Reassessing the Modernist Elements in Siegfried Sassoon's War Writing

A RELUCTANT MODERNIST: Reassessing the Modernist Elements in Siegfried Sassoon’s War Writing

Un MODERNISTE RETICENT: Reevaluation des elements modemistes dans les Merits de guerre de Siegfried Sassoon.

A Thesis Submitted to the Division of Graduate Studies of the Royal military College of Canada

Finley Lawrence Mullally, CD Lieutenant-Colonel

In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

September 2012

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A RELUCTANT MODERNIST: REASSESSING THE MODERNIST ELEMENTS IN SIEGFRIED SASSOON’S WAR WRITING/ Un MODERNISTE RETICENT: REEVALUATION d e s El e m e n t s modernistes d a n s l e s e c r it s de g u e r r e d e Sie g f r ie d SASSOON. complies with the Royal military College of Canada regulations and that it meets the accepted standards of die Graduate School with respect to quality, / satisfait aux reglements du College militaire royal du Canada et qu’elle respecte les normes aceptees par la Faculte des etudes superieures quant a la qualite,

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MASTER OF ARTS / MAITRE DES ARTS

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To the Librarian: this thesis is not to be regarded as classified. / Au Bibliothecaire: Cette these n’est pas consideree comme a publication restreinte.

Main Supervisor / Directeur de these pricipal ABSTRACT

Mullally, Finley Lawrence. M.A. in War Studies. The Royal Military College of Canada. July 2012. A RELUCTANT MODERNIST: REASSESSING THE MODERNIST ELEMENTS IN SIEGFRIED SASSOON’S WAR WRITING/Un MODERNISTE RETICENT: REEVALUATION DES ELEMENTS MODERNISTES DANS LES ECRITS DE GUERRE DE SIEGFRIED SASSOON. Dr Tom Vincent and Dr Steven Lukits.

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the English Poets included in Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies and tended, as did his fellows, to nineteenth-century conservatism, romanticism and sentimentality. His war poetry however, at least that written after his first encounter with trench warfare, shifts dramatically into a verse characterised by themes of outrage, despair, iconoclasm, and futility, elements associated with modernist forms of literature. Sassoon is often presented in First World War literary criticism as a Georgian, steeped in the optimism of the nineteenth century, who is temporarily transformed into a sort of accidental modernist. This interpretation is supported by Sassoon, who claimed to reject modernism as an ideology and who returned to composing Georgian verse after the war; however, when Sassoon revisited his war experience in a trilogy of prose accounts, collectively The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. he could only memorialise the event using existential and modernist modes. Through a close comparison between the Complete Memoirs and the war poetry, deconstructing the writing thematically rather than aesthetically, this study asserts that Sassoon is unable to reconcile his experience of the war with his nineteenth-century world view. What emerges is a portrait of a writer attempting to regain the rational optimism and social conservatism of prewar, rural England, but who has had his access to this world irrevocably severed. The Complete Memoirs provide no resolution to the essential problems of anger, despair, guilt, futility and meaninglessness Sassoon experiences in the war and explores in his poetry. This study of Sassoon’s war writing repositions him in the canon of early twentieth century writers as a modernist and demonstrates the transformative power of the Great War upon the literary traditions that it engendered. RESUME

Siegfried Sassoon dtait l’un des podtes anglais dont l’oeuvre dtait reprdsentde dans les anthologies de Georgian Poetry fpoesie gdorgiennel d’Edward Marsh et tendait, comme ses confreres, vers le conservatisme, le romantisme et la sentimentality qui dtaient caractdristiques du dix-neuvidme sidcle. Ses podmes de guerre, cependant, du moins ceux qu’il avait dents aprds sa premidre expdrience de la guerre de tranchdes, se distingue de fagon radicale par des vers ddnotant l’outrage, le ddsespoir, l’iconoclasme et la futilitd, soit des dldments qui sont associds aux formes modemistes de littdrature. Sassoon est souvent prdsentd par les critiques littdraires de la Premidre Guerre mondiale comme un gdorgien, trempd dans le optimisme du dix-neuvidme sidcle, temporairement transformd en une espdee de modemiste accidentel. Cette interprdtation est appuyde par Sassoon, qui a affirmd rejeter la modemitd en tant qu’iddologie et qui s’est remis k composer des vers gdorgiens aprds la guerre; toutefois, lorsque Sassoon s’est penchdk nouveau sur l’expdrience qu’il avait vdcue pendant la guerre dans une trilogie de comptes rendus sous forme de prose, regroupds sous le titre The Complete Manoir&-of George Sherston (mdmoires complete de George Sherston. il ne pouvait commdmorer l’dvdnement qu’en utilisant les modes existentiel et modemiste. En s’appuyant sur une comparaison dtroite entre les podmes figurant dans les mdmoires complets et les podmes de guerre, cette dtude fait valoir, au moyen de la ddconstruction des dcrits en fonction de critdres lids aux thdmes plutot qu’d l’esthdtisme, que Sassoon est incapable de rdconcilier son expdrience de la guerre et sa vision du monde caractdristique du dix-neuvidme sidcle. II s’en ddgage un portrait de l’auteur qui tente de retrouver l’optimisme rationnel et le conservatisme social de l’Angleterre rurale d’avant la guerre, mais qui a vu son lien avec ce monde irrdvocablement ddtruit. Les mdmoires complets ne comportent aucune solution aux probldmes essentiels que sont la coldre, le ddsespoir, la culpability, la futility et l’absence de sens que Sassoon explore dans ses podmes. Cette dtude des dcrits de guerre de Sassoon le repositionne, au sein de l’dventail des auteurs du ddbut du vingtidme sidcle, comme un modemiste, et ddmontre la puissance transformatrice de la Guerre des Guerres sur les traditions littdraires qu’elle a engendrdes. Acknowledgements

This paper grew out of work I did for Professor Peter Archambault’s cultural history course,

“Total War and the Twentieth Century,” where I was introduced to Paul Fussell and the connection between literary modernism and the First World War. I am very grateful to Professor

Emeritus Tom Vincent, my principal teacher and advisor, who set me along this trajectory and who steered me back on course whenever my own intellect led me into the low ground.

Professor Steven Lukits, Head of the English Department, sharpened my focus and provided the motivation I needed to finish the project and 1 owe him for his close criticism and scrupulous editing. Any errors remaining in the text were placed there afterwards by me so that my friends would know that I wrote it.

My wife, Leydin, has accompanied me on this and several other more dubious journeys always with grace, humour and grit. I could wish for no better companion and I am ever thankful for the unyielding support I receive daily from her. She has always helped me discern my duty and she remains the sole measure of my aspirations.

This work was interrupted about halfway through when I deployed to Afghanistan on Operation

Athena. When I picked it up again during post-deployment leave, I reread Sassoon with fresh eyes and new insight. My own experiences allowed me a more personal understanding of the essential issues at play in Sassoon’s war writing; I must acknowledge a debt to Sassoon as thinking about his books has helped me find my own way home. Acknowledgements

This paper grew out of work I did for Professor Peter Archambault’s cultural history course,

“Total War and the Twentieth Century,” where I was introduced to Paul Fussell and the connection between literary modernism and the First World War. I am very grateful to

Professor Emeritus Tom Vincent, my principal teacher and advisor, who set me along this trajectory and who steered me back on course whenever my own intellect led me into the low

ground. Professor Steven Lukits, Head of the English Department, sharpened my focus and provided the motivation I needed to finish the project and I owe him for his close criticism

and scrupulous editing. Any errors remaining in the text were placed there afterwards by me

so that my friends would know that I wrote it.

My wife, Leydin, has accompanied me on this and several other more dubious journeys

always with grace, humour and grit. I could wish for no better companion and I am ever

thankful for the unyielding support I receive daily from her. She has always helped me

discern my duty and she remains the sole measure of my aspirations.

This work was interrupted about halfway through when I deployed to Afghanistan on

Operation Athena. When I picked it up again during post-deployment leave, I reread Sassoon

with fresh eyes and new insight. My own experiences allowed me a more personal

understanding of the essential issues at play in Sassoon’s war writing; I must acknowledge a

debt to Sassoon as thinking about his books has helped me find my own way home. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 6

Chapter One - Received Tradition in the Reading o f Siegfried Sassoon’s War W riting...... 15

Chapter Two - A Modernist by Necessity: Sassoon’s Great War Poetiy...... 61

Chapter Three - Sassoon’s Search for Meaning in his Memoirs of the Great War...... 107

Chapter Four - A Reluctant Modernist: Reassessing the Modernist Themes and Modes in

Sassoon’s War Writing...... 163

Works Cited...... 175

Curriculum V itae ...... 179

v Introduction

Siegfried Sassoon was touring Europe by car during the summer of 1927 having put aside the unfinished manuscript of his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Sassoon had continued to write poetry after the war but his verse had reprised the pastoral settings and Georgian stylings and themes which had lost currency with a reading public whose tastes had changed. Quite coincidentally, he passed through Ypres the day after the New Menin Gate monument was dedicated. Jean Moorcroft Wilson recounts Sassoon’s immediate revulsion and outrage, which inspired him the same day to write one of his angriest war poems (Joumev from the Trenches.

186). “On Passing the New Menin Gate” is a good example of the immediacy with which

Sassoon could slip back into his wartime poetics when considering Great War themes.

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

The Unheroic Dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, -

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

The armies who endured that sullen swamp. (1-8)

Sassoon’s familiar war poem devices are engaged. In form, his poem is a sonnet and the diction is formal. Beginning with two, sharp rhetorical questions, Sassoon positions the reader on the defensive and in opposition to the “unvictorious” dead. He restates his familiar demand that no meaning will be made out of the slaughter: the soldiers who fought here were doomed conscripts; they were victims, not heroes. The theme of guilt informs the thesis of the poem, that no peacetime monument can expiate the essential crime that was the Great War.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride

‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. (9-14)

Sassoon demonstrates clearly that he is not ready to make peace with the civilian world that set the conditions for the First World War, even a decade later. His shame, anger and sense of alienation all remain unresolved. His war poetry, even the war poetry written years after the conflict, finds immediate access to the emotions, themes and modes of expression associated with his best wartime writing.

Recognition of Siegfried Sassoon as an important writer appears to be growing. In 1985, he was one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated in Poets’ Comer of Westminster Abbey. In the 1990s, he was the subject of a trilogy of best-selling historical fiction by Pat Barker, a volume of which, Regeneration, won the Booker Prize in 1995; Barker’s version of Sassoon’s life was made into an internationally released feature film in 1997. An audio recording made from archival sources of Sassoon reading his own work was released in 2003, and in 2009

Cambridge University purchased Sassoon’s personal papers for £1.25 million, mounting a major exhibition of his life and work in 2010. Also in the last decade, several full-length, critical biographical studies on Sassoon have been published. Moreover, there is a wealth of literary criticism focused on Sassoon’s writings and those insights are central to our understanding of the

First World War and the literature it inspired. Not surprisingly, in several recent anthologies of

Great War poetry, Sassoon has among the greatest number of entries, reflecting his role as one of the foremost memorialists of the war in English. In surveying the critical and popular material on Sassoon’s writing, the depiction of war that the critics find in Sassoon’s work is central to current notions about the First World War and its cultural effect upon the twentieth century. They argue that it is the war itself, and the response to the war, where we find the origins of modernism: the dark inclination to collective cynicism, the hopelessness of individual action, and the sardonic subjectivism of modem experience. Sassoon is presented both as representative of his generation (a generation considered to have been victimised by the war) and, ironically, as a vector of modernistic ideas in his writing, although he himself rejected modernism as a literary theory and as a cultural ideology. In fact, it is through the modernist elements of his work that he is critical to our understanding of the war as a moral and cultural force.

Assessing Sassoon’s modernism and the extent to which he may justifiably be associated with the movement will require a working definition of the term. Chris Baldick describes

“Modernism” for The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as a literature “characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader.” In her introduction to Modernism and Mourning. Patricia Rae remarks that our understanding of modernism has been recently “institutionalised;” quoting Rita Felski, she says the term refers to texts composed between the world wars of the twentieth century “characterised by such features as aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation” (15). The compulsion fueling this aesthetic is described by Vincent Sherry in

The Great War and the Language of Modernism as a rejection of the patrimony of the European

Renaissance and Enlightenment to which this paper refers as rational optimism:

When [modernism] entered wider currency in midcentury as a term in cultural history, it

evidently served to label an energy once perceived and, long ago, even feared (from one

vantage) as insurgent, counterconventional. One of the main values that literary

modernism challenged was the liberal rationalism of the previous centuries.... [T]he term

modernism still preserves the orientation - it needs to recover the memory, and the shock -

of the first, massive reversal that history turned on liberal rationalism. (17)

Although Sassoon’s poetry always retains a formalism associated with traditional English verse, the themes explored in his war writing after his first experience o f the front line predominantly adhere to modernist characterisations. For the purposes of this thesis, the broadest sense of the modernist inclination is intended with particular emphasis placed on the sense of the artist as cultural iconoclast.

Modernist tastes and ideas, like the Victorian ones against which they reacted, are not easily catalogued. The modernist movement was international in scope and its adherents were fractious and contradictory. However, speaking broadly, modernists were unified by their rejection of both the rational optimism which pervaded the nineteenth century, and its conventions in art and morals. Referring to themselves as the “avant garde” by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the artists themselves were socially radicalised: no more the critic 10 whose role was to chasten and improve the social fabric, the modem artist was now an iconoclast, set on purging and recasting. Levenson catalogues some of the accepted generalisations about the literary modernists of the period:

the recurrent act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or

lyric form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the willingness to

make radical linguistic experiment, all often inspired by the resolve (in Eliot’s phrase) to

startle and disturb the public. (3)

Michael Bell locates the roots of Modernist ideology in the writings of Marx, Freud and

Nietzsche, and in such new social sciences as economics, psychology, and anthropology.

Modernist ideas were introduced into the mainstream of popular culture in the early twentieth century by the more avant garde poets and novelists. Lawrence Rainey argues that, in prewar

Continental Europe, modernism’s growing popularity had much to do with shrewd marketing; although its adherents were found mainly among the cultural elite, some, like the futurist F.T.

Marinetti, became something of a curiosity among the general readership and delivered large- scale, sold-out, public lectures. Marinetti had mixed reviews in Britain, which was experiencing a nostalgic revival of Victorian pastoralism. The British reading public favoured the Georgian poets just as England’s burgeoning middle class was embracing an urban and suburban consumerism. It was not until the period between the wars that modernistic trends were to become the ascendant, dominant cultural aesthetic throughout the English-speaking world. Many critics argue that it was the First World War that catalysed this new modem spirit and transformed popular tastes and trends. Characteristically, the literature of the time moved towards a deep subjectivity. As new psychological theories became popularised and even faddish, a new sense of perspective was introduced - even multiple perspectives were allowed - and symbolism and interpretation of meaning became more private or personal; imagery was often juxtaposed harshly, incongruently and, at times, inscrutably. The settings changed also as the popular Geoigian naturalist and pastoral themes were superseded by an industrialised poetry set in an urban locale of decay and dislocation. Bradbury and McFarlane describe why the radical modernist ideas captured the

Zeitgeist of the post war period:

This leads us toward another kind of account as to why Modernism is our art; it is the one

art that responds to the scenario of our chaos. It is the art consequent on Heisenberg’s

“uncertainty principle,” of the destruction of civilisation and reason in the First World War,

of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and

constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness and absurdity....

The communal universe of reality and culture on which nineteenth-century art had

depended was over; and the explosively lyrical, or else the ironic and Active modes, modes

which included large elements of not only creation but de-creation were inevitable. (27)

In poetry particularly, formal conventions were abandoned. Rhyme and meter gave way to free verse while logical exposition was supplanted by fragmentary imagery after the fashion o f T. S.

Eliot. Many critics credited the general public disenchantment following the Great War for popularising what had been radical and minority tastes. This study will focus on Sassoon’s work and the enduring effect the war had upon his writing. That impact is clearest in his wartime verse. The poetry written by Sassoon between

1916 and 1918 responds directly to the war in terms immediate and intimate. As a young poet,

Siegfried Sassoon was associated with Edward Marsh and the Georgian movement which coalesced around the Georgian Poetry anthologies which Marsh edited. Before the war, Sassoon tended, as did his fellows, to nineteenth-century conservatism, romanticism and sentimentality.

His war poetry, however (at least that written after his first direct experience of trench warfare), shifts dramatically into a verse characterised by themes of outrage, despair, iconoclasm, and futility, elements associated with modernist forms of literature. The currently accepted reading of

Sassoon, as will be elaborated in Chapter One, is that the modes of expression associated with literary modernism are accidental to his work and necessitated by his war experience: in other words, the only way he could describe his experience of the trenches in the First World War was in this mode of writing. The position that Sassoon’s modernism was a temporary condition wrought by the intensity of his combat experience is supported by Sassoon’s own interpretation of his work and by analyses of his postwar poetry, which clearly and immediately regains its

Georgian aesthetic.

This thesis will reassess Sassoon’s reversion to a prewar, optimistic vision of the world through a thematic comparison between the poetry he published during the war and his major prose work, a semi-fictional exposition of his war experience. Chapter Two will examine the seventy poems composed during Sassoon’s tours of duty in the trenches and analyse their content, assessing his themes and modes of expression as being broadly modernist. Chapter Three will treat Sassoon’s prose account of the war in a similar manner, assessing the writing thematically to challenge the assertion that Sassoon was able to revert to Georgian modes after the war and to determine the degree to which his prose may be categorised as modernist.

Sassoon began his trilogy in 1926, the first volume of which, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was published ten years after the Armistice in 1928. This was followed by Memoirs of an

Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936) and collectively published as the

Complete Memoirs o f George Sherston in 1937. If it is true that the modernism associated with

Sassoon’s war poetry is only accidental to his immediate experience o f the Great War, then one should expect to find in the Complete Memoirs a reexamination of the war in terms more late-

Victorian than modem, a literary rendering in which the war itself may be rationalised and where his own place within the war may be found to have been personally meaningful. But this is not the case. The Complete Memoirs reveals Sassoon unable to reconcile his experience of the war with his nineteenth-century world view. What emerges is a portrait of a writer nostalgically attempting to regain the rational optimism and socially conservative mores of prewar, rural

England, but who has had his access to this world irrevocably severed. Chapter Four will conclude the paper with a direct comparison of several episodes described in the poetry written during the war, which are revisited in the Complete Memoirs: despite a softening of effect

(especially in the satirical portraits) the prose offers no clear conclusion and no resolution to the essentially modernist problems of anger, despair, guilt, futility and meaninglessness originally examined in the poetry. This study of Sassoon’s war writing repositions him in the canon of early twentieth-century writers as a modernist, despite his best efforts to be otherwise, and demonstrates the transformative power of the Great War upon the literary traditions that it engendered. 15

Chapter One Received Tradition in the Reading of Siegfried Sassoon’s War Writing

The commentary and criticism on Sassoon's literary works have been broad in scope and approach. He continues to interest academic writers for his profound transformations in technique, diction and theme; for his enigmatic silences on his mixed race ancestry; for his spiritual journey from vapid country sportsman to devout Roman Catholic; for his evolution from war hero to war protestor; and for his sometimes chaste, even puritanical stance on sexual themes to his own complicated relationship with his own homosexuality. In broad terms, the critics fall into four main categories of criticism. The earliest critics concentrate on Sassoon’s politics, reviewing his poetical abilities in a relatively cursory manner. Into this group are placed such writers as Edmund Blunden, Vivian de la Sola Pinto and J. M. Gregson, who were each anxious about positioning Sassoon’s poetic and literary ideas, as well as his politics, in relation to contemporary trends. The second category examines Sassoon’s craftsmanship as a writer. The first comprehensive study of Sassoon’s poetry and prose comes from Michael Thorpe in the

1960s. This pivotal work is followed by other books and essays by Arthur E. Lane, Paul Fussell,

John Press, and Paul Edwards. These critics tend to apologise for Sassoon’s poetical choices while positioning his poetry and memoirs as important texts in our understanding of the Great

War. Third, a school of biographical criticism emerges following the publication of Dame

Felicitas Corrigan’s book, A Poet’s Pilgrimage, in 1973. Dennis Silk, Thomas Mallon, Patrick J.

Quinn, and Brooke Allen are critics who examine Sassoon’s works as literary critics, but do so primarily to gain insight into Siegfried Sassoon’s enigmatic personality. In more recent years, a fourth category of psychological criticism has arisen which examines Sassoon’s writings from specific aspects of his character. Writers such Elaine Showalter, Carole Shelton and Daniel Hipp are interested in Sassoon’s experience as a survivor o f shell shock; Adrian Caesar and Philip

Hoare are interested in Sassoon as a homosexual writer; Avi Matalon and Avrom Fleishman examine Sassoon in relation to his Jewishness; Patrick Campbell incorporates all these elements.

In this approach, Sassoon’s poetry and prose are psychoanalysed to gain insight into the man himself; moreover, the critics do so to draw conclusions about the specific group to which they assign him as spokesman, alternately as the homosexual or Jewish voice from the trenches of the

Great War.

