On September 1, 1967, Siegfried Sassoon died, aged 80. He had a long and productive career as poet, novelist and memoirist, but he is remembered chiefly as one of the fine group of English poets of the First World War (along with Rupert Brooke, Israel Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and above all Edward Thomas). For a sample of his wartime work, take “Remorse”:
Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,
He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows
Each flash and spouting crash,–each instant lit
When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes
Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,
‘Could anything be worse than this?’–he wonders,
Remembering how he saw those Germans run,
Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:
Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one
Livid with terror, clutching at his knees…
Our chaps were sticking ’em like pigs … ‘O hell!’
He thought–‘there’s things in war one dare not tell
Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads
Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.’
(Written at Craiglockhart Hydropathic, familiar to readers of Pat Barker.)
A few days ago, Ari noted that William Calley had offered a surprising apology for the massacre at My Lai. Gary Farber digs deeper in a recent, probing post — just in case you thought the massacre might have been a matter of a few bad apples, or might not have had bearing on questions in the air today.
(Also on Sept. 1, 1967, Ilse Koch, “die Hexe von Buchenwald”, hanged herself in prison, whether with remorse or not I do not know.)
The Edge of the American West 
19 comments
August 31, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Vance
I think the reason the “You can’t handle the truth” maneuver works at the end is because Sassoon attributes it to a character speaking to himself — making it more a defense mechanism than a boast.
August 31, 2009 at 11:50 pm
herbert browne
*more a defense mechanism than a boast*
Yes… he doesn’t want to move from “our chaps” to “me”… and this was a way out of that internal confrontation.
My father introduced these poets, and others, to me when I was a teen. He was a WWII veteran who would perhaps have never spoken about his part in that war at all, if he hadn’t been confronted, 30 years later, by a “history buff” who asked him some probing questions in my presence. When he decided to talk about it, the first thing he told me was that he “was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to go”. He was flying a B-17 from N. Africa & then Italy in the last year of the war, at age 24… & turned down a captaincy… preferring to get out rather than re-up.
Thanks for the link. I haven’t read Amygdala in a few years… but the info on the Toledo Blade’s Pulitzer jogged my memory (& the “bearing on questions in the air today” is… palpable). ^..^
September 1, 2009 at 12:27 am
serofriend
there’s things in war one dare not tell
I have a relative who served in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. Six years ago, the Library of Congress came knocking and asked him to pull together personal documents and images of the war. Up until then, he had only allowed our family to see a few photographs. I still have the feeling that I know only half the story. Sassoon words may offer a possible explanation.
September 1, 2009 at 1:27 am
dave
It is well done to remember that Sherman was not joking when he said that war is all Hell. “He never talked about what he did in the War” is such a cliché that we should pause from time to time and consider why.
September 1, 2009 at 7:36 am
serofriend
He never talked about what he did in the War
The above reference explicates only a component of Remorse’s meaning. At the time of writing the piece, Sassoon had been ruminating on the the past and future. At that time, he actually supported the Allied cause. Not speaking of the past facilitates a bucolic present and future, which I interpret as a possible motivation.
September 1, 2009 at 10:44 am
Vance
Right — it isn’t Sassoon telling us “there’s things in war one dare not tell”, it’s his character, right after we’ve been told. S is dramatizing the decision not to tell. Note that the character doesn’t say “I shall never tell these things”, but abstracts both himself (to “one”) and the experiences. That act of abstraction is the second turn of the poem.
September 1, 2009 at 11:56 am
kid bitzer
“and above all Edward Thomas”
above all what, vance? he’s especially fine, especially poetical, especially english, especially remembered? he’s actually the only of that list i’ve never heard of before.
nice post. almost like history can illustrate the present day.
September 1, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Vance
Best poet, I’d say. Most musical. Rosenberg was onto something very interesting, but I don’t think he had the time to develop it. I suppose the same could be said of Thomas — he was older, already an established prose writer, but had only begun writing poetry in the last couple years before going to war. The prettiness of the other “Georgians” can seem old-fashioned (as Sassoon’s diction is above), but Thomas found quite a distinctive vein. And he worked fast.
Fairly little of his work, FWIW, deals directly with the war, but it’s often there in the background, if enigmatically:
(via)
September 1, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Gary Farber
I said so in an update on my blog, but thanks very much for the link, by the way.
