainly isolated MPs irritated into calling for the latter.

But cooler minds prevailed, spelling out precisely the dilemma which David Lloyd George's government now faced.

Siegfried Sassoon was just too popular, too well-known. He was a decorated hero, who had exhibited startling courage under fire. His poetry touched chords in the national psyche, which no politician could ever hope to achieve.

If punished, they risked a backlash from the British population. If left unchecked, there was a strong possibility that the poet's talent could be used to further the arguments of pacifism, while undermining public trust in the government.

For a moment there, it seemed that the former was the lesser of two evils.

His friend, and fellow poet, Robert Graves came up with a solution. To the annoyance of Siegfried himself, the suggestion was made that he was suffering from shell-shock. The panicking British government immediately grabbed the compromise. Sassoon was sectioned and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, as if he really was thus afflicted.

Siegfried Sassoon was discharged in February 1918, but initially posted with the British Army in Palestine. He didn't make it back to the front line in France until July of the same year.

It turned out to be quite a busy month for him.

First, a poem of his caused a fuss when it was published in a left-wing magazine. I Stood With the Dead was a no hold's barred, satirical poem about men paid to stand in line to kill or die.

It prompted an angry letter from the Ministry of Defence to the editor, demanding to know when the poem was submitted. If it was recently, then Sassoon was going to be court martialled and shot. If earlier, then he'd have been certified 'insane' and they could let it go.

The editor replied that he didn't know.

The second major incident occurred on July 13th 1918.  Sassoon persuaded one of his men to accompany him on a wild patrol into No Man's Land, but they didn't get very far.

He'd barely raised his head above the level of the trench, when a bullet hit him in it. Only it wasn't fired from the German side, but by a British soldier standing by. It had been an accident, but the Tommy was utterly distraught.

Siegfried Sassoon survived the gunshot, but the war was effectively over for him now. He was shipped back to Britain for treatment, and hadn't yet recovered by the time the Armistice was sounded.