The Political Critics

The early attempts to contextualise the writings of Sassoon tend to be political and ideological in nature, describing him alternately as conservative and as radical. This approach has as much to do with postwar social politics as with the politics of literary criticism. The focus on political criticism appears to have been exacerbated by Sassoon’s own political activities, his working for a time as the literary editor of a leftist newspaper, and his campaigning with the

Labour party for general elections, all the while maintaining his connections among the upper- middle class and the aristocracy. Writ large over all of this political criticism was his 1917 war protest that thrust him into the national political spotlight. Literary criticism emphasising the political aspects of Sassoon’s poetry emerged in response to negative reviews of Sassoon’s poetry collection, Heart’s Joumev. published in 1928. 17

The defence was led by Sassoon’s lifelong friend, fellow infantry officer, and like-minded war poet and memoirist, Edmund Blunden, who wrote a 1928 essay defending Sassoon. He subsequently republished it in The Mind’s Eye in 1934. Blunden concedes that Sassoon had been politically radicalised by the war, and that his radicalisation had extended so far as to affect his art, transforming his war poetry into modernist modes o f writing. At the w ar’s end, though,

Blunden asserts that Sassoon, whatever his politics, had withdrawn from the modernist school, which he describes as “monotonous, unsubstantial and irrelevant; it does not comfort but bum” (262). Blunden himself was a Georgian poet and defends the Georgian method stating that its artistry, at least in part, comes from its craft. He argues that the newer styles, eschewing old mles for rhyme and form with “dead shadows, empty silences, blank unchartable continents” (264) are easy to emulate and lack the rigour of that poetry which, in its older forms, requires much knowledge, skill and practice. Further, he claims that Sassoon is the poet of his day who makes innovations while retaining the best of their shared poetic traditions. He praises

Sassoon’s use of rhythm (especially the “alexandrine” or dodecasyllable) and rhyme as well as his coinage of new words and use of satire (263-4). Blunden acknowledges the radical elements in Counter-Attack but states that modernist elements were made necessary by the singular event of the Great War and simply signified an interruption in a poetic career more conservative than innovative:

.. .a poet was found with the strength of mind to sacrifice everything, even the

traditions of poetry, even his earlier artistic plan, in order that he might make

audible and intelligible in England and elsewhere the weeping Truth...[Counter- 18

Attack] was an individual’s endeavour, under a conviction that things were going

from bad to worse, to pull the line of civilisation together. (267)

In this way, Blunden stands as a contemporary apologist for Sassoon’s postwar return to

Georgian styles based on his argument that modernism is a faddish aesthetic movement derived from political radicalism and personal trauma.

Blunden also comments on the content of Sassoon’s poetry and addresses the question of his friend’s iconoclastic satire. In an attempt to explain how Sassoon’s aesthetic seems to evolve and regress, and as a means of forgiving Sassoon for the angry sarcasm of Counter-Attack, he says, the volume

employed a type of sarcastic verse which Mr. Sassoon developed for the particular case.

He struck out with mockery of the apathy, or false ardours, of the period.. .Nothing is

more certain than that Mr. Sassoon himself realised the difference, in the way of essential

poetry, between these searing colloquial verses of desperation and the full-toned lyrics,

the delicately profound descriptions and interpretations which his nature could and

should be comprised in. (271)

Blunden denigrates Sassoon’s modernist war poetry as mere “colloquial verses of desperation” in contrast to his Georgian poems which for him are “essential poetry.” Blunden’s certainty that

Sassoon’s modernism had been adopted “for the particular case” o f the First World War is prescient of later arguments that the Georgians “evolved” their poetry in response to their war experience, not as an aesthetic choice but because it was the only appropriate mode of expression. 19

Vivian de la Sola Pinto gives the counter argument. He was another writer who served as an infantry officer with Sassoon in the First World War. He went on to prominence as a literary critic in the postwar period and his best known work, Crisis in English Poetry 1880 - 1940. was published in 1951. In it, Pinto interprets English poetry through the leftist’s prism o f class struggle. In a politicised argument, he traces the history o f English poetry, differentiating between England’s upper, middle and lower classes. Each o f these, he argues, had its own distinct cultural traditions, and each had its culture sorely tested in “the industrial revolution during the nineteenth century [that] had destroyed both the aristocratic and popular traditions of culture.” The middle classes were victims of their own success: in their migration to the suburbs and subsequent dropping out of the corporate life of town and city, the middle classes had “failed to continue and develop the culture bequeathed to them by their predecessors” (100). They “had literary traditions, but especially in the field of poetry, these were overlaid by a thick veneer of a conservatism that was at once academic and puritanical” and centred on a “worship of the classics” (103). He notes that Sassoon’s early war poetry is in the Georgian style, but was

too honest and too sensitive to continue to live in this world of romantic fantasy...

Sassoon was at his best when he combined this pity for the ordeal of the common soldier

with a savage irony directed against the stupidity and vulgarity of the people who shut

their eyes to the horror o f the war. (127)

But after this praise, and his claims that Sassoon embodies a leftist’s concern for the working class, Pinto says of the poetry itself: Sassoon had no originality in technique. He used the smooth decasyllables of the

Georgians in nearly all the poems and he seems to have learned from Brooke’s realistic

poems the trick of producing a humorous effect by the contrast between a stately

traditional metre and subject matter very unlike the dignified themes with which such

metres are associated. There is nearly always a touch of parody in Sassoon’s war

poems.. .Sassoon’s best poetry is to be found in these little satires. It lives by its

passionate sincerity and honesty, but it is purely destructive. It performed the great

service of debunking the old romantic myth of the glory of the war, but it created no new

myth to express the inner meaning of the conflict and the crisis of which it was a

symptom. (128)

Pinto acknowledges the modernist tendency in Sassoon’s war writing towards a destructive passion that does not replace what is destroyed through any redemptive means. As a political critic, Pinto saw, even in Sassoon’s prewar writing of The Daffodil Murderer, the emerging leftist who was to join the Labour party after the war, although this is a view hotly contested by later critics, chief among them, Michael Thorpe.

Michael Thorpe’s Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study, published in 1966, is the first full- length scholarly work on Sassoon, a work which focuses more on literary than political criticism.

However, Thorpe is briefly mentioned here, among the political critics, because of his response to Pinto’s political argument. Thorpe takes issue with Pinto’s political interpretation of The

Daffodil Murderer as a rejection of Sassoon’s upper-middle-class privilege; Thorpe refers the reader to Sassoon’s diaries and memoirs and their lack of any such commentary and then points 21 out the absence of any such political sequel. According to Thorpe, as far as politics go, “[w]hat is characteristic of Sassoon, as the War poems were to show more powerfully, is his capacity to feel for the suffering victim” (13).

Satire, if not the highest, is a legitimate form of poetry - and it was Sassoon’s distinctive

achievement to put it to wholly original ends. In showing the dreadfulness of the War, in

its surface aspects, he preceded Owen and surpassed him and all English poets who had

previously written about war. His satires have, quantitatively, better ‘bite’ than those of

his fellow war poets and a sheer brutality of utterance that matches the reality. (25-6)

Thorpe quotes Sassoon in Siegfried’s Journey, accepting that the satirical poems were bom, not out of politics, but out of the poet’s psychological state; his sense of self, says Sassoon, is worked out in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. As far as politicisation goes, Thorpe holds up The Old

Huntsman as illustrative of Sassoon “striving during his first few months in France, to hold fast the innocent vision that had animated the early nature poems” and which contains “a note of facile optimism” (27). This optimism, he argues, is crushed in the crucible of combat.

Writing in 1976, J. M. Gregson is the most recent critic in the political school. A great admirer of Vivian de la Sola Pinto, Gregson also interprets most of the war poetry primarily along political lines, and Sassoon’s especially so. He places the war poetry in a milieu where the old three-class social structure had been reduced to two:

By 1916 there had arisen what V. de S. Pinto has called the division of British society into

two nations, the Nation at Home and the Nation Overseas, with a growing cleavage

between the two. The Nation at Home still believed in the patriotic myth of the heroic war; the Nation Overseas, in touch with the obscenity of life and death in the trenches,

was completely disillusioned about the glorious nature of the struggle. (31)

Gregson views Sassoon as chief among the politicised poets of the time. He calls him

the supreme propagandist among the war poets, as sharp, as concentrated, as bitter as any

lampoonist or satirical cartoonist.. .Sassoon is the best barometer of the evolving

emotional responses to the war made by the fighting men. If Brooke caught the mood of

1914.. .then Sassoon’s vivid angry tirade speaks for the fighting men o f 1917 and 1918.

(29)

He says of Sassoon’s poem “They” that it “is hardly poetry but a political cartoon” (35), conceding, “[wjhile in quantity and consistency of aim Counter-Attack is a political pamphlet, there is considerable variety in the way the poet drives home his message” (36). He writes that

Sassoon has “the reporter’s eye” and “[b]y 1917, Sassoon saw himself as an anti-war propagandist” (35). Gregson comments on how modem the Georgian war poets were, noting that the Georgians used their old-fashioned techniques combined with a modernist theme and image. Commenting on this, he adds, “it is indeed one of the sadder facts of literature that

Sassoon lapsed in post-war years into minor verse with an unmistakably Georgian stamp” (33).

In sum, Gregson asserts that Sassoon

lacks the vision, the range of techniques, the profundity and variety of emotion of Owen

and Rosenberg, but in narrow and direct effects he is unsurpassed. He turns familiar and

unpretentious metres and rhymes and a bitter wit to forceful and ironic effect, and his

language is hard, simple and sharply defined. As he desired to be, he is always

immediately accessible. (40) 23

Owing much to Pinto, the singularly political criticism seems to die out after Gregson. While it

remains an issue touched on by the other critics, Sassoon’s politics do not form the central

concern o f their criticism.

Later writers will agree with these political critics that Sassoon was indeed politicised but

only in the moment and they will assert the same about Sassoon’s flirtations with modernism.

His politics were created by the extreme exigencies of the war and his own immediate and

dramatic experience of it. That his war protest was bom of a sincere and primarily political

conviction is no longer accepted by any critic or biographer; rather it is seen as a personal or psychological expression which soon evaporated like his pretensions to socialism after the war.

As his political ardour died out, Sassoon’s retreat into solitude is viewed as a personal response to the modem political world, though some later critics have more to say about this. In the received tradition regarding Sassoon, these early political critics are important to our current understanding of the war writing in that their argument that Sassoon’s political radicalism noted as a temporary condition and necessary to his experience, would be reprised by the literary critics who argued that the same radicalisation resulted in temporary existential and modernist elements emerging in his writing.

The Literary Critics

The first writer to embark on a reading of Sassoon’s body of work that was primarily concerned with literary criticism was Michael Thorpe; he was followed closely by Arthur Lane who wrote the 1972 study, An Adequate Response; The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modem Memory, published in 1975, looms large over all subsequent criticism. These critics are most concerned with questions of poetic or aesthetic categorisation. They examine Sassoon as a writer with an artistic pedigree and place him in the continuum of literary and cultural history. They differ from the political critics mainly in their lack of urgency; for these critics, the radical and reactionary political movements that alternatively claimed Sassoon had become moribund and there is more interest in defining how

Sassoon affected other writers of the period and how he affected the general reading public and later generations in his memorialising of The Great War. They share with the political critics a preoccupation with literary form.

Michael Thorpe’s study is meticulous and thorough. He traces Sassoon’s full journey from artistic immaturity (which he argues persisted into the war period), through full development, and into literary obscurity. Thorpe maintains that Sassoon was well aware of the poverty of his early poetry and asks why so many of the early works are preserved in his

Collected Poems of 1961. Thorpe’s guess is that Sassoon wished to offer “an honest pattern of his development” as “they are chiefly valuable as a measure of the extraordinary change wrought in Sassoon’s writing by his War experience” (5). Thorpe gives the prewar poems full reading and sees a continuation in form, diction and style in the early war poetry of the 1917 edition of the Old Huntsman. One-third of these early war poems, he notes, are written in the manner of the Victorian “Happy Warrior,” a theme which Sassoon would come to reject and parody later 25

Sassoon’s poems romanticising the war were, like Brooke’s and many others’, written

before the experience of war had really begun and before the spirit with which it was

entered upon had been extinguished by the accumulation of unremitting horrors took all

the sense of ‘cleanness’ out of even the most self-deceived. (16)

Thorpe echoes others in locating the break in Sassoon’s style not with his enlistment in the

British Army, but rather in the “ferocious destruction of 1916-17” which caused Sassoon’s antiwar sentiment.

Bitterness is the keynote of the satires that occupy the central place in Old Huntsman and

Counter-Attack: bitterness against all who are excluded from the martyrdom and who can

be held in some way responsible for its continuance. The counter-attack is directed

chiefly against the Nation at Home - the Church, the State, the civilians (whether

ignorant or indifferent) - and the ‘brass hats’ of the General Staff. (18-19)

Thorpe notes the “grotesque irony.. .thrust brutally in the reader’s face” (19-20). “Sassoon,” he says, “deliberately sheers off the euphemistic trappings that clutter the notion of the Supreme

Sacrifice” (20). Thorpe credits Pinto with the idea that the conventionality of form in Counter-

Attack adds to the ironic quality of many of the poems in that they obey “the simplest prescription of Georgian verse in everything but diction, so that the satiric effect is accentuated by clothing a disreputable body in formal dress” (23). In this, Thorpe also acknowledges

Sassoon is at his best.

Thorpe recognises the limitations of Sassoon’s poetry. He offers that Sassoon “is prone to give way to dull imprecations and cliches that dangerously deflate the feeling” (29). He adds, “There is a dangerously high proportion of cliche in the poems of strong feeling, as if he had not the urge for precision or the artistic conscience to vary his expression” (30). Thorpe also provides a brief sampling of some of the criticism Sassoon’s reviewers wrote up to 1966. There seems to be little positive commentary about the poetry in Thorpe’s estimation. He refers to D.J.

Enright who, in a 1961 essay, describes Sassoon’s “poems of negative emotion” as “interesting,” but outside these, Enright says Sassoon “inclines to become sentimental in a conventional way” (31-2). In his 1948 publication, English Literature Between the Wars. Ifor Evans calls

Sassoon the most “outstanding” writer of the “realist stage of war poetry” but says he is incapable of deep emotion or unbiased contemplation (32). John H. Johnston and Vivian de la

Sola Pinto are also listed among Sassoon’s detractors. Thorpe goes on to give a full reading of

Sassoon’s postwar poetry as well. In the very first such publication, released in 1919, Thorpe says,

Now, reading Picture Show within the whole pattern of Sassoon’s development, the

reader is conscious of an ardent search for tranquility and absolution rather than of any

achieved equilibrium of feeling....

.. .The most interesting poems express his reactions to psychological problems that

were the legacy of the war: how to endure the bitter and harrowing memories and how to

readjust to ordinary life when suddenly deprived of the clearly defined purpose war had

at least provided. (39)

This search for peace was the predominant theme noted by Thorpe in Sassoon’s later poetry. It was marked by a return to his prewar poetic sensibilities, reinforcing the notion that whatever we 27 read as modem in the war poems is a temporary condition wrought by the experience o f trench warfare.

Arthur Lane published a book-length study in 1972 called An Adequate Response: The

War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In this work, Lane devotes a full two chapters to an evaluation of other war poets like Charles Hamilton Sorley and Rupert Brooke.

Overall, he provides a very close study of Sassoon’s poetry without reference to his prose. The politics behind the poems, while acknowledged as important at the time, have become secondary concerns.

The standards I intend to use are for the most part literary, since it is as poets and not as

propagandists or moralists that both Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon should be

considered. However, no examination of this particular poetry - poetry produced under a

unique environmental stress - can afford to ignore its moral and propagandistic

implications without doing less than justice to the stated intentions of both poets. (11)

In his “Introduction” Lane says the recent criticism - he cites John H. Johnston and Bernard

Bergonzi as exemplars - has been content to divide the war poetry of the First World War into two categories: epic and lyric. He finds this less “useful” than his own division into “the poetry of meditation” and the “poetry of immediate experience.” He defines the meditative poetry as relatively impersonal and says it has as its object general truths; the experiential poetry begins in the moment, “is personal, frequently dramatic, and usually stops short of general statement” (15).

He says that, with many notable exceptions, Owen and Sassoon’s work is of the second category. 28

In 1975 Paul Fussell published his The Great War and Modem Memory and immediately became a major influence among the critics of the literature of the First World War. He examines

Sassoon in a far-ranging and intertextual study which looks at the totality of the Great War as it endures in the literature and culture of the twentieth century. In the section that examines

Sassoon in detail, Fussell fixes on Sassoon’s ability to juxtapose and to hold opposites together

(92). He makes a strong case debunking the facile myth that the Somme offensive created popular, literary modernism in poetry and acknowledges that a nascent popular modernism was present in the prewar poetry of Thomas Hardy, Sassoon’s greatest influence: “Glancing back 31 years later, Siegfried Sassoon recalled that during the war, Hardy had been his ‘main admiration among living writers’ and he acknowledged the debt of his satirical poems about the war to the prewar ironies of Satires of Circumstance” (7). He adds later that it “was this same instinct for dark and formal irony that turned the soldiers to Hardy. Sassoon speaks for the whole BEF when he says, ‘I didn’t want to die - not before I’d finished The Return of the Native anyhow’” (163-4). He notes that there was a strong literary tradition of dark, experiential imagery in English poetry and describes how much of Sassoon’s “end of the world” figures are derivative of other, more traditional English writers (136). He examines Sassoon’s writing as a demonstration of the general theatricality of the war (193,195), and notes the presence of homoerotica in the war poems (248). Fussell accepts the earlier argument that the Georgians - and Sassoon was typical - entered the war as neoromantics, and that their experiences there transformed them into something else. He stops short of defining their work as modernist.

While Fussell examines the war poems of Sassoon, he devotes much more energy to interpreting the Sherston memoirs. In these, Fussell demonstrates that the “insistent polarities” of the war experience “determine his whole lifetime mental set and become the matrices” of

Sassoon’s memory (92). Fussell notes that the Sherston Trilogy is constructed like a play in three parts to give his memory structure and therefore meaning (199). Fussell describes the memoir as undisguised fiction (310-1), a position with which later critics will disagree.

Comparing Graves’ work to Sassoon’s, Fussell writes, “But we are in no danger of being mislead as long as we perceive that Goodbye to All That is no more ‘a direct and factual biography’ than

Sassoon’s memoirs” (207). Although there are many elements - especially in form - that are reminiscent of the Victorian novel, there are some significant breaks with the past, especially regarding the consistent disillusionment.

In one sense, the Memoirs of George Sherston can be considered a long series of

adversary footnotes to Wordsworth’s poem [“The Happy Warrior”]. Sassoon mentions it

very often, and always ironically....[I]n rejecting “the Happy Warrior,” Sassoon is

rejecting a whole Victorian moral and artistic style. (169)

Of importance to this thesis, Fussell notes the return to pastoral imagery in the memoir and highlights the curious and significant absence of the same in the war poems (236, 242).

Pastoralism is one example of a Georgian aesthetic with which he makes a break in the war poems but to which he returns in the war memoirs.

Other critics have examined the writings of Sassoon looking for specific motifs.

Indicative o f this style is the 1983 essay by Avrom Fleishman, “The Memoirs o f George

Sherston: Sassoon’s Perpetual Pilgrimage.” Fleishman follows Thorpe and Fussell by examining the problem of autobiography and authenticity and wades into the vigorous debate over how fictive the war accounts are. Fleishman examines the memoir as “pilgrimage literature.” He argues that the memoirs follow traditional motifs and images associated with the transcendental

English pilgrim allegories: “The absence of religious conversion and formal completion in

Sassoon’s self-writings does not, however, bar them from full use of the figures with which spiritual autobiographers have given pattern and meaning to their lives” (338). Demonstrating that the memoirs are highly constructed reflections, derivative of other writers, Fleishman writes that Sassoon

ascribes this tendency to a habit acquired through the medium of his poetry and also

through his Jewish ancestry and love of the English mystical poets: his poetry gives

frequent indications of a typological habit of mind in confronting the otherwise

unassimilable spectacle of the Great War... [T]he longstanding practice of Sassoon’s

poetry confirms his autobiographical tendency to apply to the Bible for the figures of life.

We may trace the habit to his sense of Jewish heritage... or to his favouring of the

devotional and mystical poets o f the seventeenth century, especially Herbert and Vaughn.

(338-9)

He notes that there is almost no Biblical “figuration” in the first volume of the Sherston trilogy.

Fleishman posits, “Sassoon wishes to maintain his native scenes - for all their numinousness in the memory - at the literal level, in preparation for the violent contrast he will draw between them and the war spectacle” (340). He echoes Fussell’s interpretation of the first volume as very much connected to the second and third, functioning not as a prelude but as an elaborate first act thematically based on a prescience of doom. He also uses Fussell’s primary examples of the 31

Watts’s painting, “Love and Death” (341) and the “perils of wire” in horse jumping (342) to

demonstrate this literary foreshadowing.