I so need to get around to dropping blogrolling, and hand-rolling a new blogroll. Among a zillion other blog maintenance tasks I’ve been procrastinating about for years.
September 1, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Matt McKeon
The propaganda and heroic cliches common at the time drove Sassoon up the wall, and in his war poems he presents the most beastly, absurd, anti heroic stance he could. In his famous statement of protest about the war, he specifically condemns civilians who “lack the imagination” to understand what the war was like. What he didn’t write about(because he didn’t particpate or witness it) was the deliberate murder of civilians. Calley and Sasson aren’t alike. Sassoon’s rage at complacent civilians is not Calley’s self excusing whine, “you don’t known what it was like.”
But even a best cause, in a war, requires savagery. In Sassoon’s time, the British civilian population was not directly threatened or witness(some bombing aside). Our current efforts in Afghanistan is something we watch on the news, happening far away to people we don’t know. We could use a few more Sassoons.
September 1, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Gary Farber
“Calley’s self excusing whine, ‘you don’t known what it was like.'”
Um, huh? That’s not what Calley is saying.
How is this that?:
September 1, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Vance
True, Matt, the cases of Calley and Sassoon’s speaker are not the same. I trust we all understand that Calley committed an atrocity, and the speaker has just done what’s expected of him. Perhaps the largest difference is that the speaker articulates his remorse while still at war, not 40 years later.
September 1, 2009 at 5:04 pm
teofilo
One of the odder things about living in my present location is that everything’s named after Joyce Kilmer, who was, as my dad used to say, “way down on the list of World War I poets.”
September 1, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Matt McKeon
The largest difference between Calley and Sassoon isn’t timing, but that one is a mass murderer and one isn’t.
Maybe the difference is what each man is expressing remorse about. Sassoon is showing compassion for enemy soldiers he is able to still recognize as human beings, while he was still at war with. Calley, mushs the American soldiers and Vietnamese together(we’re all victims!) is his passive voiced, distanted confession of “remorse.”
Or perhaps the largest difference is one protested his war at personal risk, and one was, maybe, but probably not, “just following orders”.
September 1, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Vance
Matt, we’re not far apart on this. Part of Sassoon’s point, I take it, is that “one” may feel remorse for even lawful, “just” killing — which doesn’t of course obliterate the distinction between that and war crimes.
I’m prepared, though, to be obstinate about the distinction between the “he” of the poem and Sassoon — and I would be even if the text made him “I” — and even if Sassoon in propria persona said similar things.
September 4, 2009 at 6:56 pm
TF Smith
Kilmer, like Rupert Brooke, died fairly early in his wartime service, but Kilmer served on the Western Front during the period of stalemate, and as an nco, not an officer. I wonder if that made a difference…
Although the “Rouge Bouquet” doesn’t have the punch of Sassoon and Owen circa 1918, it certainly is much clearer about the chanciness of life and death under fire than, for example, “The Soldier”…
http://www.sixtyninth.net/Bouquet.html
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/brooke5.htm#P57
Is there a more Owen/Sassoon-like figure among American WW I poets/writers?
September 4, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Vance
I don’t think we have a critical mass of “American WW I poets/writers” to choose from. (I’m reasonably familiar with the period, and I couldn’t have named any beyond Hemingway. About Kilmer I knew only one thing — “Indeed, unless the billboards fall”. And I see MacLeish served, but again I know only one thing about him.)
September 5, 2009 at 12:14 pm
TF Smith
That’s an interesting point, Vance; the WW I mobilization in the US was quite large (4 million men, IIRC) and so one would expect that would have swept up a lot of literary/academic types (Kilmer being one of them; Kent Roberts Greenfield being another, albeit a historian); add in those young Americans who served in the armed forces of the Allies (Canada, the UK, and France, for example) and one would think more than a few of the writers known in 1920-30s would have had WW I experience.
Hemingway, of course; Kilmer, Alan Seeger (I have a Rendezvouz…); MacLeish (Two Poems from the War); Cummings (why must itself up every of a park); Dos Passos (Three Soldiers); Amos Wilder (Battle Retrospect, and Thornton’s brother)
September 8, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Vance
Thanks, TF. How could I forget Cummings! And I didn’t know the others.