Fleishman quotes Thorpe, who says Sassoon’s “creation of a pseudonymous persona to

tell an authentic but selective tale allows him to exaggerate the ingenue in his early self-

portrait” (342). In his particular study of pilgrimage allegory, Fleishman locates “The Figure of

Innocence” not as the narrator, but as Dick Tiltwood, whom Sassoon buries (342).

The language inclines here not only toward indignation at outraged innocence but also

toward universal finality.. .It is the larger burden of the narrator’s slowly growing

political awareness that begins to emerge in his anticipation of the debacle: “.. .that

exploitation of courage.. .was the essential tragedy o f the War, which, as everyone now

agrees, was a crime against humanity.” (343)

Fleishman finds the typical “language of the lower world” emerging immediately at the

beginning of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (344). He then traces Sherston’s successive losses

of faith - first in the war, then in the battalion and then, as the battalion is obliterated, in himself;

these presage his descent into the German tunnels beneath the Hindenburg Line (344-5). He says

that after Bertrand Russell’s character, Thornton Tyrell, and Sherston collaborate on his rejection

of the war, “the act of protest on which they collaborate takes the form of a traditional religious protest-cum-profession of faith” (348). In the culmination of his argument, Fleishman finally notes: “There follows one of the classic scenes of autobiographical writing, an ascent of a hill to the point of epiphany” (349). Fleishman’s final and most obvious clue supporting this interpretation of the Sherston trilogy is in the epigraph to Sherston’s Progress, “indicating 32 movement toward the Celestial City, to lay the path for the denouement. But...a near-fatal wound offers no easy moral or aesthetic resolution - it simply brings his war service to an end and closes the Memoirs” (350). Fleishman’s attempt to position Sassoon within the greater matrices of literary history are typical of those following the pattern of criticism mapped out by

Fussell.

Thematic readings of Sassoon and other First World War writers after the fashion of

Fussell have not lost much currency since 1975, as indicated by the reissue of Great War and

Modem Memory in a new 25th Anniversary Edition in 2000. When Sassoon receives a mention as one poet among many, or is anthologised in books on the Great War, it is often Fussell’s style of cultural criticism which is employed. By way of example, John Press in his 1983 compendium Poets of World War I. has a chapter on Sassoon. The essay’s style is exclamatory, and there are misplaced details which would indicate that Press knew Sassoon’s biography only through poor secondary sources; however, he echoes others when he says, “The judgement that

[Sassoon] is primarily a satirist is questionable, but his satirical poems retain to this day their incisiveness and power” (42). On Sassoon’s realism, Press offers, “.. .he portrays as faithfully as a Dutch seventeenth-century painter...no mere catalogue of horrifying items: the dense particularity of the description achieves a sensuous richness... [and] casual irony” (44). Press summarises Sassoon’s postwar career:

[Sassoon] continued to write poetry during the rest of a long life, happy to employ the

diction and the metres of his youth, unswayed by the innovatory techniques of Pound, 33

Eliot and the Imagists. His poems include gentle satires. ..reminiscences of the war, and

explorations of religious and mystical themes. (46)

In this manner, Press relegates Sassoon to the second rank of war writing, well regarded for his satirical poems and his memoirs, which are considered important texts, but only insofar as they reflect the cultural aesthetic of the Great War.

A recent holistic study of the First World War memoirists by Paul Edwards was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War in 2005. In it, he offers a cogent summation of where the literary critics of the memoirs of the First World War have settled regarding the continuum of Georgianism and Modernism. Writing specifically of Blunden, but generally about the group of writers he represents, including Sassoon, Edwards says,

Blunden’s is virtually a modernist stance[;] his modernism is, like that of other Georgian

poets compelled to represent war and destruction, adopted through force of circumstance

rather than aesthetic predilection. It doesn’t come naturally to him, so that on a level of

form the book obeys the unwelcome imperatives of the experience it records. (20)

Edwards is representative of the majority opinion of the literary critics that the modernist elements in Sassoon’s war writing are accidental and resulting from a psychological response and not an artistic one. He goes on to follow Fussell’s interpretation of the Complete Memoirs with some precision. He allows that the “200-page long prelude might seem disproportionate” but he locates this prelude as foreshadowing precisely as Fleishman does, noting Sherston’s sympathy with the hunted quarry, the similarity of buying military and hunting uniforms, the 34 prefigured barbed wire; Edwards states, “the war has been so powerful as to seep back into, and colour, Sherston’s innocent youth” (24). On the question of authority and truthfulness in the memoirs, and the categorisation of the Sherston trilogy, the debate has become inconclusive and settled into something like a detente. Among the literary critics, the authenticity of the prose accounts is more important than their mere factualness. Citing Fussell again, Edwards writes,

Paul Fussell believes the Memoirs [of George Sherston] should be treated as fiction,

especially since they leave out the whole dimension of Sassoon’s identity as a poet. He

has a point, but if the work is still read it is because it provides an account of Sassoon’s

own experience: it is read as a record of the truth - a shaped record but not a novel.. .So

the Memoirs have psychology at their centre, but the psychology of Sherston is ultimately

only of importance to us because of the war experience that tests it, almost to destruction.

This makes the trilogy a kind of travesty of a ‘novel of education.’ (23-4)

Edwards argues that the Complete Memoirs is an authentic record of the First World War and the issue of whether to categorise the prose as a novel or as an autobiography have become unimportant over time.

The literary critics, from Thorpe to Edwards, dominated by Fussell, have informed our current reading of Sassoon’s war writing, and have given it a place in literary and cultural history. Fussell’s view that the modernist elements are present but a product of psychology rather than artistic choice, has become canonical and has developed a strong sense of place within the criticism. His assertion that the role of the Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is to 35 foreshadow the second and the third volumes is also generally accepted. Edwards, building on this idea, adds,

But the world of Dickens and Surtees is that of the early nineteenth century, not the late

nineteenth, and the feudal society of Sherston’s youth is not the real thing.. .It is a

Victorian revival. Fox-hunting, here, is a semi-ritualistic activity that serves an

ideological function of maintaining the illusions o f a set of social relations that are in

reality quite different as the ‘Mister’s’ warning to Sherston about unrest in Ireland

confirms.. .Sherston’s experience of disintegration takes on a historical significance, then,

as the war removes those ideological facades that had sustained him. (26)

The literary critics agree that the first volume of Complete Memoirs is as much about Sherston’s imminent loss of innocence, as it is about the imminent destruction of the Victorian revival which, from the outset, was doomed to give way to modernity, its demise hastened by the Great

War. Sassoon’s war writing, according this interpretation, includes literary elements associated with modernism because Sassoon himself was so affected by his own experience that there was no other way to describe or explore the themes of personal or cultural negation that are central to this body of his work.

The Biographical Critics

Because Sassoon was an enigmatic and interesting person in his own right, there has emerged in the last half century a group of writers not so much interested in the body of work that Sassoon created but rather in exploring the personality of the man himself. This group has been dominated by Felicitas Corrigan who assembled a book difficult to categorise, called 36

Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage in 1973. More editor than writer, Corrigan strove through selective editing, to trace the spiritual journey of Sassoon from lukewarm establishment

Anglicanism, through atheism tinged with a complicated relationship with his own Jewishness, to his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. Her textual analysis of the poetry was included to illuminate the character of Sassoon through what she perceives as a long conversion experience.

Corrigan, a friend of Sassoon in his latter years, examines his writing entirely from the perspective of his conversion to Christianity. She focuses not simply upon the later work which was overtly religious in nature, but, like Fleishman, looks for evidence of a conversion narrative in Sassoon’s earliest writing. In these, she finds an undeveloped sense of the religious in his moralistic and prophetic writing. “His predictions, always related to historical circumstances, may be explained as the result of a normal faculty of observation combined with an intensified insight into the religious and moral situation” (20-1). Of his war protest, she writes, “[f]rom the first his revolt was essentially religious in character” (22). Even his experimentations with modernism in his poetry she revises - borrowing heavily from Blunden - as an act of crusade against the destructive power of the war:

Under his conviction that things were going from bad to worse and that civilisation (one

of his favourite words) had to be pulled together, come what might, he felt an inner

compulsion to sacrifice everything, to sacrifice the very tradition of English poetry and

his own ideals, to sacrifice his own reputation and life if need be, to prevent the

destruction of the nation. (22) 37

Corrigan quotes Sassoon’s comment on the enduring popularity of his war poems to the exclusion of his others: ‘“Why can’t they realize’, he asked, ‘that the war poems were improvised by an impulsive, intolerant, immature young creature, under the extreme stress of experience?”’ (23). She cites Blunden among her supporters in this revisionist project:

Edmund Blunden, who of all men ought to know, has repeatedly insisted that the

emphasis of Sassoon’s war poetry and his dramatic manifesto were essential: he swept

away the illusions and the profusion of absurdity circulating in the first years of the war.

The mockery, disillusionment and despair of his war poems are simply variations on the

theme of longing - longing for the savagely annihilated joys of the past when nature and

man were in peaceful harmony, for the spiritual intimacies of solitude, and for a dwelling

place for the spirit of man. (23)

According to Corrigan, Sassoon believed that “technical development.. .without any corresponding emotional development,” as well as the absence of form and “the air of profundity produced by scientific method and experiment” were “a harlequinade of intellectual activity manufactured by mannerisms and adroit tricks of style. He would have none o f it, save by way of ridicule” (40-1). Corrigan identifies Sassoon’s later rejection of modernistic poetry with a complete rejection of the twentieth century.

Corrigan interprets the Complete Memoirs in much the same way as the poetry. She notes that the Sherston trilogy is “marked by a deep and subtle sense of humour, a profound feeling for the innocence o f youth, and a nostalgia for an English way of life destroyed by war and scientific advances” (31). Even his love of horses and hunting, denigrated as empty 38 activities by the other critics, is given mythic status by Corrigan: “His was essentially a pre machine mentality. ..He liked horses, he said, because they were so completely unmodemizable, so independent of fashion, and because like himself they absolutely refused to move with the times” (31). Not surprisingly, and presaging Fleishman, she characterises the trilogy as a sort of religious allegory: “at the head of the final book of the Sherston trilogy, there stands the curious epigraph: ‘I told him that I was a pilgrim going to the Celestial City.’ The very title of Sherston’s

Progress leaves no doubt that the evocation of Bunyan’s spiritual allegory is deliberate.” (32) She seems to view the memoir - not so much as a retraction of the angry dissension of the war poetry

- but as an extension o f it.

[T]he reader might have.. .construed the text as a studied piece of mockery on the part of

the author of Counter-Attack. George Sherston, come from the City of Destruction,

wrestles with an Apollyon in the uniform of a British Chief-of-Staff, passes through the

valley of the shadow of Passchendaele, and at the end of his pilgrimage finds a way to

hell from the very gates of the Celestial City. (32)

In short, Corrigan portrays Sassoon as a prophetic reactionary who consciously rejected literary modernism as a merely faddish extension of the essentially destructive philosophies of the twentieth century.

Within two years, another friend of Sassoon and acquaintance of Corrigan, Dennis Silk, wrote a slim volume called Siegfried Sassoon. Silk discloses himself as a friend and frequent visitor of Sassoon over a period of 13 years. He relies heavily for the content of his book on

Dame Corrigan’s work which he describes as “superb” (17) and a work of “perceptive accuracy” (22). He quotes her in several places and uses many o f the same excerpts from

Sassoon to make the same points. He echoes her idea that the war provided the impetus for both maturity and vividness all the more because of, and not in spite of, his prewar sheltered innocence (7). He makes much of Sassoon’s Jewishness and follows Corrigan wholly in this aspect, even so far as repeating the notion of his ‘genetic memory’ of things oriental and Hebraic;

Silk also repeats the same Old Testament allusions to his “forth-telling” role as prophet, especially of the Second World War (8). Silk praises Sassoon’s war poetry as realistic in its imagery and conversational in its diction. “The war had given him the opportunity, through experience, for direct utterance, which was always to be at the heart o f his best poetry” (17).

Like Corrigan, Silk is an apologist for Sassoon’s satirical writing which she describes in religious sentiment, but of which Silk says,

Poems like [“Memorial Tablet Great War”] have far too often caused Sassoon to be

labelled as a ‘bitter satirist.’ It is too facile a judgement. It takes no note of his essential

humanity. It ignores the fact that along with the works o f his greatest contemporaries his

poems were an anguished heartfelt cry for help, not a call for retribution. (15)

Silk is clear that Sassoon was no modernist. He describes “the abiding impression is one of whimsical nostalgia, almost backward-glancing sadness” (20). How far Sassoon could become comfortable in his own time, Silk writes, “The sell-out to the machine and materialism and brute force caused him again and again to look back to the old landmarks and the sure pillars of existence in the old century” (20). He later adds, “The truth of the matter was simple. An essentially religious man, he could find nothing to believe in and all the while the world was careering towards disaster, both the world of international beastliness and his own personal 40 world of matrimonial estrangement” (22). Silk then follows Corrigan in his efforts to elucidate the man more than the art, albeit he uses the practice of the literary critic vice the biographer or historian to do so. Although Silk and Corrigan were both friends of Sassoon, these works influenced later writers, among them some scholars, who were happy to interpret the war poems and memoirs to debate the character of Sassoon and not his writing.

Following the example of the aforementioned Arthur Lane, John Lehmann pairs Wilfred

Owen with Sassoon for his 1982 essay which he contributed to The English Poets of the First

World War. Again, his purpose was to write a critical essay describing the war writing of these two poets through the prism of personality. He repeats the by now canonical belief that “carnage and stalemate could not fail to have its effect on the minds of the intelligent and articulate soldiers.. .The last tattered rags of the Rupert Brooke mood were blown away” (38) leaving the field clear for the “two most outstanding poets of the new mood” (38), Sassoon and Owen.

Lehmann notes the divide described by Pinto created between the fighting men in France and those at home and suggests that, for Sassoon, “it was time that illusions were dispelled in

England.” Lehmann writes that the “Battle of the Somme deepened this mood, and he began to write poems, bitter, satirical and, as he has said himself, ‘deliberately written to disturb complacency’” (39). Lehmann is one of the first to describe “the homoerotic feeling that runs through his work” (50). O f importance to this thesis is Lehmann’s observation, “[i]t is a curious fact that when Sassoon came to write Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in 1930.. .several of the episodes which form the stark subjects of his poems of the time suffer a modification, or rather mollification of effect” (50). Lehmann sees Sassoon’s rejection of the war on moral terms, 41 stating that the slaughter by 1917 had “led him to the point o f total rejection, a belief that he could no longer square it with his conscience to go on fighting in such a war” (52). However, with a nod to the political critics, he says, “Like Sassoon, Owen appears to have thought of his poems as manifestoes, truthful reports on what was happening at the Front far deeper in their revelations than anything the war correspondents could or would write” (55). Lehmann’s chapter is referenced by many other subsequent critics.

Among these was Thomas Mallon who contributed “The Great War and Sassoon’s

Memory” to Harvard University’s essay collection, Modernism Reconsidered in 1983. Mallon references Fussell (and “his splendid book”), Thorpe (“an extended and workmanlike discussion”), Corrigan, and Lehmann in this essay which is really a character study with the explicit purpose of determining, through a reading of the memoirs and autobiographies, how much Sassoon had been changed in the war. His thesis, which “is very different from the one put forth” by Fussell reads:

His splendid military performance and his brave subsequent protest against the fighting

were no more disparate actions that eventually synthesised into a solid character than fox

hunting and poetry had been. The evidence of both the memoirs and autobiographies is

that far from being remade by the war, Sassoon had his constitutional capacity to shift

and adapt made even more habitual. (87)

He sees Sassoon as an unformed character which never really “hardened” into a definite personality but shifted, chameleon-like, from social circle to circle. He sees his life as constituting one serious phase, which he says begins with Old Huntsman in 1917, progresses 42 through his protest and Counter-Attack, and then peters out in the denouement of his American lecture tour (81-2). He notes that the autobiographies and memoirs do not easily allow themselves to be categorised as truth or fiction; however, “Sherston and Sassoon both seem, at twenty-one, not only far away from adulthood, but even uninterested in it,” and notes that

Sassoon is “Already more predisposed to remember than anticipate” (84-5). Mallon remarks upon the theme of sexual exploration, present in most memoirs and autobiographies, in that it “is almost eerily absent” (85). In describing Sherston’s “posing” for visitors in the hospital, Mallon says, “The reflexes of response here are more psychological than social; they are part of

Sherston’s (and as it were, Sassoon’s) instinct, in the face of an unusual absence of fixed character, to improvise selves as they are needed” (89). Regarding the protest, Mallon notes that it seems ambivalent, and later concedes that the “indictment is too inclusive” (89); he says it is also more personal than political, emotional, and seems to him “impromptu” (90). After the war,

Sassoon’s rootless ability to move between sporting and literary milieux, “would serve him well.. .But it also left him with a persistent lack of identity” (92).

The literary moment was actually receding from Sassoon even as he was attempting to

find his place in it. As his wartime subject matter vanished, the poet’s boldly colloquial

diction and ‘knock-out’ fS[iegfried’s] J[oumey]. 43) last-line ironies had fewer poems to

go into. He was left with his more placid prewar pastoralism and his regular Edwardian

metrics. He travelled on a fast sound wave from beingle dernier cri to being a respected

echo.. .Sassoon was really more attuned to the writers of an earlier generation, one soon

to be the literary past, than he was to those who would create the great modernist poetry

and fiction of the twenties. (92-3) Mallon notes that the organising principle of the Complete Memoirs is not a novelistic pattern but rather mere chronology. This is not to lend them credibility as diary entries as one might expect in a modernistic text, but rather a device made necessary by the “continually tentative and experimenting nature of both Sherston’s and Sassoon’s personalities [which] makes an episodic structure inevitable” (95). Leaving aside the authenticity of personality, Mallon says that the pervading sensation in the reader is one of frustration at trying to pin down either the personality of Sherston or Sassoon but discovering in the works neither.

Patrick Quinn and Brooke Allen are two scholars currently active in the field o f biographical criticism of Sassoon. Quinn has published several works on Sassoon including a book-length study in 1994 called The Great War and the Missing Muse looking at the early writings of Graves and Sassoon. More recently, he edited and contributed a chapter on Sassoon to Palgrave’s 2001 study The Literature o f the Great War Reconsidered. In the latter work,

Quinn takes a biographical approach to reading Sassoon in this short summary of the poet’s legacy. Concentrating on the poetry, published diaries, and Siegfried’s Journey. Quinn briefly touches on Sassoon’s war experience to focus more upon his interwar writings. Quinn references

Thorpe and calls Sassoon “the greatest living soldier-poet” at the conclusion of the First World

War (230). Despite his efforts to arouse the public to the “truth” of the war, “he soon came to realise.. .how little his poetic effort had really touched the propagandised population of Great

Britain” (232). In rather a solitary position, Quinn feels it was this disillusionment with the effect of his poetry which led to the writing o f his protest against the war, and then credits his contact with Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart for his return to the fighting: “Once Owen was discharged 44 and sent back to France, Sassoon could only follow this example of his friend, however reluctantly, and return to war” (232). He says of the postwar period leading to the publication of his memoirs, that

Sassoon spent the ensuing decade trying unsuccessfully to expiate the memories of the

war from his consciousness and reminding the British government of its promise that the

returning soldiers should have an improved lifestyle with a fair share of the cultural and

economic benefits of a victorious England... .Continuing to search for meaning in a world

which seemed to him more self-centred and materialistic than before the war, yet

disillusioned by what he saw, Sassoon returned to writing poetry through which he hoped

to expose the superficiality of his life; by extension this implicated many of the returning

officers who had fought in the war. (233)

By the mid-1920s, Sassoon had again become disillusioned, this time with “satirising the materialism, the superficiality and the growing philistinism of his age,” which placed Sassoon upon “an introspective journey of self-investigation which was to lead to his 1928 volume of poetry entitled The Heart’s Journey” (234). Quinn characterises the poetry of this period as forming “an intensely personal” attempt to create meaning in a world which had abandoned many traditional values (234). With Sassoon’s return to political poetry in the 1930s, Quinn makes an elegant argument for Sassoon’s prescience and acumen in presaging the inevitable outcomes of the National Socialist party in Germany and even the rhetoric and melancholy of a second postwar period.

Brooke Allen’s article, “Rediscovering Sassoon” from The New Criterion in 2005, was undertaken - at least in part - as a response to the publication of Max Egremont’s biography of 45 the same year1. Allen despises it for its “infelicitous style” (16). Namely, he criticises

Egremont’s use of quotations (too “scrappy” and short), his lack of analysis, and what he interprets as “contempt and even distaste for his subject” (16-17). Allen writes that Sassoon’s

limited reputation would seem to arise from the fact that it was only during the war that

Sassoon caught - no grabbed - the spirit o f his times; indeed, he personified it. During

the rest of his life he resisted every cultural current. In youth, as an amateur poetaster, he

had toyed with a moribund Pre-Raphaelitism and rejected, almost fearfully, the more

robust excitements offered by modernism; in maturity he directed his affections, and his

artistic efforts, backwards at a half-imaginary Golden Age that lasted, he felt, from 1825

to 1914. (16)

Allen credits Edward Marsh, Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves with helping “to focus Sassoon upon the elements that would make all the difference to his style.. .the use of the familiar and everyday, the shift from ‘poetic’ language and images to the rough and frequently anti-romantic language and images of real life” (17-8). Hardy is credited with inspiring Sassoon’s “knock out” last line technique (19). Considering their early poetry and the change that war wrought upon

Sassoon, Allen says, “it is interesting to reflect that but for the randomness of disease and stray bullets, Sassoon might today be remembered as the idealist and Brooke as the grim realist” (18).

This would support the current notion that war experience wrought modernist elements in the war poetry that are wholly accidental. Allen gives an exalted place to the early example provided by Sorley (18). Allen also echoes Mallon and his “identity-crisis” argument: “Though

1 He says that, of Sassoon’s biographers, Jean Mooreroft Wilson, has written the best biography in her two-volume set, Making of a War Poet 1886-1918, published in 1998, and the Journey from the Trenches. 1918 - 1967, published in 2003. (16) 46 fully alive to the horrors around him, Sassoon was convinced that he was in the right place. The war had given him what he had long lacked: a vocation” (18). Regarding politics, the biographical critics seem to have settled the question this way: “Sassoon was, in essence, a conservative (despite his Labour politics) and a romantic” (19).

The remaining fifty years of his life were something of an anti-climax.. .His hatred of the

modem movement (led by the despised ‘Towering Tom’ Eliot) pushed him into the

cultural rearguard, a difficult position to hold without real genius, which Sassoon did not

possess. (19)

Allen likes one thing about the Egremont biography (and this seems to be a consistent argument among the biographical critics):

in recreating himself through his autobiographical protagonist, George Sherston, Sassoon

omitted everything that made him interesting: his homosexuality, his Jewishness, his

poetry, his neurotic mother.. .Apparently incapable of writing about anything but himself,

the ultra-narcissistic Sassoon turned to straight autobiography.. .Anyone hoping for

material more intimate and revealing than the Sherston books was disappointed: once

again, Sassoon seemed incapable of exposing the unconventional aspects of his life and

character. (19)

It is telling of Allen, and perhaps of other biographical critics, that when enumerating the things that make Sassoon interesting - and therefore, one presumes, worthy of study - Sassoon’s artistic work comes after race and sexual orientation and just a little ahead of his overweening mother. 47

The Psychoanalytical Critics

Beyond Sassoon’s art, there are two reasons for the enduring interest in his legacy. One

is his intertextuality: through a series of coincidences, Sassoon was placed in close contact with

celebrity during the war: he served in the same regiment and was friends with Robert Graves and

Vivian de la Sola Pinto; he was a hospital resident through pure happenstance with Wilfred

Owen; and he was a patient of W.H.R. Rivers, a celebrated Jungian psychologist and pioneer in

the study and treatment of shell shock. Beyond these mere coincidences, there was a deliberate

celebrity thrust upon him by Bertrand Russell and others in the pacifist movement which made

him something of a national curiosity through his protest. While his place as an abiding minor

historical character of the period makes him interesting to the biographical school, the other

reason for his endurance is his problematic, elusive and multifaceted personality. As a writer

who devoted himself almost entirely to autobiography, he retained a strict privacy over those parts of his character which, to many, are most interesting: his sexual life as an openly gay aesthete who is alternatively recognised for his strict, prudish chastity; his Jewishness which could be a cause for curiosity but seems rather the locus of some self-loathing; the obvious interest in Sassoon’s treatment for the then emerging medical condition of “shell shock” and the current emerging field of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” There are many critics, most of them recently or currently writing, who interpret the writings of Sassoon through the prism of psychoanalysis to shed light - not on his character, and not on his work - on the elements of his personality that may be part of a larger whole: in short, they seek to position him within the literary field based on his psychology. Philip Hoare, in his 1989 essay, “Siegfried Sassoon: AestheteManque ,” examines

Sassoon through the lens of his homosexuality. He characterises the First World War as a time when the “role of an aesthete.. .was an ambiguous one” following “the homophobic assault of

Wilde’s ignominious trial. Now the conservative reigned supreme, and poetry. ..had a new conventionality about it” (15). Hoare looks to Sassoon’s homosexuality as a positive influence on his work, both military and literary. “[F]or Sassoon, whose homosexuality was already determining his social habits, and was, even during the war, leading him more and more into the aesthete’s camp, the male ‘binding’ process of an officer’s devotion to his men seemed at least to bring good out of the evil” (15-6). He quotes Corrigan, (whom he describes as a “biographer”) and presents this portrait of the writer: “Sassoon the Socialist in his sandy-coloured tweeds, yellow waistcoat and pink shirt was., .coming on quite terrifically, as he more and more frequented the company of ‘titled blokes and blokesses’ rather than that of the workers on the march waving the red flag” (16). Hoare cites Sassoon’s homosexual friends to reveal a man never at ease with “fancy dress” parties, although he did like posing for photos. “Sassoon had found the perceived effeminacy of this new generation a good thing, a positive reaction against the masculine values of the men who had allowed the war to happen” (17). Hoare reveals

Sassoon as a writer as reluctant and unsure about his sexuality as about everything else in his life. He tells an anecdote about Sassoon collecting sea shells for Stephen Tennant, his former lover, on his honeymoon with Hestor Gatty (17). Hoare’s brief picture of Sassoon is that of a writer who only dabbled in innovative things and who was ultimately driven back by his own conservatism. He told Dame Hildeth Cumming in 1961 that ..by 19201 was too old to indulge in

technical experiments,’ but that ‘the strange thing about it is that my poems should have

been liked by other good poets - Hardy, De la Mare, Belloc, Masefield, Blunden for

leading instance - (Edith Sitwell too, though she has cooled off, owing to my being

regarded as old-fashioned!)’ (16)

Hoare writes, “Modernism left him cold - Siegfried grew impatient with everyone telling him how Eliot was the future of poetry - for it threatened his own only too recently established reputation” (16-7). In his conclusion, Hoare assesses Sassoon as a man without a home.

“Perhaps... Sassoon was a victim of survival.. .He could not throw himself into the roaring twenties and the avant-garde, nor find a comfortable place in the old guard” (18). In this way, his sexuality, as an aspect of his psyche, is bound up with his writing and his construction o f himself.

Sassoon’s relationship with his sexuality was at least as complicated as his relationship with his Jewish identity. There have been writers keen to study Sassoon from this point of view, among them, Avi Matalon, whose 2002 essay, “Difference at War,” compares the writings of three Jewish First World War poets: Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and U.Z. Grinberg.

Matalon recognises that Sassoon “did not consistently consider himself Jewish (even as others did)” (26). “[T]he complicated question of Sassoon's Jewish identity is not addressed in the poems, but it is part of his biography, and its poetic silence also leaves a trace” (28). Like his sexuality, his sense of Jewishness is conspicuous in its absence from his own narratives and so must be inferred in other ways than mere criticism. Matalon identifies the war as a locus of absolute transformation for Sassoon in his art and describes “[t]he once timidly Georgian poet” 50 and his “unsparingly realistic representation of the violence of battle” (30-1). In this, he was part of a movement, perhaps involuntary: “Sassoon and other soldier-poets evidently rejected the epic and heroic traditions of war poetry in favour of an almost photographic representation of reality and the self’ (31). This realism and preoccupation with truthfulness did not extend to his conflicts about his race, however.

His poetry did not express the ‘problem’ of his Jewish identity, even as Sassoon's diaries

and letters reveal that Jews were an issue in his life. This is how Sassoon described two

British enlisted men in a 1918 diary entry: one had a ‘curved Hebrew beak coming down

to the thin lipped mouth. Another little Jew whispered to me.... [He] evidently expected

me to be thrilled.’ Sassoon was clearly not thrilled at being identified as a Jew, especially

by ‘another little Jew.’ As much as his politics and poetry were changed by the war, when

it came to Jews and Jewishness, Sassoon reverted to type and expressed mockery, class

superiority, and bigotry. (31)

There are other examples in the diary record and from other sources to demonstrate a strong anti-

Semitism in Sassoon. His biographers, Corrigan and others, go to some lengths to demonstrate incidents where Sassoon also softens in his stance on his own Sephardic heritage; however, what emerges is a complicated sense of self which is reminiscent of his relationship to his sexuality and even his politics. Sassoon is victimised by his own conventionality and, as a result, is estranged from aspects of his identity.

Patrick Campbell is the critic who best exemplifies the psychoanalytical method of deconstructing Sassoon’s writings. In his article on Sassoon’s poem, “Conscripts,” which was published in the journal Explicator in 1998, he examines the “subtext” of the poem as a psychoanalyst. His thesis is that Sassoon does express his deep seated sense o f self, but does so in a sublimated manner. He describes the poem as “a manifestation of Sassoon's attempt to express his personal feelings in a way acceptable to his readership” (89). On the surface, it reads quite innocently as a recollection of drilling raw conscripted recruits; however, Campbell claims that interpretation “reveals the suppressed emotions of the parade ground; the enforced role of

‘raucous’ martinet contrasts...with Sassoon's romantic and libertarian spirit - ‘how I longed to set them free’” (90). Campbell also locates

homoerotic longings barely concealed by the use of such arch personifications as "Young

Fancy-how I loved him all the while," the parapraxis of "joy was slack," and the

innuendo of the drill command to "Press on your butts!" Indeed, the final "confession"

hints at a sexual activity that, although it may be more desired than actualized, is not

altogether erased by a deliberately flippant tone: “And many a sickly slender lord who'd

filled / My soul long since with lutanies of sin, / Went home, because they couldn't stand

the din.” (90)

Campbell is not interested in Sassoon as a homosexual writer specifically, however; he seems to be more interested in studying Sassoon as an example of how psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical techniques - conscious or not - reveal his art.

In another close reading of Sassoon’s poem, “The Repression of War Experience,” in The

Literature of the Great War Reconsidered. Campbell continues in this manner. He compares

Sassoon’s imagery to the writings of W.H.R. Rivers and Freud to demonstrate that Sassoon’s poetry of sublimation was deliberate and developed out of psychoanalytical techniques learned at the hands of Rivers. Campbell claims that Sassoon learned the techniques of “talking therapy” avowed by Rivers and the subsequent analysis of poetic imagery; these techniques although

“aimed at the ‘removal of repression’, would in the future help [Sassoon] cope much better with' an ‘anxiety neurosis’ to which he was consistently prone” and would allow Sassoon to be able

“relive his ‘war experience’ through their cathartic expression in verse” (223). After all,

Campbell argues, “Writing poetry is, in psychoanalytical terms, a sublimatory activity, a rechanneling of basic drives so as to make them socially acceptable and potentially useful” (227). He says that Sassoon was aware of all this:

[‘Repression of War Experience’] is a watershed poem, as significant, in terms of its

exploitation of a key moment in his psychic development, as anything Sassoon wrote

during the war. That he realised that the poem was both an example of ‘repression’ and

an attempt to come to terms with its operations is clear from a title which not only

employs a term drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis but also pays homage to Rivers’

professional interest in ‘anxiety-neurosis’. (220)

Campbell interprets the poem as a conversation between “I” and “You,” both representing

Sassoon: the “I” is the present Sassoon, and the “You” his past self shattered by war memories and concomitant trauma (223). Each poetic image in the poem - the normal sights and sounds of an English summer evening - brings with it some “overtones that he has sought to smother” (224) like the candles which suggest votive offerings for the dead; the moth reminds him of the creature’s likely incineration in the candle; his pipe reminds him of “its function in the trenches” and more of the same. Campbell makes much of Sassoon’s homosexuality, which was 53

“sublimated” in his poetry into intense friendships, “sentimentalised hero-worship,” “pastoral elegies to dead comrades,” and “by adopting a puritanical, even misogynistic stance” (226). It is a method of interpretation made valid by Campbell’s insistence that Sassoon was a willing and conscious practitioner of psychoanalysis.

Much recent analysis of Sassoon’s war writing has been focused on his Craiglockhart experience, specifically around the issue of his diagnosis of shell shock. One of the early debates focused on whether this diagnosis was legitimate or political. More recently, as our own understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has developed, this interest has refocused on the effects of trauma in his writing. In 1992, Carole Shelton offered “War Protest, Heroism, and

Shellshock: Siegfried Sassoon: A Case Study” for the journal Focus on Robert Graves and His

Contemporaries. In it, Shelton makes the argument that Sassoon fits the diagnosis of a man suffering from shell shock, and, despite that Sassoon himself dismissed the label, says that his condition was bound up with his war protest.

As I will show, Sassoon was emotionally debilitated by the war and by his own need to

present the fearless face o f the happy warrior when, in fact, each return to the front

required a desperate battle to suppress his fears...Sassoon displayed all the symptoms of

Shellshock. (44)

Shelton argues that Sassoon met the conditions for diagnosis, and that his character type was congruent with the classic case study. Her method is to examine his recorded experiences, especially his diaries, to posit that the “medical board diagnosis o f shell shock was not mistaken” (45). She also dismisses the pacifist label attributed to Sassoon. 54

[I]n reality, Sassoon, while a war protester, was not a pacifist. His refusal to fight was

short-lived.. .and [he] was soon asking to be returned to the fighting in France. W.H.R.

Rivers.. .noted that Sassoon differed from the pacifists in that it was the seeming

hopelessness of the war which concerned him and that he would be willing to continue

fighting if he saw any prospect of a rapid decision. (43)

For the purposes of the present thesis, Shelton notes the change that shell shock symptoms caused in his poetry: his earlier Georgian idealistic imagery dissipates as he becomes more involved in the stress of combat: “Sassoon’s perception of war is changing. The reality of the dead and wounded differs from his earlier sanitized poetic imaginings” (45) and after his first wound, “his poetry becomes increasingly bitter” (46). At the time of his protest, Shelton writes,

Sassoon cast about him for an honourable solution to his dilemma, one in accord with his

moral precepts of duty, responsibility, patriotism, and courage.. .a protest against the

w ar.. .placed him in a different type of danger and even offered the prospect of

martyrdom, protected his image of self while allowing him to escape a situation with

which he could no longer cope. That he was suffering from shellshock does not

invalidate the sincerity of the protest; that his protest was sincere does not prove wrong

the diagnosis of shellshock. Rather his inability to suppress his instinct for self-

preservation allowed his bitterness at the war to surface. (49)

Shelton’s argument that his diagnosis of shell shock does not invalidate the protest and vice versa, is quoted by other critics elsewhere and seems to be accepted as the end of that argument.

O f note, overall, is Shelton’s use of text to make a case about the artist’s condition rather than the other way around. In his long 2005 essay, “Siegfried Sassoon, Shell Shock and Living through the Dead,”

Daniel Hipp concentrates his interpretation of Sassoon on the psychoanalytical approach and focuses on Sassoon’s period of convalescence at Craiglockhart. Making full use o f other literary critics, Hipp distances his argument from Silkin, Johnston, Quinn and Campbell to whom he refers the reader interested in a careful reading of Sassoon’s poetic technique, especially his sense of “irony, realism, and tone, all of which contribute to the anti-war message they envision at the heart of the poet’s vision” (206). Instead, Hipp wishes to examine the psychology at work in the poetry, diaiy and letters that Sassoon wrote proximate to his experience of psychoanalysis at the hands of Rivers, whom Hipp also examines in some detail. Echoing Campbell, Hipp says,

Poetry written at the mental hospital functions alongside the psychotherapy utilized by

his doctor, W.H.R. Rivers, both of which enabled Sassoon to examine the political

strategies of his protest and to conclude that although the basis for the declaration - that

the war was unjust and by 1917 unnecessary - was defensible, the means of protest - the

willed removal of himself from the trenches - created a psychological conflict that the

political urgency of the protest could not address. (152)

Hipp’s method centres on examining the “varying degrees of distance between Sassoon and the suffering victims within his poetry” (152). He sees the reduction of this “distance” as instrumental in healing from shell shock. The protest, he argues, was a failed attempt to reduce the “physical and emotional distance between himself and his charges;” his poetry, however, served as a better vehicle as it allows “the poet to transcend the barriers of class that separate officer and enlisted man” (152). Distance - psychological more than physical - is at the heart of

Hipp’s reading of Sassoon. He sees Sassoon’s use of satire, irony and detachment as poetical 56 methods to maintain a distance from the subject matter of his poems, but among the

Craiglockhart poems of Counter-Attack, some poems differ significantly. The poems of

Counter-Attack include many where the poet-as-speaker becomes less distanced from the subject of the poetry, and in this closing of distance, he sees Sassoon’s release from the effects of shell shock (154). “Many poems of Counter-Attack remove this barrier of irony between Sassoon and his reader and introduce ... the potentially curative technique of confession and autobiography” (156). Hipp follows the psychological school of interpretation by looking for

Freudian or Jungian imagery and then imparting a psychological value to these after the fashion of psychoanalysis.

Like Campbell, Hipp closely interprets the Craiglockhart poems’ symbols on the psychoanalytical level. In this way, he emphasises aspects of Sassoon’s psychological state at time of composition and then presents the poems as products of his own or Rivers’ psychoanalysis rather than works of art. For example, Hipp sees “Hindenburg Line, April 1917” as a highly symbolic, personal exploration.

[I]t displays his anxiety in a repressed form to return to the fighting, an anxiety which

surfaces within the protagonist’s symbolic journey towards his surfacing in the ‘twilight

air’ of warfare. This anxiety to return will prove to be at the heart of Sassoon’s version of

shell shock. (159)

Hipp also examines the war protest from its psychological angle rather than the political: “The hospitalisation was a political act as was the protest itself, but the political nature of the actions 57 on both sides should not obscure the psychological trauma that Sassoon had endured” (162).

Similarly, nightmares reported in Sassoon’s diaries and letters are analysed in the same manner as the critical reading of his poetry. The image of a private dying - in a dream recorded in the

Craiglockhart diary - with a letter in his hand, becomes, for Hipp,

a symbol of communication between himself and Sassoon. Significantly, in his vision,

Sassoon does not extend his arm to accept the gesture, perhaps because of the distinction

in rank between them. After this missed connection, the private dies. The imagery of his

death emphasises Sassoon’s anxiety about his relationship with these men.. .Such a

hallucination reveals the concerns characteristic of officers suffering from shell

shock...” (164)

Hipp references Carole Shelton as well as Elaine Showalter’s 1987 essay, “Rivers and Sassoon:

The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties” to take up the question of whether Sassoon was shell shocked or not. Showalter believes he was not, arguing that his diagnosis was simply a function of classism protecting a decorated officer. Hipp accuses Showalter of ignoring the “evidence” in

Sassoon’s poetry. Hipp prefers Shelton’s reading which states that the politics of the situation was immaterial to the question of shell shock (167). Hipp, of course, is adamant that he was.

Hipp references Quinn about Sassoon’s homosexuality which, according to the latter critic, was acknowledged and confronted at Craiglockhart. Hipp goes on to posit that this coming to terms with his own “repressed homosexuality ... led also to poetic representations of his relationship to the men that stressed the removal of emotional and physical distance between them” (174). Hipp also refers to Lane, who noted that the incident of the raving prisoner described in the war poem,

“Lamentations,” was much softened when described years later in the memoir. Lane attributes 58 the discrepancies to the conscious literary choice of the artist; Hipp interprets the differences as being psychologically based: “These complicating factors invite an analysis of the relationship that Sassoon has constructed psychologically between himself and the suffering soldier” (179).

Psychoanalytical critics seem to focus on defining how Sassoon performs categorically - as the traumatised poet; as the Jewish combatant; as the gay soldier - presumably, to illuminate the type for study rather than the poetry or the memoir.

Conclusion

This chapter has categorised four critical methods used to interpret the writings of

Siegfried Sassoon as political, literary, biographical, and psychological. Of these, the political interpretations seem to have lost currency or else have been subsumed into the biographical school. The biographical and the psychological methods are somewhat related in that they perform textual analysis to draw conclusions about the author. Both have active adherents: the first decade of this century has seen three book-length biographies published on Sassoon and scores of scholarly essays, all using textual material to argue ideas about the man as an individual, or as the representative of an identified group. The psychoanalytical method tends to use terms and methods of interpretation borrowed from psychological analysis rather than literary criticism. Current interest in post-traumatic stress has stimulated this school. Traditional methods of literary criticism used to draw conclusions about the cultural sources for Sassoon’s work and the effects which his work has, in turn, upon our culture are, for the purposes of this thesis, the most relevant as questions of culture rather than personality are at issue. Certainly, all of these approaches resonate with one another, demonstrating the complexities and contradictions that are an integral part of a period of cultural, artistic and perceptual transition. 59

This thesis will focus on closely examining the works themselves as a means of more fully understanding the intricacies of transitional change as reflected in the personal, social and cultural life of Siegfried Sassoon. His writings, the early poetry and later prose, provide both scope and points of comparison that allow for a broad appreciation of the cultural dynamic surrounding and following the First World War.

Of the commentators examined, this study will tend to the methods of literary criticism represented by Paul Fussell and others. In Chapter Two, the seventy poems contained in

Counter-Attack (1918) and War Poems (1919) will be closely examined.2 This thematic study of his poetry will define the war’s immediate effect upon his writing. In turn, this effect will be measured against literary trends contrasting Sassoon’s poetry with his contemporaries. Despite the formalism of the war poems, thematically, these are revealed as modernist texts. Chapters

Three and Four will contrast the poetry with a close reading of Sassoon’s prose work on the war demonstrating that his experience of combat pushed Sassoon, and many others, into an ideological position incompatible with his prewar inclination toward rational optimism. When taken as a whole, Sassoon’s war writing, both prose and poetry, retains the character of early twentieth-century modernism despite the author’s own rejection of the movement.

2 While The Old Huntsman was published during the war in 1917, it will not be considered as many of its poems were composed before Sassoon’s first engagement in trench warfare and any written after were reprinted in Counter-Attack and War Poems. 60

Chapter Two A Modernist by Necessity: Sassoon’s Great War Poetry

Introduction

Siegfried Sassoon’s inclusion in the Georgian Poetry anthologies of 1917 and 1919, edited by Edward Marsh, places him in the company of poets inclined towards nineteenth- century conservatism, romanticism and sentimentality.3 This is in keeping with the verse he penned before and after the Great War; however, it contrasts sharply with the war poetry upon which his fame is based. In the roughly seventy poems composed during tours of duty in the trenches of the Western Front, his realistic, experiential poems focus on themes of outrage, despair, iconoclasm, and the futility of individual action, elements associated with the avant garde movement in literature broadly defined as modernist. The preceding survey of First World

War literary criticism positions Sassoon as a Georgian, steeped in the rational liberalism of the nineteenth century, who is temporarily transformed into a sort of accidental modernist, one for whom these new modes seemed the only ones appropriate at the time of writing due to the particular intensity of his experience. This study will challenge that assertion. Following methods of thematic literary criticism, this study will examine the poems published in Counter-

Attack (1918) and War Poems (1919) and, despite their formalism, will argue that they are

3 “In the Georgian Revolt (1965), Robert H. Ross sought to unsettle the ‘ridiculously oversimplified’ assumptions about the nature of Georgian Poetry. He discovered that, far from being pseudo-pastoralists, the Georgians had extended the subject matter and diction of modem poetry, especially in the years 1911 to 1915. But the harsh criticism of Eliot and Leavis, allied to the disenchantment felt by a postwar generation of British critics, inflicted lasting damage on the reputations of the Georgians. Stead’s The New Poetic gave serious attention to the innovations of a few of the poets published in the Georgian anthologies (including Rupert Brooke, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon and Graves), yet the movement was essentially pigeonholed as prewar and therefore outside the charmed circle of the 1920s ‘high modernism’ - a term gaining increasing critical currency in American universities during the 1970s - which had apparently descended from the Imagist movement. (Harding, 236-7) 61 modernist texts. The Great War transformed Sassoon and placed him into an ideological position incompatible with his prewar inclinations; Sassoon’s war poems fall into the category of early twentieth-century modernism despite the author’s later nostalgia and personal disavowal of modernist trends in literature.

The Great War was an event of cultural cataclysm for Europeans who had become unused to warfare waged on a grand scale: the massive numbers of casualties; the grisly reality of the wounded returning, some monstrously deformed; the surreal and nightmarish, almost subterranean, quality of the fighting; the antiheroic role played by the soldiers facing dehumanising warfare by mechanised technology; all this is finally overlain with a sense of the war’s utter futility. In the postwar period, there was a general reaction against all that seemed to set the war in motion, and a rejection of the European status quo. Among the returning combatants, there was a general experience o f alienation from civilian society. The Italians refer to those who fought the First World War as thegenerazione bruciata, the “burned generation” (Eksteins 283). Gertrude Stein overheard a French mechanic scolding a young veteran for his indigent ways and, paraphrasing him, coined the term the “Lost Generation,” a descriptor made famous as the epigraph in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The phrase illustrates the sentiment that those who fought the First World War had been ruined and alienated from the older generation which had set the conditions for the war and then sent them into it.

The effects of this idea were not limited to the veterans. Jeffrey Williams describes how the belief that “the flower of England” had been killed in the trenches caused a reaction which pervaded every aspect of political and cultural life, crippling Britain at her moment of potential 62 greatness. The malaise “took an introspective apathetic form which was in such stark contrast to

[Britain and France’s] status as victors. ..and the war poetry happened to express as nothing else could or would the distress of a deeply wounded liberal culture” (49). This summary is certainly not true of all the war poetry, but it is a common feature of the poetry which has best endured.

Our perception of this poetry has been created principally by the anthologists and the literary critics who propagate the idea of the “Lost Generation” and the theory that the Somme offensive transformed popular perception. The anthologists of First World War poetry have succeeded in creating, among the hundreds of thousands of offerings in English alone, a canon of selected texts, often arranged to tell the story of British culture’s journey from optimism to disillusionment. A reading of the post-Armistice anthologies of war poetry supports the argument. Dominic Hibberd and John Onions warn against drawing broad conclusions about the

First World War poetics based solely on a study of the anthologies. They argue that anthologies

say as much about the anthologists’ personal views, politics and sensibilities as they do about the poetry. They point out that an examination of anthologies published during or immediately

following the war would reveal a universal tone of “heroic resistance in a just cause; some mention of horrors was allowed ... but only to increase respect for soldierly courage” (3). The

first anthology to contain a dissenting voice was not published until 1918 and there were very

few others in the immediate aftermath of the war. The literary revivals of the thirties and sixties

were motivated first by socialist readings of the war and then modernist readings and “both revivals told a story of idealism turning to realism, satire, protest and pity” (3). In these collections, the early poems follow the pattern set by Rupert Brooke; in the later poems, the 63 subject matter becomes dark and hopeless, and the poems begin to feel more modem. They concern themselves more with the visceral quality of the poet’s experience and less with crafting poetical moments of insight and connection. John H. Johnston supports this inteipretation, explaining that during

the second winter of the war, when the true nature of the struggle was becoming

apparent, poets began to react to the horrors around them with a directness almost

unprecedented in verse. This literature of angry protest employed the weapons of

satire, irony, and a savage realism, since realism seemed the only effective mode for

depicting the disaster being enacted in France.... As a partial and natural

consequence, we have a tentative, episodic, disconnected, emotional kind of writing,

a desperate insistence on the shocking facts of life and death, a compulsive focus on

the obscene details of crude animal needs and reactions, on wounds, death, and

decomposition. Never before in literature had war been described with this painful

compression of action and incident, with this narrowing o f focus, this fragmentation

of reality, this obsessive emphasis on isolated and irrelevant details. (13)

According to the patterns set out by the anthologists, especially the ones after the 1960s, the

Georgian poets who fought in and wrote about the war, had become prototype modernists by the war’s end. They still retained the rhyme and meter of the prewar period, but in their choice of subject and theme, and their tendency to write of direct experience in spare, fragmented episodes that concentrate on disconnected, horrific detail and despair, they anticipated modernist writers. Sassoon’s war poetry has been much anthologised over the intervening century and has become part of the canon of English verse from the First World War. Fully 16 poems in the 2006 anthology, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, are by Siegfried Sassoon, more than any other poet. (The anthology has republished 15 poems by Ivor Gurney, 14 by Wilfred Owen and eight each by Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.) In the Oxford Book of War Poems

(1984), Sassoon’s six entries is eclipsed only by Owen’s seven. The anthologists, following the work of the critics, have typecast Sassoon as the middle-class Edwardian who is transformed by the war into a bitter realist and satirist, emerging as a twentieth-century cynic. The inclination that informs this view develops in Sassoon from his inability to reconcile his experience of trench warfare and all the destructive elements that it entails, with the prevailing world view: that he is part of a culture with an inherited responsibility for positive activity. As a result, the themes that his war poetry explores include destruction, victimisation, self-pity and the antiheroic.

There is in it a self-effacement, a preoccupation with guilt and a certain rootlessness and cultural malaise. Much of it despairs of the nineteenth-century rational optimism of which he was once a proponent and his poems evince a new found cynicism. There is a fear of personal and cultural negation in many of the poems. In others, he seems to demonstrate acceptance of the senselessness of suffering as opposed to the lyrical sense-making one might have expected from a poet of nineteenth-century inclinations. The largest group of his poems are those of protest through anger, satire, irony, realism, and iconoclasm. Most are wholly subjective in perspective and he chooses the experiential mode in place of the lyrical in the majority of these works. Among Sassoon’s most modem poems are those written in the elegiac mode, lamenting

either the victims of the Great War, or more generally the loss of England’s prewar culture. In

recent years, literary critics and cultural historians have described modernism’s transformative

influence on the cultural conventions that surround mourning, and specifically public mourning.

Many have focused on the means by which modernist writers have memorialised the experience

of war in the early twentieth century and, more particularly, on the evolution of the elegy as a

poetic form. Jahan Ramazani, in his Poetry and Mourning, credits Sassoon’s favorite writer,

Thomas Hardy, as the prototypical poet in this regard: “the last Victorian and the first modem,”

whose “accomplishment of working within the genre of elegy while dislocating many of its

conventions deserves more analysis” (36). Where a writer of the nineteenth century would seek

to console and to make meaning out of loss and suffering, Rae, reprising Ramazani’s thesis,

states that the “modem elegist refuses to transcend or find redemption in loss and to move on to

new objects o f devotion” (14).

The modernist works discussed here leave mourning unresolved without endorsing evasion

or repression; indeed, they portray the failure to confront or know exactly what has been

lost as damaging. They encourage remembering where memory has been repressed, and

they expose the social determinants for troublesome amnesia. At the same time, they resist

the narratives and tropes that would bring grief to catharsis. (22-3)

Andrew Kunka, writing specifically about Sassoon in the same anthology, notes that Sassoon’s elegiac writing transforms over time, acquiring a more modernist sensibility throughout and after the Great War. The elegiac voice is one that resonates strongly in prose as well as poetry and does so throughout his Sherston trilogy. 66

Sandra M. Gilbert, in her essay “Rats’ Alley: Great War, Modernism and the (Anti)

Pastoral Elegy,” posits that writers have not abandoned the traditional elegy but have transformed it. She describes the shift in emphasis away from confidence and redemption towards uncertainty and resignation.

In my view, this poetics begins with both unbelief and disbelief—unbelief in traditional

strategies of consolation (an afterlife, a resurrection, a transmigration);disbelief in the

reality of the individual death itself—and seeks to come to terms with loss through at least

four different strategies: first, a meditation on the actual scene of dying; second, a

preoccupation with the literal body of the dead one; third, a retelling of the details of the

past as if to ensure that they have both passed and passed away; and fourth, a resignation

that sometimes involves a hopeful (but often sardonically hopeful or fantastic) resolution

and sometimes merely a stoic acquiescence in the inevitable. (182-3)

Much of Sassoon’s war writing employs this modernist elegiac formula. “On Passing the New

Menin Gate,” quoted in the introduction to this paper, serves as a good example. In it, Sassoon, meditating on both the scene of carnage and its memorial, laments the deaths of the soldiers while refusing to accept that the monument is anything but a balm for the guilty consciences of the noncombatants. He offers no comfort to the reader and refuses to invoke any image or passage that would suggest redemption; neither does he allow that their deaths had purpose or meaning. Rather the reader is reminded that the war was a crime and the dead are forever lost to us. In most o f the poems written after 1916, and even in his prose memoirs, loss is among his prevailing themes and this elegiac voice is clear, whether he is lamenting the dead, or his own loss of place in a familiar world. 67

Most of the literary criticism examining Sassoon’s poetry has focused on the transformations evident in Sassoon’s war poetry from his pre combat, Georgian verse, to the dark, satirical, realism present in his post combat work. More recent critics attempt to fix the causes of this evolution on psychological factors rather than aesthetic or artistic ones. It is generally accepted by current writers that the changes wrought were exacerbated by a combination of social, cultural and psychological factors; that the changes were abrupt and dramatic; and that they were a direct result of Sassoon’s experience o f trench warfare. While a comparative study of Sassoon’s pre and post combat poems is revealing, it falls outside the scope of this thesis which focuses on exploring the thematic differences by which Sassoon’s war experience is memorialised proximately in poetry and remotely in prose. For this reason, this paper will focus only on the seventy poems published in Counter Attack and War Poems.

Siegfried Sassoon published two volumes of poetry during the war and one immediately after: The Old Huntsman in 1917, Counter Attack in 1918. and War Poems in 1919. The Old

Huntsman contains many poems Sassoon had been working on immediately before the war or poems he had composed after enlistment in 1914 but before his first direct experience of the front line in March 1916. In contrast, the poems published in Counter Attack were drafted after he had seen action, between 1916 and his convalescence at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917, when he revised them and prepared them for publication. Of the 64 poems published in War Poems. only five were republished from The Old Huntsman, while 33 of the 39 poems from Counter

Attack were included. The remaining 27 poems were composed between 1917 and the 68

Armistice. Counter Attack was first published in London on 27 June 1918. The first 1,500-book edition sold out in July and permitted a second printing of 1,500 copies by September

(Egremont, 204-8). It was widely reviewed to great critical acclaim including a very positive comment in the Times by Virginia Woolf. An American edition followed and was published in

December 1918. Both were dedicated to Robert Ross and the US edition featured a preface by

Robert Nichols. In October of 1919, Heinemann published The War Poems of Siegfried

Sassoon, which had sold 2,000 copies by January 1920, making necessary another 1000-copy edition (Egremont, 240). Although sales were good, it was not widely reviewed. A lecture tour of the United States was a mixed success. Thereafter, as Sassoon returned to Georgian poetics for his newer verse, his postwar poetry fell out of favour with the reading public and the critics complained that he had become old fashioned. However, the enduring importance of Sassoon’s war poetry to our cultural understanding of the Great War cannot be overstated.

Sassoon’s Anti-Heroic Poetry

Sassoon published many poems that challenged conventional attitudes towards such themes as heroism and the nobility of a martial death. In his sonnet, “Dreamers,” Sassoon explores the victimisation of the combatants, but also celebrates the volunteerism which makes the men complicit in their sacrifice. Placing them in “death’s grey land” (1), suggestive of the half-life of classical Hades, Sassoon intimates that his soldiers have accepted death as inevitable.

They are aware also of the disparity implicit in the immensity of the event in which they are caught, “the great hour of destiny”(3), and of their own indistinct and almost insignificant place within it. Although he describes them as “citizens” who “stand,” “sworn to action” (1, 3, 5) and 69 thus they are volunteers of a sort who must “win / Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives” (5-6); however they are also mere “dreamers” and he does not suggest that there is any purpose in their actions or in their sacrifice. Amid this heroic language, Sassoon interposes the homespun and commonplace desires for “firelit homes, clean beds, and wives” (8). The sonnet’s sestet does not resolve the tension begun in the octave, but rather emphasises it and deepens the pathos of their “hopeless longing” (12) through the juxtaposition of trench horror with homely intimation:

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train. (9-14)

In this way, despite that the soldiers are willing participants, the lingering effect is one of helplessness and futile waste. If there is heroism here, it is of a different sort than the Victorian model.

This sense of the antiheroic is continued in “How to Die,” a remorseless rebuttal on any attempt to romanticise the death of soldiers. In the octave, Sassoon describes a soldier’s decorous and pious death in high diction; in the second, a satirical and anonymous voice decries the notion that soldiers’ deaths are unseemly. The account of the death is highly romanticised with religious overtones. The dying man lifts his hand to a sunrise metaphorically described as 70

“the glory that returns” (4) to “skies / Where holy brightness breaks in flame” (5-6). The

“whispered name” (8) he utters as he dies is not disclosed and we must surmise it. There is a sudden change in diction in the second octave, signalled by the direct address to the reader, the use of contractions, and the inclusion of colloquialisms: “You’d think, to hear some people talk, /

That lads go west with sobs and curses, / .. .Hankering for wreathes and tombs and hearses” (9-10, 12). Thorpe says of this poem, that Sassoon “parodies the heroic manner so successfully that even the closing lines might mislead the insensitive reader” (Thorpe 21):

But they’ve been taught the way to do it

Like Christian soldiers; not with haste

And shuddering groans; but passing through it

With due regard for proper taste. (13-16)

The change in diction is jarringly abrupt, and effects the intended shock upon the reader. It acts as a clear attack on the sensibilities of the home front and on the continuation of the romanticised decorum of heroic death.

This sentiment is continued and expanded in “Suicide in the Trenches”4 and “Remorse,” poems as unromantic and antiheroic as “How to Die.” In “Suicide in the Trenches,” the poem’s subject, described as joyful and guileless in the first quatrain, becomes “cowed and glum / With crumps of lice and lack of rum” (5-6). After his unremarkable suicide, “No one spoke of him again” (8). Sassoon then addresses the civilian population directly and brutally:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

4 Sassoon or his editor has re-titled this poem “Suicide in Trenches” in War Poems and Collected Poems. 71

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go. (9-12)

Notably, the nameless young suicide is purely victim, a point emphasised by use of the adjective

“cowed.” Worse, he is abjured even by his fellow soldiers, placing him outside the community

of fighting men, a severe indictment on “the simple soldier boy” (1) and illustrative of the

anonymous futility of his death. In the sonnet, “Remorse,” Sassoon demonstrates that the

pitiable victimisation of soldiers transfers to enemy as well as friendly combatants. The speaker

recalls “how he saw those Germans run, / Screaming for mercy... / Green-faced, they dodged

and darted” (7-9). He remembers one German particularly who was “Livid with terror, clutching

at his knees” (10) while the British “chaps were sticking ‘em like pigs” (11). The diction is

significant: the soldiers are referred to as “chaps” emphasising their true identity as militarised civilians; the act of killing is like the slaughter of farm animals. The poem lapses back into direct, dramatic statement in its conclusion:

“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.” (11-14)

Sassoon introduces the idea that soldiers will have to return to their civilian identities to confront a nation utterly propagandised. Here though, the reference to “poor father” is sympathetic and uncritical, a minority sentiment in much of his war poetry and the antithesis to several poems examined below. 72

Sassoon recognises that even well-meaning combatants are complicit in this propagandising of the nation at home and of the necessary distortions of death and heroism. He illustrates this graphically in “The Hero,” a short narrative poem describing an officer’s visit to the mother of Jack, one of his dead comrades. In the first stanza, Jack’s mother experiences solace and pride believing her son had died well and that he had performed bravely to the end.

The second stanza reveals that Jack’s officer had “told the poor old dear some gallant lies / That she would nourish all her days” (8-9) while “her weak eyes / Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy, / Because he’d been so brave” (10-2). The speaker then goes on to recall the truth: Jack, the “useless swine,” had been “cold-footed” (13), had “panicked” (14) at least once, had tried to “get sent home,” and - as was the case with the subject of “Suicide in the Trenches”

- “no one seemed to care” (17) about his death, except the pathetic and deceived mother at home. Fussell praised this poem, comparing its irony and satire favourably to Hardy’s work (7).

Lane also says,

As in the best of Hardy’s satires, the “point” lies below the dramatic surface, or plot, of

the poem. The Brother Officer’s disgust is evident.. .but his overriding impression (and

ours) is of the pathos of the scene being played out.. .Yet behind the poem, and implied

by it, is the knowledge that, in contributing to the fiction of the “hero’s” death, the officer

is helping to distort the realities of war and what the war has done to Jack. (Lane 102-3)

The fiction that heroism, at least as a traditional Victorian might understand the term, still prevailed in the circumstances of trench warfare, was not only perpetuated as an act of jingoism or as a lie told by recruiters or propagandists, it was a necessary mercy for the direct victims of 73 the war’s violence. It is a mercy in which Sassoon does not always indulge, but he is sympathetic to it in some of his poetry.

In “Song-Books of the War,” Sassoon presciently fears that, in this conflict that he defines between soldiers’ realistic accounts of the fighting and the propagandists’ glamorisations, time will favour the latter. The poet imagines a young man, fifty years after the Armistice, reading lyrics to some of the contemporary, popular war music. Because the propagandists will have “plundered” the past, this youth will “envy us the dazzling times / When sacrifice absolved the Earth” (3-4). The second stanza reveals that the boy’s grandfather, an “ancient man” (13) with a “weary face” (14), was an eyewitness and participant in “Haig’s last drive” (17). He describes the war to the boy as “the shambles that men built / And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt” (19-20).

But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,

Will think, “Poor grandad’s day is done.”

And dream of those who fought in France

And lived in time to share the fun. (21-4)

Sassoon accepts that horrors fade while romanticism endures. He acknowledges that there is a need to speak truthfully about the war. However, the shocking sentiment in this poem is that even the evidence of the witness is not believed. In the last stanza of the remorseless and cynical poem, “Does it Matter,” the speaker suggests none of the witnesses will be credible in the postwar world:

Do they matter? - those dreams from the pit? - 74

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. (11-15)

The darkly humorous understatement implies that all those suffering from traumatic memory, far from being taken seriously and finally standing as witnesses to the truth, will be treated as alcoholic or as insane, and that this is the ironic reason why “no one will worry a bit.” This perception of apathy in the “Nation at Home,” to use Pinto’s phrase, is the principal cause for

Sassoon’s poetry of angry protest which he directed against the civilian population with the intention of shocking his readership and disturbing their complacency.

In many of his poems, Sassoon tries to achieve this shocking effect by combining black humour with grim realism, not always to good effect. Through the five stanzas of “To Any Dead

Officer,” Sassoon mixes understated cliche with realistic snippets of trench life. The whole takes the form of a telephone call to a dead officer - “Well, how are things in Heaven?” (1) - using conventional diction, some o f it quite awkward, as in this excerpt:

You joked at shells and talked the usual “shop,”

Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine:

With “Jesus Christ! When will it stop?

Three years.... It’s hell unless we break their line” (21-4)

The poem becomes political in the final stanza.

Goodbye, old lad! Remember me to God, 75

And tell Him that our Politicians swear

They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

Under the Heel of England.... Are you there?...

Yes ... and the War won’t end for at least two years;

But we’ve got stacks of men.... I’m blind with tears,

Staring in the dark. Cheero!

I wish they’d killed you in a decent show. (33-40)

In this poem, the humour overshadows the pathos and the sarcasm outplays the realism leaving no particular emphasis. Likewise, Sassoon’s poem, “The Effect,” fails in its attempt to mix humour and realism through too jarring a contrast between grim imagery and comic diction:

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that,

Flapping along the fire-step like a fish,

After the blazing crump had knocked him flat....

“How many dead? As many as ever you wish.

Don’t count 'em; they ’re too many.

Who ’11 buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny? ”(13-8)

“The Effect” does cause revulsion in the reader and the juxtaposition is not unfitting as the subject of the poem is a soldier who is likely going mad; however, the poem is not among

Sassoon’s best.

The cynical pessimism underpinning much o f Sassoon’s poetry stemmed from his belief that the war was pointless and that the compensations for the sufferings of the surviving combatants would be forever inadequate. In “I Stood with the Dead,” Sassoon explores what motivates the individual soldier to kill. In a sing-song rhythm, the poem’s first stanza suggests that revenge is the motive that drives him to act. From the perspective of one standing among the “forsaken” (1) dead, the speaker’s “slow heart said, ‘You must kill; you must kill / Soldier, soldier, morning is red” (3-4). Allowing for the pun on “mourning” in the fourth line, the second stanza goes on to describe that among the slain is the poet’s beloved: “O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face” (7). The whole problem of cathartic revenge as a motive for killing leaves the poet confused as is suggested by the repetition and ellipsis that begin the third stanza and as the next line makes clear: “I stood with the Dead.... They were dead; they were dead; / My heart and my head beat a march of dismay” (9-10). In the end, the routine duties of the army provide the ironic conclusion in the poem’s last line: ‘“Fall in!’ I shouted; ‘Fall in for your pay!”’ In this way, Sassoon resorts to dark humour for resolution of the poem, but without solving the problem: there is no motive adequate and the soldiers are, ultimately, mercenaries.

He continues this exploration in “Survivors,” one of the only poems denoted as

“Craiglockhart, Oct. 1917.” Although the mood is not as cynical as “Does it Matter,” the poem considers whether the pride that men will feel in their war service is worth the trauma and injury.

It begins positively: “No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain/Have caused their stammering disconnected talk. / Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ - ” (1-3). The poem never refers to the combatants as soldiers, but throughout they are “boys with old, scared faces” (4), and the list of their sufferings indicates shell shock and mental illness:

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed 77

Subjection to the ghosts o f friends who died, -

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

O f glorious war that shatter’d all their pride....

The ironic “glories of war” will not compensate for these broken men and the poem ends with a sharp contrasting reversal: “Men who went out to battle, grim and glad; / Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad” (9-10). Not only has the experience of war shattered the spirits of happy men, they have been reduced to a state of childish madness by it and now despise those who did not share their suffering. In all of these poems where the unheroic aspects of war and death are stressed, Sassoon’s writing is characteristic of the modernist tendency to startle and dislocate a general reading public by denying the conventional literary means of resolving grief through suggestions of redemption or by resorting to the trope of noble sacrifice for a just cause.

Satire and Irony: Direct Attacks against the Homefront

Sassoon’s anger was directed at many specific targets other than a general civil population who were guilty, he felt, of ignorantly allowing the prolongation of a war which had become unwinnable and senseless. He also attacked those who, through their innocence, fed the mythology which perpetuated the recruitment of soldiers. Sassoon wrote almost a score o f these seventy war poems specifically as satirical attacks on women, fathers, clergymen, journalists, propagandists, and the officers of the general staff. The critics generally acknowledge that these make up the body of Sassoon’s best war poems and that he is the foremost war poet in this genre.

In each of these spare studies, his principal weapon is satire: often the poem’s speaker is a 78 member of the targeted group who damns himself by his own words and actions and the reader leams the moral lesson through dramatic irony.

Pinto suggests that, before the war, there had been three distinct classes in Britain which the war reduced to only two: those who fought and those who did not. Sassoon wrote several poems which dramatically depict how he adheres to this idea. In “The Tombstone-Maker,” the speaker represents the ignorance, selfishness, and stupidity of the home front. The subject of the narrative is an old tradesman with a “loose red mouth” (1) lamenting how “The war comes cruel hard on some poor folk” (5) ironically meaning himself. He complains to the poet - presumably a combatant - that his trade is ruined by all the soldiers buried at the state’s expense in France.

The narrator decides to play with the man’s ignorance by passing along one of the rumours that had circulated at the front, namely, that many war dead are never buried, but rather

I told him, with a sympathetic grin,

That Germans boil dead soldiers down for fat;

And he was horrified. “What shameful sin!

O sir, that Christian men should come to that!” (11-14)

Sassoon sets the soldier in contrast to the civilian in several ways not least by demonstrating the gullibility of the tradesman. Ironical, also, is the implication that the rendering of the dead for profit is the tombstone maker’s profession, and the thing for which he condemns the Germans.

In this way, the British civilian is positioned in further opposition to the speaker and on the side of the enemy. 79

A less subtle positioning of civilians with the enemy occurs vividly in “Blighters.” The

setting is a music hall “crammed: tier beyond tier” (1) full of spectators who “grin / And

cackle” (1-2) with “prancing ranks / O f harlots” (2-3) who are singing jingoistic songs about “the

dear old Tanks” (4).

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. (5-8)

This picture is much like the narrative in “Fight to a Finish” where the speaker is again

fantasising about killing civilians - in this case, particularly those practising that brand of

sensational journalism associated with the “Yellow-Pressmen” - who had gathered to watch a

homecoming parade. The “Grim Fusiliers” are described as making “a cushy job” out of

bayoneting the onlookers who, like the Germans in “Remorse,” “grunt and squeal” like farm

animals. In another transposition of the home front with the enemy, the speaker “with my trusty

bombers turned and went / To clear those Junkers out o f Parliament” (11-2). By categorising the

British political leaders with the conservative, militaristic German “Junkers,” Sassoon implies

that English and German politicians are of a type and both the enemy of the fighting man. These

poems graphically demonstrate the wide gulf which the war had created between the B.E.F. and

their civilian supporters.

Among the specific civilian groups Sassoon targeted, his presentation of women leads many to accuse him of misogyny. Thorpe says that the sentiment in his poems, “Glory of Women” and “Their Frailty,” “verges on obsessive hysteria” (25). In the former, a sonnet, the octave sets the theme: women perpetuate the war by romanticising and glamorising such things as “decorations” (3), “chivalry” (4), “tales of dirt and danger” (6). Sassoon’s women love soldiers as “heroes, home on leave / Or wounded in a mentionable place”(l-2), suggesting that their love is conditional, and they themselves are fickle. The sestet presents the grim truth that

British troops are capable of cowardice: “You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’ / When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run / Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood” (9-11). It is unclear whether he is speaking about individual soldiers breaking down, or groups of soldiers retreating. Given his history as a man diagnosed with “neurasthenia” or shell shock, the meaning may be the former. This is likely an example of a wound in an

“unmentionable” place. The last three lines are set off from the rest and the poem changes its point of view. Suddenly, the speaker addresses the German mother of one of the corpses being trodden on by British boots who is at home knitting socks for her deceased son. The women of the poem are both English and German, and their glory is made ironic by the brutality of the poem’s images. In Counter Attack, this poem is immediately followed by another slightly less misogynistic study, “Their Frailty.” In three rhymed quatrains, Sassoon derides the women who care only for their own particular loved ones and who are able to continue to support the war effort as long as their sons and husbands are out of harm’s way. The subject is a woman of no specific relation to a beloved soldier. She is at once, mother, wife and sweetheart (11) whose man is returned to her with a “Blighty wound” (1) and, once recovered, is returned to the fighting. The type of woman criticised in the poem is one who cares only for her own and not for the mass of soldiery: “War bleeds us white./ ... they don’t care / So long as He’s all right” (10-2). More than not caring though, the woman’s “frailty” causes her also to become a war perpetuator: Sassoon writes that as long as “He’s safe; and then / War’s fine and bold and bright” (1-2). In both poems, women are targeted as supporting the war effort either by active mythologising or by passive indifference.

Sassoon takes aim also at fathers whom he sees as perpetuators of the conflict through the pressure they place on their sons to fight. There are two poems that bitterly mock the complicity of fathers: “Memorial Tablet (Great War)” and “The Fathers.” In the former, the speaker is a young man who is posthumously considering “Squire,” his father, who “nagged and bullied” (1) him into the army. The reluctant soldier did not enlist directly into the service, however, but was one of the 350,000 who registered into the pre-conscription, compromise programme named for the then Secretary of State for War - “Lord Derby’s Scheme” (2) - by which registered men were promised to be called up for active service only if necessary and married men last. Ironically, the speaker had received a “blighty” and was walking out of the fighting trenches towards the rear when a shell burst near him; however, he was killed not by shrapnel, nor the blast: he fell off the duckboard and drowned in “the bottomless mud, and lost the light” (6). The octave removes the reader from France to postwar England where “Squire” contemplates his son’s “gilded name” (8) upon a parish memorial tablet. The diction is satirical:

For though low down upon the list, I’m there:

“In proud and glorious memory” - that’s my due.

Two bleeding years I fought in France for Squire;

I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed; Once I came home on leave; and then went west.

What greater glory could a man desire?

The last rhetorical question may be referring to the speaker, but more likely, the intended target is

Squire. The “glory” of the ignominious death of the soldier has been usurped by his father, for whom the speaker fought.

In “The Fathers,” a poem written earlier than “Memorial Tablet (Great War),” Sassoon allows the subjects of the poem to speak in their own voices. The setting is a club, where two old men are discussing their sons’ military careers. One of the speakers has two sons in action, one in Baghdad and the other in France; although the former’s letters are described as

“cheery” (4), of the two, he says the latter is “getting all the fun” (5) in combat with the artillery.

The other man laments that his “broken-hearted” (8) son is still in England, but remains hopeful that the war will continue until he can join the fighting. The poem’s narrator has no speaking role in the poem; he reports the conversation and describes the speakers in caricature as

“snug” (1), “Gross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat” (2), wheezing (7) at one another before they

“toddle through the door” (11). In portraying them as grotesques, Sassoon does not need to deride their civilian opinions of the front; the reader captures the full dramatic irony of the conversation without commentary. His final verdict is passed upon them as “impotent old friends of mine” with the implied double sense that “old” may also mean “former,” a position reinforced by the lack of interaction between them. Indeed, the poem appears to have an omniscient, third- person narrator until the second last line, when the narrator suddenly insinuates himself as a character who “watched them” (11) in the club. This serves to heighten the sense of separation 83 between Sassoon and his subject: fathers as portrayed in the Victorian settings of country, parish, and club, attacking the patrimony in its traditional citadels.

The established Church of England was satirised quite early in Sassoon’s war poems, with ‘“They,”’ originally in the Old Huntsman and republished in War Poems. Thorpe described

it as “the shrewdest thrust a t ... the priest’s delight in war,” mocking the idea that the war was just and that God favoured the English (24). Continuing the poetic theme of division between home and away hinted at in the title, “The Bishop” is preaching to “us” (1). The cleric presents the war as “a just cause” (3), as “the last attack / On Anti-Christ” (3-4) and concludes that the redemption of the English race will be wrought through the sacrificial blood of the soldiers (4-5). All this is premised on the innocuous line: “’When the boys come back / They will not be the same” (1-2).

In the second stanza, “the boys” have a rebuttal:

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

A chap who’s served that hasn’t foundsome change.”(7-ll)

The impotent response of the Bishop: “The ways o f God are strange” (12) serves to heighten the effect created by the change in diction from the theological stridency o f the clergy to the mocking cynicism of the soldier; the sense of alienation is intensified by the lack of credible response to the soldiers’ challenge to the authority of the Church. 84

More subtly, in “Joy Bells,” Sassoon uses the subject of church bells to consider whether the traditional church has any relevance in wartime. In diction and form, the poem reads like a pastoral elegy:

Ring your sweet bells; but let them be farewells

To the green-vista’d gladness of the past

That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells

To a joyful chime; but let it be the last. (1-4)

The poet appears to be lamenting the loss of the parish church bell as belonging to a vanished prewar world. Sassoon continues this idea in the second stanza, with anachronistic diction:

“What means this metal in windy belfries hung I When guns are all our need?” (5-6). The war effort demands metal, and so the bells “tuned for peace” (7) should be melted down so as “To let them cry doom and storm the sun with shells” (8). The poetic device shifts from metaphor to simile as its theme becomes explicit in its last stanza: a direct attack upon the clergy:

Bells are like fierce-browed prelates who proclaim

That “if our Lord returned He’d fight for us.”

So let our bells and bishops do the same,

Shoulder to shoulder with the motor-bus. (9-12)

Sassoon reveals his argument that the church, with all of its trappings, while an integral part of prewar England, has lost its relevance in wartime. Bells and bishops will be replaced as certainly as the motorbus replaces the horse-drawn carriage. This sentiment may have been a personal one, but it is one which Sassoon felt was shared by the bulk of his brothers-in-arms. The Church had become just another vestige of the civilian world isolated from the fighting men. 85

This isolation was not alleviated by those sent to observe and report the war at home.

The press was satirised by Sassoon and characterised as little more than naive propagandists, complicit in the continuation of the war through optimistic reportage. In “Editorial

Impressions,” a journalist newly returned from the fighting is dining with a convalescent soldier.

The loquacious writer is enthusiastically describing “the glorious time he’d had / While visiting the trenches” (2-3) to his wry companion who goads the journalist with ironic comments: ‘“One can tell / You’ve gathered some big impressions! ’ grinned the lad” (4-5). Sassoon contrasts the attitude of the writer who “seemed so certain ‘all was going well’” (1) and the soldier “Who’d been severely wounded in the back / In some wiped-out impossible Attack” (6-7). Incongruously, the journalist, who had been among infantrymen and who is now conversing with an infantryman, begins to praise the flying corps. The soldier deflates the other’s enthusiasm towards the pilots by stating “’Ah, yes, but it’s the Press that leads the way!” (19), sarcastically

suggesting that the efforts of pressmen and the nascent air force were more effective than the infantry and their “impossible attacks” in bringing an end to hostilities.

Satire and Irony: Attacking the Brass Hats

No group was satirised as often and as unapologetically as the General Officers and the officers of the Staff. In “The General,” a poem published while Sassoon was still a serving officer, he mocks the planning of the battle of Arras, in which 130,000 allied troops were killed, wounded or went missing during its 30 days. As with most of these angry satires, the poem is short and framed by a narrative incident: Harry and Jack meet the general on their way to the front; the general greets them warmly and optimistically. “Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead / And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine” (3-4), says the omniscient narrator. After an ellipsis, Sassoon narrows the reader’s focus to close on Harry and Jack again, whose deaths are blamed on the general’s personal incompetence: “But he did for them both by his plan of attack” (7). The postwar poem, “The Return of the Heroes,” is a highly ironic account of the homecoming parades featuring general officers with names such as “Dudster,”

“Leggit” (as in “to run away”) and “Stoomer.” The speaker in the poem is a woman,

“enthusiastic, flushed and proud” (2) who is conversing maternally to a character with the

Germanic name, “Freda,” exhorting her to wave her flag (5) at the appearance of one or another

“splendid leader” (3) with “rows of ribbons on his chest!” (4). The English generals are compared favourably to a Prussian general the speaker had the pleasure to see once in Munich

(6). The “lady” positions herself as a war-supporter when she offers sympathy to these men who must moum the Armistice: “’They must feel sad to know they can’t win any more / Great victories!”’ (9-10). The speaker closes with the ironic, rhetorical question: “‘Aren’t they glorious men? ... So full of humour!”’ (10) ‘Humour’ retains the double meaning suggesting at once men of high emotion and men of comedy. The overall effect is one of caricature: British and German generals are positioned together with a sympathetic civilian with German connections, who recognises their sadness that the war has ended and halted further aggrandisement of the generals’ professional careers, ironically viewed as the true purpose of the conflict.

The officers of the General Staff are caricatured mercilessly in the persons of the “scarlet

Majors” in the poem, “Base Details,” first published in Cambridge Magazine in April 1917. Jean 87

Moorcroft Wilson reports that this poem’s genesis was an actual luncheon taken by Sassoon at a rearward base in 1917 and first reported in prose form to Robert Ross in a letter (War Poet.

326-7). The whole poem is written in the subjunctive mood with Sassoon’s narrator ingenuously envying the poem’s subject: a professional senior officer described in dismissive language as a selfish, unfit sensualist.

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

You’d see me with my puffy, petulant face,

Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

Reading the Roll of Honour. (1-6)

As with his other short satires, Sassoon allows his subject to damn himself by his own ironic words.

“Poor young chap,”

I’d say - “I used to know his father well;

Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.” (6-8)

The speaker’s status as a professional officer causes him to normalise and minimise the First

World War as just another “scrap” and the death of a colleague’s son an event worthy of no more than a mention over luncheon. Finally, the main idea of the poem is delivered in something like a “punch-line,” a device typical to Sassoon’s satires: “And when the war is done and youth stone dead, / I’d toddle safely home and die - in bed” (9-10). This final image of the staff officer - toddling off, as impotent as the ‘old friends’ from “The Fathers” - places him outside the community of combatants with the civilian or the journalist.

Sassoon’s barbs at the officers of the staff come up in other poems more obliquely. For example, in “Lamentations,” an otherwise realistic portrayal of a soldier on “suicide watch” after receiving news of the death of his brother - an event that Sassoon witnessed and described in his diary and his memoir.

I found him in the guard-room at the Base.

From the blind darkness I had heard his crying

And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face

A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying

To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest. (1-5)

At this point in the poem, the tone changes and Sassoon inserts the ironic voice of the narrator who employs understatement and euphemism to great effect:

And all because his brother had gone West,

Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief

Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling

Half naked on the floor. In my belief

Such men have lost all patriotic feeling. (6-10)

In his diary, it was Sassoon the combatant passing through from leave who came upon this scene and reported it without commentary. In the poem, the unidentified witness is more likely a Base- dweller, and the characteristically caustic final line, damns him for his lack of empathy. The 89 euphemism of “going West” recalls Sassoon’s “How to Die” and the anger that he heaps on those who try to minimise soldiers’ suffering or to romaniticise death in the trenches.

Psychological Poems: Coping with Survivor Guilt and the Spectre of Cowardice

The bulk of Sassoon’s poems positions himself and his fighting comrades against some external element which would not or could not properly sympathise with them; ironically, several notable poems internalise this conflict. When exploring his own guilt as a survivor of the war, he isolates himself from the troops and places himself outside the fellowship of his men. Sassoon employs modernist poetic techniques to emphasise this separation that he felt from those still fighting or those deceased. “Banishment,” “Sick Leave,” and “Autumn” were all composed while Sassoon was recovering at Craiglockhart in 1917 and were likely influenced by his contact with W.H.R. Rivers. Each poem wrestles with Sassoon’s guilt at being away from the fighting.

In “Banishment,” a Petrarchan sonnet, the diction is lofty, more archaic than many of Sassoon’s war poems, and even the theme touches more on the traditional: love for one’s comrades while in exile; however, the exile is self-imposed and therefore the root of the speaker’s guilt. The octave builds upon the theme of fraternity which he felt between himself and the other ranks whom he led: “They smote my heart to pity, built my pride” (2). The speaker describes himself as

“banished” from his men, while they, in traditional form and diction, “arrayed in honour” (6) march away in formation: “Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,/ ... away from life’s broad wealds of light” (3-4). The poem takes on more of the character of a modernist poem in the last lines of the stanza which suggest the reason for the poet’s banishment: “ ... they died / Not one by one. And mutinous I cried / To those who sent them out into the night” (6-8). This reference to 90

Sassoon’s war protest is continued in the sestet: “Love drove me to rebel” (12) where the problem of the officer’s guilt at leaving his men is resolved in his decision to return to the fighting: “Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; / And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven” (11-12). In the case of “Banishment,” the men did not march into a metaphorical afterlife as in Sassoon’s other poems, but were literally marched away into a virtual hell at the front; the officer may assuage his guilt simply by deciding to return to active service at the front and joining them in their futile suffering. Guilt is an emotion not as easily resolved in Sassoon’s other poems on the subject.

“Autumn” is an extended metaphor describing soldiers as fallen leaves, “scattered ... tossed and blown / Along the westering furnace flaring red” (6-7). The month of October is personified as the angry “breaker and cleaver” of the “bronzed battalions of the stricken wood” (2), imagery which works both literally and metaphorically within the poem. The speaker describes hearing in the autumn wind, a “lament... for battle’s fruitless harvest” (3-4) where the soldiers’ “lives are like the leaves / Scattered in flocks of ruin” (5-6). The poem concludes with the elegiac: “O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, / The burden of your wrongs is on my head” (8-9). Although the speaker claims to take the “wrongs” of the fallen upon himself, martyrs need no redemption in any religious tradition; with no hint of resurrection or hope for an afterlife mentioned or implied, the speaker is more like the ancient scapegoat of Passover than the Christ of Easter. Nor is there resolution to the problem of survivor guilt. As Rae and others have described, the modernist elegy does not tend to resolve such existential issues; rather the poet’s response is one of resignation and endurance. This theme is continued in “Sick Leave,” another of Sassoon’s poems composed at Craiglockhart. The speaker describes himself as comfortable: “asleep, dreaming, lulled and warm” (1) while the ghosts, “the homeless ones, the noiseless dead” (2), gather round his sleeping form and whisper: “Why are you here with all your watches ended? / From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the Line” (7-8). The poet awakes “in bitter safety ... unfriended” (9) and still hears the ghosts of his dead soldiers chastising him:

“”When are you going out to them again? / Are they not still your brothers through our blood?” (12-13). It is significant to note that the dead chastise but they do not frighten Sassoon; rather they form a community and a fraternity which he, “unfriended,” clearly does not share with his living fellow patients though they are also combatants. In these three poems, Sassoon explores the problem of survivor-guilt in modernist modes and presages that guilt may become an irresolvable impediment to postwar fellowship for the veteran; these poems describe a deeper sense of isolation than that suggested in most of the satires with their “us and them” positioning.

There are several other “veteran” poems that deal with unresolved questions of guilt and blame. “The One-Legged Man” describes an invalided veteran returning to the comforts of rural

England in pastoral language among oasts, cowls, and stooks, while counting his many blessings, chief among which, secretly, is his wound: ‘“Thank God they had to amputate!’” he thinks to himself at the poem’s conclusion (12). Secret cowardice lies also at the heart of “Arms and the

Man,” a poem based on a real experience of a medical board at Caxton Hall, Westminster, in

November 1916 at which Sassoon hoped to be granted an extension o f his leave (Wilson, War

Poet. 308-9). The title alludes ironically to the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid: “I will sing to you of arms and the man,” with Sassoon punning on the theme o f amputated limbs. The soldier o f the poem is “Captain Croesus,” a reference to Herodotus’s tale of the hapless King of Lydia. These classical allusions serve to contrast the poem’s soldier with heroic and tragic antecedents, heightening the pathos of the man who goes to beg a leave from a medical board for which he knows he is not entitled. While awaiting his audience with “Colonel Sawbones,” Croesus reads a notice telling amputees where to get prostheses and enumerating the prices for various artificial limbs (but at no charge to officers): “Two arms, two legs, though all were lost / They’d be restored him free of cost” (13-14). The classical Croesus boasts to Solon the Athenian that he must be the “most fortunate of men” and draws the sober response from the Greek that no man should be accounted fortunate until he’s dead; in the poem there is the implication of impending doom for Sassoon’s Croesus. The tone of the poem remains light and even humorous, but the humour is based on the rich ironies Sassoon creates and the stark reality of personal fear of returning to the Front and the promise that maiming may be the best possible outcome for the modem warrior.

In another postwar poem on the themes of guilt and cowardice, “Atrocities,” Sassoon takes aim at the war’s braggarts. The poem is set in a bar, and the target of the poet’s anger is a returned soldier who is drunk and boasts of killing German prisoners. There is no ambiguity of sentiment for Sassoon as the poem’s title makes clear.

How did you do them in? Come, don’t be shy:

You know I love to hear how German’s die,

Downstairs in dug-outs. “Camerad!” they cry;

Then squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly. (5-8) Sassoon heightens the sense of atrocity by quoting the prisoners’ appeal for comradeship with the

British troops as fellow soldiers and suggesting that their new status as prisoners have reduced them to an animal state as they end up making animal noises. The poem refocuses on the braggart who is himself described as a cowardly malingerer who “weasels” his way out of the fighting:

And you? I know your record. You went sick

When orders looked unwholesome: then, with trick

And lie, you wangled home. And here you are,

Still talking big and boozing in a bar. (9-12)

In this way, the soldier is condemned as a malingering coward as much as a war criminal and the the sympathy lies with the German prisoners. This positioning of the English troops as the poem’s villains is a good example of how Sassoon’s writing could be countercultural. This apportionment of blame, considering Sassoon’s other Craiglockhart poetry, suggests that the survivor-guilt was a powerful agent in his poems, and that all returned men were somehow under suspicion of cowardice.

In “Stand-To: Good Friday Morning,” an early 1916 poem, Sassoon explicitly acknowledges this theme of survivor guilt. The poem describes in realistic terms, the predawn ritual of “standing-to” when the line is manned to capacity in anticipation of repelling a dawn attack. The poem’s speaker is completing an overnight duty-shifi in the dugout and listens at the door to the grunts and swearing of the men as they respond to the “stand to” order. There is a conventional contrast of happy larks to the ill mood of the officer: “Deep in water, I splashed my way / Up the trench to our bogged front line” (8-9). Without reference to the enemy, the conditions described are such that the writer desires to be wounded: “O Jesus, send me a wound to-day, / And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine, / And get my bloody old sins washed white!” (11-13). The poem’s mood is cynical and the religious reference denies any tme transcendent hope. “Attack” is similarly despairing, although it presumably describes the successful battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917, the first mechanised, combined arms attack and the first British victory of the war when 378 tanks led eight divisions with 1000 guns in support (Keegan, 369-71). The descriptions are realistic, even though Sassoon was not present for this particular battle and did not witness first hand the first effective use of tanks in combat:

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Note that the verbs describe decidedly unheroic action: tanks “creep and topple;” the artillery

“roars and lifts;” the infantrymen, “clumsily bowed ...jostle and climb.” The soldiers are

“muttering” and “masked with fear” (9) and even the reference to the novel wrist watches: “time ticks blank and busy on their wrists” (11) is a metaphor employed not to emphasise the practical innovations of tank and timepiece, but to suggest that the passage of time is as pointless as the war is hopeless. Rather than a celebration of victory through British innovation, “Attack” remains a poem of despair where “hope ... / Flounders in mud” (12-13) and which ends with another religious appeal: “O Jesu, make it stop!” (13) an exclamation more dramatic than

spiritual, deepening the poet’s modernist sense of the fruitlessness of the war. 95

Modernist Elegies

Sassoon wrote some elegies that adhere to the conventions of traditional pastoral elegy.

In the majority, however, his poems on the theme of loss follow very closely the

characterisations of modernist elegy as described by Gilbert, Ramazani and Rae. Some of

Sassoon’s poems suggest that the spiritual negation of character that he laments was not just

personal, but collective. The war appeared to have shattered not only the individual men who

fought in it, but also the spirit of the entire professional, British, prewar army, and even the

civilian world for which they presumed to fight; the war, he argues, would have long and even

permanent effect on the cultural achievements of Europe. His poem “Twelve Months After”

describes, through the destruction of his own platoon, how the professional British Army he had joined in 1915 had been totally annihilated within a year. In the sonnet, ‘Two Hundred Years

After,” this army has been reduced to a phantasm: ghostly units still haunting France senselessly,

which the local villagers describe as “Poor, silent things, they were the English dead / Who came

to fight in France and got their fill” (13-14). The most explicit exposition on the theme of

cultural negation comes in “Dead Musicians.” The first of three stanzas is addressed to

Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, comparing their musical works to the great cathedrals which

likewise inclined the poet to a contemplation o f the Divine. Ironically, all are German speakers.

In his second stanza the speaker laments: “Great names, I cannot find you now / In these loud

years of youth that strives / Through doom toward peace” (9-11). The poet is no longer striving

for union with God, but for reunion with his dead war-companions: “upon my brow / 1 wear a

wreath of banished lives.... / Your fugues and symphonies have brought / No memory of my 96 friends who died” (11-12, 15-16). In the third stanza, the poet reveals that he has been listening to a gramophone playing popular wartime songs: “In slangy speech I call them back. / With fox trot tunes their ghosts I charm” (18-19):

I think o f rag-time; a bit of rag-time;

And see their faces crowding round

To the tune o f the syncopated beat.

They’ve got such jolly things to tell,

Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat....

* * *

And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone.

They’re dead.... For God’s sake stop that gramophone. (21-27)

The poem’s conclusion does not resolve whether his spiritual needs are met through high or low culture: the poet is not comforted by the lofty works of the great masters and neither is he comforted by the music of the dance hall. In the last line the poet calls for silence. There is no specific antecedent for the pronoun “they”: his friends are dead and so are the great musicians of

Europe whose art no longer moves him.

In “The Rear-Guard (Hindenburg Line, April, 1917)” Sassoon poeticises a real event and creates an extended metaphor describing this negation of European culture through classical allusion: the story of the hero descending to the underworld. The poem narrates his exploration 97 of the captured German Hindenburg Line, an event described in his diary5 and one which, he anticipates, will haunt him for the rest of his life. Sassoon had been in reserve with a company of bombers soon after the Germans retired to higher ground in March, and was ordered to the

German lines after they’d been cleared. In the poem, his descent into hell is reminiscent of ancient texts, echoing the descriptions of Homer, Virgil and Dante. Unlike the precedential literature, however, there is no one to lead him and the poet staggers about alone in the gloomy depths looking for his guide to the underworld.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie

Humped at his feet, half hidden by a rug,

And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.

“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)

“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.” (8-13)

He attempts to wake the “soft, unanswering heap” (14) - a corpse dead for ten full days “whose eyes yet wore/Agony dying hard” (16-7). In the classical descent literature, the hero can make the dead speak and teach him something of importance; in contrast, Sassoon’s poem provides a vision of Hades where the dead remain silent. Finally, he is saved by “Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair” (20) in a comparative reference perhaps to Persephone, who is permitted regular respite from the Underworld but who is also doomed to return in the classical myth. The speaker escapes the tunnel “with sweat of horror in his hair” (23), “Unloading hell behind him

5 “The dead bodies lying about the trenches and in the open are beyond description - especially after the rain. (A lot of the Germans killed by our bombardment last week are awful.) Our shelling of the line - and subsequent bombing etc. - has left a number of mangled Germans - they will haunt me till I die. And everywhere one sees the British Tommy in various states of dismemberment - most of them shot through the head - so not so fearful as the shell-twisted Germans. Written at 9.30 sitting in the Hindenburg underground tunnel on Sunday night, fully expecting to get killed on Monday morning” (Diaries. 134-5). step by step” (25). The classical allusions and the traditional arrangement of the poem from descent to ascent suggest an interpretation of the poem as allegory: the educated European, facing the reality of subterranean warfare, looks to his cultural touchstones to help him make sense of his experience; the poet discovers instead that this is merely an episodic moment in a horrific personal experience devoid of any attempt to impose meaning or purpose on it. There are no guides to the underworld, literal or symbolic, to be found in European cultural reference.

Other poems in Sassoon’s collections of war writing presume the war itself is senselessly futile and, therefore, the personal and collective suffering of the soldiers is rendered meaningless.

In these, Sassoon avoids seeking resolution by imputing meaning to his experience as one might expect in the poetry of the nineteenth century. In “Break of Day,” a soldier dozes off awaiting zero-hour on a beautiful autumn day which reminds him of hunting parties back home. He dreams vividly of pastoral England while expecting to be “done in” (7) in France

Where men are crushed like clods, and crawl to find

Some crater for their wretchedness; who lie

In outcast immolation, doomed to die

Far from clean things or any hope of cheer,

Cowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims

And roars into their heads, and they can hear

Old childish talk, and tags of foolish hymns. (13-19)

When his dream of pastoral England begins in the third stanza, the poem’s subject is transformed from hopeless submission into “a living soul, absolved from pain” (17). Thorpe speculates that this “tenuous reverie” does no more than tranquilise the soldier before battle and notes the 99 ambiguous benefit o f the dream which may be no more than a “jest o f God” (Thorpe 28). In

Sassoon’s poem, God’s presence is not assumed to be kindly and hymns are “foolish,” associated

with “childish talk.” Rationalising religious tendencies are unable to overcome the “darkness” that “brims and roars” at the soldiers. Sassoon asks the existential question: “Was it the ghost o f

autumn in that smell / Of underground, or God’s blank heart grown kind, / That sent a happy

dream to him in hell?” (10-12). Even the slightest spiritual boon is as likely the result of a chance

smell as it is a moment o f grace, and the poet avoids the inclination to make sense o f this war experience.

The reluctance to make sense of death in the trenches - to call it sacrifice or to find in it a higher purpose - is a modernist characteristic even of Sassoon’s elegiac poems. In “Prelude: The

Troops,” Sassoon describes his soldiers as “disconsolate” (1), “haggard and hopeless” (5); nonetheless, they have a vague heroic virtue in that they “cling to life with stubborn hands, / Can grin through storms of death and find a gap / In the clawed cruel tangles of his defence” (9-11). It is this quality which is praised in the final stanza. Although they are referred to as “the eyeless dead” who “Flock away silently” (18), their deaths will “shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge, / Death will stand grieving in that field of war / Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent” (19-21). There is a sort o f heroism possessed by Sassoon’s dead soldiers, but it is not the heroism of the Romantic Period that might have shamed death: the chief virtue Sassoon presents lies solely in the fact that they were “unvanquished.” Although they died, they endured until the end. As in most of Sassoon’s imagery of dead soldiers, they are distinguished by their silence and impotence.

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass 100

Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unretuming army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust. (22-25)

Although Sassoon mentions Valhalla, the raucous mead-hall of the ancient Nordic texts which forms the afterlife of Northern warriors killed in battle, his “mooned” place is more reminiscent of the underworld of classical antiquity where the dead flutter like bats and eat dust. There is no sense of reward or of sacrifice in Sassoon’s elegy and in this way there is no sense of redemption or resolution achieved or suggested.

This sense of individual impotence is a strong, modernist theme recurring in many of

Sassoon’s poems. Even in the poems where the activity of the collective is successful and apparently meaningful, Sassoon presents this fact always in an ironic tone and uses it to contrast the ultimate meaninglessness of the individual’s actions to achieve the goal. Both “Counter-

Attack” and “Wirers” apply this technique. “Counter-Attack” is one of the few poems Sassoon wrote in blank verse, and describes in realistic and graphic detail the successful seizure of an infantry objective and subsequent repulsion of a German counter attack. The poem begins with a simile personifying the dawn as a “face with blinking eyes, / Pallid, unshaved and thirsty” (2-3), which finds the British soldiers firm in their position, awaiting the inevitable German counter attack. The descriptions of the trench are horrifically realistic:

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and grovelling along the saps;

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags, loosely filled; And naked sodden buttocks, mats o f hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime. (7-12)

The subject of the poem is introduced in the second stanza: a “yawning soldier” (14) who watches the German artillery bracketing onto his position. “He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, / Sick for escape” (22-3). He responds to the orders issued from a

“blundering” (25) officer, who is “gasping and bawling” (27), to return fire on the German infantry, “stumbling figures looming out in front” (30). The cause of the soldier’s death is indistinct: “a bang / Cmmpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out / To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him” (33-5); he is described alternately as drowning and bleeding. The soldier’s part in the repulse of the attack was limited to him “blazing wildly” (33). The abrupt last line of the poem, “The counter-attack had failed” (39), renders its information so starkly that it has an ironic effect, making no discernible connection between the efforts and sacrifices of individual soldiers and the greater action.

The poem, “Wirers,” also describes the futility of individual action and similarly uses a final, ironic statement to heighten this effect. Like “Counter-Attack,” the poem is constructed around a narrative of realistic detail of infantry routine: the relay of information from soldier to soldier to prevent fratricide during the passage of friendly lines; the muffling of the hammers on the metal stakes to mask the sound of their work; the “immediate action” drilled into the soldiers to stand rigidly in place instead of dropping to the ground when a flare goes up. The men’s work is described in the present tense using many verbs in the imperfect form to convey the sense of the monotonous labour: “yawning,” “Unravelling; twisting; hammering,” “whispering,”

“clutching.” Sassoon allows the archaic phrase, “hither and thither,” and contrasts the poem’s 102 realism with a sudden rich, poetic description: “Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts / Gleams desolate along the sky” (8-9), but the most jarring transition occurs in the last stanza. Sassoon introduces a first-person speaker, shifts to the past tense, and delivers the summation of the night’s work in an efficient tone: “Young Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away, /

Moaning at every lurch; no doubt he’ll die today. / But we can say the front-line wire’s been safely mended” (10-12). The death of Hughes is as routine as the mending of wire, and both are equally considered, one as compensation for the other. Neither the “night’s misery” nor the death of the soldier is particularly important and may be no more than futile gestures. The futility of the individual soldier’s actions implicates the entire war as an empty and meaningless endeavour.

Exceptions and Relapses into Romanticsm

Not all of Sassoon’s war poetry was written in a satirical or cynical tone, or adhered to the realism of horrific description, or expressed nihilist themes. Of the seventy poems, eight retain a prewar poetic sense. Sassoon still produced straightforward pastoral poems like “The

Hawthorn Tree” and “Before the Battle;” his elegies to David Thomas, “The Investiture” and “A

Letter Home,” are quite sentimental; and the remainder were poems written using more conventional devices and imagery, like “Thrushes,” or the lyrical “Everyone Sang,” composed in the immediate euphoria after the war. In “The Hawthorn Tree,” a distraught mother loves the beauty of her garden and tree only because her son, fighting in France, loves and longs dearly for it. In “Invocation,” it is pastoral beauty itself which is invoked as an antidote to war’s suffering:

“Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes / Remembrance of all beauty that has been, / And stillness from the pools of Paradise” (14-16). Despite some playfulness with convention in “The Investiture,” with its angels ranked and stood at ease, and the macabre image of snowball fighting with skulls, it remains a highly sentimental poem. Sassoon’s “A Letter

Home” is another much more saccharine elegy where the poet imagines his dead friend “decked in blue / Striding up through moming-land / With a cloud in either hand” (46-48). The birds described in “Thrushes,” for example, “storm the gates of nothingness for proof’ of “God’s voice in everything” (9-10). Even in these poems, however, the war is present either explicitly, or in mute contrast to the poem’s subject. Within the collections of Sassoon’s war poetry, these conventionally Georgian and pastoral poems are in such minority, that they heighten the effect o f his other poems through contrast.

Thematically, however, Sassoon’s war poetry consistently focuses on personal and cultural destruction and the antiheroic nature of modem combat. The tension that informs this view develops from Sassoon’s inability to reconcile the rational optimism of prewar England with the essential nihilism that he experiences as a combatant. As a result, most of his war poetry laments the senselessness of wanton human suffering caused by the war. Many of the poems protest the prolongation of the war through anger, satire, irony, realism, and iconoclasm.

This anger is only rarely directed at the enemy; in some the divide between German and Briton is replaced with a repositioning of combatants together in opposition to the forces which victimise them. One in four of the war poems is a direct attack on a segment of the population identified with war supporting, including women, accused of romanticising the war; fathers who pressure sons to fight; mothers and wives who care only for their own; clergymen who further the interests of the state and exploit religious sentiment for war aims; the journalists who act as sanitisers and war propagandists; the politicians and industrialists who have the power to stop the war; and the GOCs and officers of their staffs who need not be as mulish as they are and who work ultimately for their own self-aggrandisement. The poems commemorate the victimisation of the combatants and refuse to admit much sentimentalisation of soldiers’ deaths (but in some of his personal elegies to friends, Sassoon relents). The poems written while convalescing at

Craiglockhart become introspective and explore themes of survivor guilt and lost fraternity.

Several of these poems focus specifically on cowardice and private, guilty desires to shirk duties through a “Blighty” or through an extended sick leave. The overarching sense in the two collections examined is that the Great War has been pointless and, whatever the presumed benefits, there is no compensation for what is lost to the combatants through trauma, either to themselves or to the culture as a whole.

Conclusion

The bulk of published poetry that Sassoon composed during the war, despite the retention of Georgian influence in its formalism, broadly aligns his war writing with the character of the modernist literature of the early twentieth century. The poems that Sassoon composed after his first experience of combat and before the Armistice in 1918 differ markedly from his larger body of poetry, most of which has been dismissed by the critics and forgotten by the general readership with a few exceptions. If he is remembered as a Georgian poet at all, it is only as one refashioned by combat into something more recognisably modem. In tone, theme and character, the war poetry focuses on the rage and disillusionment Sassoon directed at the war and at those he felt were its proponents. His treatment of soldiers, both German and British, is pitying and 105 sympathetic, and the poems position the combatants primarily as fraternal victims rather than opponents. Sassoon challenges patriotic notions associated with the First World War through satire, savaging such tropes as “noble sacrifice,” “the good death,” and the “heroic soldier.” In this way, his poetry provides a social criticism of Britain during the war years. Critics, anthologists and teachers have ensured that Sassoon’s poetry has retained a popularity among the reading public which has placed it in the mainstream of our cultural understanding of the First

World War.

In the postwar years, Sassoon does not revisit the Great War very often through the medium of poetry. His major undertaking is the composition of a trilogy of semi-fictionalised memoirs. In these, Sassoon reexamines life as an infantry officer through his alter ego, George

Sherston, and measures his transformation from callow, rural fox hunter into an angry, protesting veteran. The three volumes comprising The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston are written in occasionally archaic diction and in a nostalgic mood; despite this, the novels explore the same ideas and reexamine the same wartime experiences as the poetry. Thematically throughout, and even formally towards the end of the trilogy, the writing renders the war, or at least one man’s experience of it, in modernist terms, offering no resolution to the spiritual and psychological difficulties facing the veteran. In this study, the Complete Memoirs seem to contradict the notion that Sassoon rejected modernity and the literary movement it engendered by retreating into romanticism and Victorian rational optimism. Rather, Sassoon’s Sherston tries to do so but is unable to resolve the same essential problems of anger, despair, guilt, futility and meaninglessness examined in the poetry. Comparing the war poems and the Complete Memoirs along thematic lines will test Sassoon’s transformation, and in so doing, will consider more fully the greater cultural challenge that the First World War posed to contemporaries and its enduring legacy on the literature of the early twentieth century. 107

Chapter Three A Reluctant Modernist: Sassoon’s Search for Meaning in his Memoirs o f the Great War

Introduction

Most of the critics examined earlier in this paper agreed that Sassoon’s wartime poetry differed markedly from what he wrote before and after the war and that his writing bore many of the characteristics associated with early modernist verse. Their opinions vary on the degree of his transformation and many would stop short of categorising Sassoon as a modernist writer; however, there is a consensus that he was drawn to modernist modes of writing in his war poetry because of the intensity of his experience of trench warfare. However, the bulk of the received opinion views the effect of war experience on his writing as being temporary, not least because

Sassoon himself foreswore association with all forms of modernity after the war and attempted to resume writing poetry more in keeping with his Georgian roots. In his later poetry, except for a few pieces in which he resumes his wartime themes, Sassoon was roundly unpopular and critically unsuccessful as his prominence as a poet waned. His literary reputation was reignited only when he chose to recount his war experience in prose with the 1928 publication of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. a work which enjoyed both critical and popular success. His popularity continued through two subsequent volumes, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and

Sherston’s Progress (1936), published collectively as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston

(1937). Rather than craft a story by selectively retelling events in a traditional narrative, Sassoon attempts to replicate the authenticity of immediate experience. His prose memoirs share what

John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury describe as the “four great preoccupations” of the modernist novel: “with the complexities of its own form, with the representation of inward states of consciousness, with a sense of the nihilistic disorder behind the surface order of life and reality, and with the freeing of narrative art from the determination of an onerous plot” (393).

Sassoon presents his novel as a fictive autobiography, even occasionally reverting to diary-like entries and adhering to a strict chronology for the ordering of events. He also uses other modernist literary techniques perfected in his war poetry such as binary opposition, juxtaposition and graphic realism, occasionally composing jumbled “train of thought” passages. In his prose, his satirical portraits become less strident and more comical, but he remains not merely the social critic, as one might expect in a nineteenth-century writer, but in many cases he is very much an iconoclast, levelling full condemnation on several cultural institutions. Sassoon is most modernist, however, when he wrestles with the same themes that he explored in his psychological poems: existential issues, such as survivor guilt, cowardice, and the loss of individualism. In all these cases, the Complete Memoirs, although nostalgic in tone, retains a modernist resignation rooted in an acknowledgment and acceptance of what has been lost in the

Great War, culturally and personally, and offering no suggestion that reconstruction or resolution is realistically possible. This study argues that the war’s effect on Sassoon’s writing was permanent and that when he engages with the First World War, whether in prose or poetry, he does so in modernist terms and modernist modes. 109

Modernist Subjectivity: TVuth, Fiction and the Difficulties of Remembering

Among the primary characteristics that the Sherston trilogy shares with other modernist novels is the obscurity of its form. This is in marked contrast to the poetry which remained rigidly rooted in an older formalism. From the first, Sassoon’s work is difficult to categorise in some measure due to his use of a pseudonym in his autobiographical account of the First World

War. Although Fussell describes the work as “undisguised fiction” on the basis that much of

Sassoon’s identity was erased from the character of Sherston, he points out that all memoirs are, by the same criterion, somewhat fictive (Fussell 310-1). Thorpe and Fleishman maintain that the

Complete Memoirs are an authentic self-portrait, merely exaggerated in places for literary effect.

Colby considers that for Sassoon, and any other writers employing first-person narratives in their accounts, realism is an ideal merely tended towards and never achieved, whether written in “non- literary documentary norms” (by which she means the diary-form), or through more experimental modes that try to capture immediate, subjective experience (Colby 10). Each of these critical opinions recognises the difficulty of objectivity in the recollection of a war whether fictionalising one’s experience into novelistic patterns (as in the case of Ernest Hemingway); or creating an autobiographical pattern (like Robert Graves); or attempting something more symbolic and subjective (like David Jones). Klein insists that the argument itself is moot; the critics ought not to censure a war writer based on accuracy.

The tradition o f Realism had created the expectation that fiction would be a convincing

mirror, would be true to life. With regard to war novels, however, quite a different

demand was made which exacted not verisimilitude, but truth to facts.. .these are

proceedings normally used in assessing works of history, and possibly apposite for the 110

numerous (often apologetic) memoirs and biographies of the great leaders; but they are

hardly adequate as the primary consideration for works of fiction. (Klein 5)

Sassoon himself writes openly about the difficulties of factualness in a work reliant primarily upon memory and is unapologetic on the point.

Sassoon addresses the reader directly at several junctures to warn that his is an uncompromisingly subjective exercise. Ironically, the fact that he has chosen to recount his experiences under an assumed name relieves him of this responsibility. Aided by his mnemonic diaries (though these are Sassoon’s and not Sherston’s) he describes his process of recall as one of rumination and distillation: “Sitting here alone with my slowly moving thoughts, I rediscover many little details known only to myself, details otherwise dead and forgotten with all who shared that time; and I am inclined to loiter among them as long as possible” (11). Moreover,

Sassoon is forthright about the subjective quality of the work:

I also remember how I went one afternoon to have a hot bath in the Jute Mill. The water

was poured into a dyeing vat. Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much

interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story which I am trying to

tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War

must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a

somewhat solitary-minded young man. (291)

In effect, Sassoon exonerates himself from criticism of his objectivity and accuracy by insisting on the subjective construction of his narrative, by using a pseudonym, and by appealing to the weight of years and the inherent difficulties of recollection. I l l

Sassoon shares the modernist preoccupation with psychology and offers some insight into his own process of recollecting his war experiences. Sassoon considers “remembering” to be a psychological activity and so, by necessity, this process causes memory to be filtered and altered despite one’s best efforts at factuality. He admits the difficulty when trying to recreate the visceral experiences of trench life: “Moments like those are unreproducible when I look back and try to recover their living texture. One’s mind eliminates boredom and physical discomfort, retaining an incomplete impression of a strange, intense, and unique experience” (311). He remarks upon his tendency to “soften” experience through recollection and says as much in the scene where Sherston is hunting on his first convalescent leave and becomes nostalgic for the

Front:

It was difficult to believe that the misty autumn mornings, which made me free of those

well-known woods and farms and downs, were simultaneously shedding an irrelevant

brightness on Joe Dottrell riding wearily back with the ration-party somewhere near Plug

Street Wood. I don’t think I could see it quite like that at the time. What I am writing

now is the result of a bird’s eye view of the past, and the cub-hunting subaltern I see there

is part of the “selfish world” to which his attention had been drawn. (378)

The “other” problem of memory - of remembering the past too vividly - is a psychological difficulty he explores in his diary and his poetry, especially during his period at Craiglockart; however it is largely skirted in the Complete Memoirs. Although he hints at it, Sassoon gives the topic short shrift. Otherwise, as a modernist writer, Sassoon is openly cognisant of the practical problems posed by memory and addresses these directly in the trilogy. 112

War’s traumatising effects, which Sassoon catalogues thoroughly in the poetry during the period of crisis, is addressed differently in the Complete Memoirs, composed after the writer has had some time to consider the depth of his psychological injuries. Sassoon’s alter ego, George

Sherston, is aware that he has been traumatised by the war, and although he will not admit the possibility of shell shock or neurasthenia, he acknowledges the vividness of his nightmares, the complete transformation in mood and character that the war has wrought on him, and the effects of fear - most notably the fear of cowardice - specifically as a motivator to rash action. Sassoon makes the following observation about the traumatising effect of the war as Sherston is coming away from the front on a Red Cross train, having been wounded in the Battle of Arras:

The Front Line was behind us, but it could lay its hand on our hearts, though its

bludgeoning reality diminished with every mile. It was as if we were pursued by the

Arras Battle which had now become a huge and horrible idea. We might be boastful or

sagely reconstructive about our experience, in accordance with our different characters.

But our minds were still out of breath and our inmost thoughts in disorderly retreat from

bellowing darkness and men dying out in shell-holes under the desolation of returning

daylight. We were the survivors; few among us would ever tell the truth to our friends

and relations in England. We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us

alone, and to those we left behind us in the battle (448-9).

The war has rendered the experience of combat inexplicable and incommunicable even between fellow combatants. The intense problem with communication described here results in isolation and alienation from others. Fussell recognises this effect and states that the primary difficulty for 113 the war memoirist is simply to begin the process of untangling “the messes of memory” into a coherent narrative (Fussell 336). These are themes which Sassoon develops throughout the

Sherston memoir and the implications on his efforts at achieving something like historical accuracy in war narratives are obvious. The primary task for a combatant trying to “make sense” of war experience is the ordering of memory, and it is the structure of the Complete

Memoirs that is instructive on this point.

Earlier in this thesis, various interpretations of the structure of the Complete Memoirs of

George Sherston were examined. Corrigan introduces the ordering principle of the religious allegory in which the evocation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is explicit in the title and epigraph of the third volume. Sherston’s Progress is an inversion of Bunyan’s, however, as the protagonist begins in a state of innocence and joy, “passes through the valley of the shadow of

Passchendaele, and at the end of his pilgrimage finds a way to hell from the very gates of the

Celestial City” (Corrigan 32). Corrigan’s design follows Sassoon well past the Armistice, and ultimately finds resolution only in his eventual religious conversion later in life. Fleishman’s exegesis follows Corrigan, identifying the motifs of the literature of pilgrimage through which writers “have given pattern and meaning to their lives” (Fleishman 338). He views the pilgrimage through Sherston’s successive losses of faith: in the war, in the battalion and in himself. These presage his descent into the German tunnels beneath the Hindenburg Line

(Fleishman 344-5) the same event described in his poem, “The Rear-Guard.” Fleishman locates the memoirs’ climax in the post Slateford convalescence when Sherston ascends the Hill topped by his parish church, having arrived from the “Underworld” of France: 114

Butley Church, with its big-buttressed square tower, was protectively permanent. One

could visualize it there for the last 599 years, measuring out the unambitious local

chronology with its bells, while English history unrolled itself along the horizon with

coronations and rebellions and stubbornly disputed charters and covenants. Beyond all

that, the ‘foreign parts’ of the world widened incredibly toward regions reported by

travellers’ tales. And so outward to the windy universe of astronomers and theologians...

my mind reverted to the demolished churches along the Western Front, and the sunlit

inferno of the first day of the Somme Battle. (493-4).

Fleishman comments that this is a typical pilgrimage motif during which “a vision of history and of oneself in history enables the divided mind to resolve itself and make its central choice in life” (Fleishman 349). Sherston’s pilgrimage, however, does not end in this epiphany as he still has much of the war to fight; rather, the memoir ends abruptly with Sherston’s head wound in

France. Fleishman argues that the lack of resolution in the memoir is a result of the author’s truthfulness to his narrative (Fleishman 350): it ends when it happens to end and without any imputation of meaning from Sassoon who remains true to the accidental summation of his service overseas.

Mallon does not ascribe this much conscious artifice to Sassoon’s works. He asserts that it is the factualness of the memoir that drives its structure.

Chronology is the basic organising principle of the memoirs and autobiographies. The

continually tentative and experimenting nature of both Sherston’s and Sassoon’s

personalities makes an episodic structure inevitable. The progression of titles in the autobiographies.. .seems to suggest a steady movement toward personal definition...But

this is misleading because Sassoon’s character really hardens veiy little. (Mallon 95)

Mallon suggests that the illusion of Sherston’s maturation is created through the titling of the memoirs, but in reality this supposed “novel of education,” or coming-of-age narrative, is chimerical: Sherston’s culminating trick is his ability to adapt his personality to his surroundings.

It is instructive that Sherston often refers to himself in the third person and sees phases of his life as quite distinct from one another. Such is the case as he describes himself after his stint in

Slateford Hospital; as Sherston is reporting to Clitherland for the third time, he speaks of the two

“previous Sherstons who had reported themselves for duty there”:

First the newly-gazetted young officer, who had yet to utter his first word of command -

anxious only to become passably efficient for service at the front. (How young I had been

then - not much more than two and a half years ago!) Next came the survivor of nine

months in France (the trenches had taught him a thing or two anyhow) less diffident, and

inclined, in a confused way, to ask the reason why everyone was doing and dying under

such soul-destroying conditions. Thirdly arrived that somewhat incredible mutineer who

had made up his mind that if a single human being could help to stop the war by making

a fuss, he was that man.

There they were those three Sherstons; and here was I - the inheritor of their dim

renown. (558)

The fourth Sherston, presumably, is the narrator at a remove of years. There is no doubting his design and intent to demonstrate the effects of war, but again the “novel of education” motif 116 described by Mallon is contradicted here: the war might have matured and finished Sherston’s character, but it has also left him muddled and confused and, ultimately, ashamed.

The War Foreshadowed: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

The “progress” structure observed by the critics suggests that all three parts of the

Complete Memoirs are integral to the whole. Nonetheless, many commentators have mentioned the curiously prominent place given to the first book concerning fox hunting. Fussell considers that the Sherston Trilogy is constructed like a play in three parts to give Sassoon’s memory structure and therefore meaning (Fussell 199). In his view, the whole of the first book forms a prelude to the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer with the primary role of demonstrating how the traumas of the war not only affect the present and future, but are powerful enough to seep into the past as well; the “insistent polarities” between his prewar and wartime experiences

“determine his whole lifetime mental set and become the matrices of his memory” (Fussell 92).

The experience of combat so effectively colours Sherston’s psychology that when recovering his memories for the narrative, his whole life up to 1914 seems to foreshadow the war. This argument is compelling, but it begs the question: if the first book is a prelude, why is it the longest of the three volumes? Also, while Fussell correctly illuminates the strong sense that

Sherston the infantry officer is foreshadowed throughout the Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. the inverse is also true: that Sherston goes to war as a fox-hunter and that this identity continues to insinuate itself throughout the other two volumes. Note the following passage as Sherston is hunting his last day at the Limerick Camp before what will be his final embarkation overseas: 117

I felt a bit mournful myself as my eyes took in the country with its distant villages and

gleams of water, its green fields and white cottages, and the hazy transparent hills on the

horizon - sometimes silver grey and sometimes that deep azure which I’d seen nowhere

but in Ireland.

We had a scrambling good hunt over a rough country, and I had all the fun I could

find, but every stone wall I jumped felt like good-bye forever to “this happy breed of

men, this little world,” in other words, the Limerick Hunt, which had restored my faith in

my capacity to be heedlessly happy. How kind they were, those friendly fox-hunters, and

how I hated leaving them. (584)

The reference to Shakespeare’s Richard II. quoted by Sherston here, also forms the epigraph to the Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. recalling the reader strongly to the beginning and suggesting a more circular than linear structure to the narrative. Sassoon echoes his friend and fellow-memoirist, Edmund Blunden, who, in Undertones of War, stresses that the author is really a civilian even at war’s end, and that he leaves France as a “harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat” (Blunden Undertones 191). In much the same way, Sherston exits France a fox- hunter who has only accidentally been an infantry officer. This view suggests that the spirit of the Victorian world (which fox-hunting represents), is at least powerful enough to insinuate itself throughout the war, even if it does not survive into post-Armistice England.

The foreshadowing of the war throughout the first volume serves to heighten the sense of tragedy implicit in the destruction of the innocent world with which George Sherston has identified himself. Fussell and Fleishman have pointed out the romantic-era portrait by 118

Frederick Watts called “Love and Death” which looms over Sherston’s childhood home “with its secret meaning which I could never quite formulate in a thought, though it often touched me with a vague emotion of pathos” (48) and is referenced ominously at several junctions. Barbed wire is the topic of the Master of the Dumborough Hunt’s end-of-season speech to the landowners when

“he asked them to do everything in their power to eliminate the most dangerous enemy of the hunting man - he meant barbed wire” (95); and later, at the Packlestone “there was the wire which was deplorably prevalent in places though well-marked with red boards in the hedges” (203). Classical literature is also a vehicle for foreshadowing of the Great War in the spring of 1914 with the arrival of Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad in a first edition: “when I’d marshalled them on the top shelf.. .1 solemnly abstracted the first volume of the Iliad and made a start. ‘The wrath of Peleus’ son and that dire spring / Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing... ’” (80). The irony that Sherston, although a man in his late twenties, is “marshalling” the tomes of the classical and renaissance worlds in his childhood school room, where he will endeavour to have them instruct him, is that the Iliad serves only to predict the “woes unnumbered” of the coming war. There are many other instances of foreshadowing, most notably where Sherston reflects upon his fear and anxiety on the eve of any important action whether it be a game of cricket or a horse race; he mirrors these feelings later before an imminent attack.

The Boer War is referenced throughout the first volume. As a young Sherston is preparing for a county cricket match, he contemplates the butcher’s calendar in the pantry: “On it was a picture of ‘The Relief of Ladysmith’... .Old Kruger and the Boers. I never could make up 119 my mind what it was all about, that Boer War, and it seemed such a long way off..(49). It turns out to be much closer than he allows because, later that day, at the cricket tea, Sherston is sat next to Jack Barchard, a Boer War veteran, whose health is toasted by the Master.

The returned warrior received their congratulations with the utmost embarrassment.

Taking a shy sip at my ginger-beer, I think how extraordinary to be sitting next to a man

who has really been “out in South Africa.” Barchard is a fair-headed young gentleman

farmer. When the parson suggests that “it must have been pretty tough work out there,”

he replies that he is thundering glad to be back among his fruit trees again, and this,

apparently, is about all he has to say about the Boer War. (59)

Once the meal is concluded, a collection plate comes around the table for each to pay his portion.

Sherston suddenly realises he has come to the match without any money. As embarrassment looms, Barchard unexpectedly pays for Sherston’s meal as well as his own, leaving a grateful young narrator. “I wished I could have followed him up a hill in a ‘forlorn hope’” (60). This anecdote not only presages Sherston’s own service and his future embarrassment upon receiving the congratulations of non-combatants; it also suggests that there is a debt to be repaid by the youth to the veteran.

In representing the home side in a match against a formidable foe, cricket is strongly suggestive of later military action. At the Flower Show cricket match, Sherston nervously contemplates the opposition. The theme of courage and fear of failure is addressed throughout all three memoirs and in similar terms to this on the eve o f a sporting activity. “How enormous they looked as they sauntered across the ground - several of them carrying cricket bags. I should be lucky if I made any runs at all against men such as they were!” As they approach the group,

Dixon points out two of their best players: ‘“They’ve got Crump and Bishop, anyhow,’ he remarked.. ..Crump and Bishop! The names had a profound significance for me” (54). Besides suggesting the sound of impacting artillery, playing Crump’s side provided Sherston’s first experience of team-travel and introduced the world beyond the environs of Sherston’s youth in the company of men. On his trip to Rotherdam, to reprise the previous match at Butley, the journey portends later voyages to France.

Nearly all the way we were looking, on our left-hand side, across the hop-kiln-dotted

Weald. And along the Weald went the railway line from London to the Coast, and this

gave me a soberly romantic sense of distances and the outside world of unfamiliar and

momentous happenings. I knew very little about London, and I had never been across the

Channel, but as I watched a train hurrying between the level orchards with its

consequential streamer of smoke, I meditated on the coast-line of France and all the

unvisualized singularity of that foreign land. (69-70)

The travel by train, with men in uniforms representing “home” in a contest against strangers, all resonate with the future Sherston’s war experience. France’s ‘unvisualized singularity’ will become its association with the underworld and death, the antithesis of Sherston’s bucolic childhood in England. At question is whether the destruction of Sherston’s innocence is emblematic of the whole of prewar England. 121

Nostalgia and Existentialism: A Modernist Elegy in Prose

The Complete Memoirs appear to mirror the same change in sensibility evident in

Sassoon’s poetry, from callow innocence before 1915 to sardonic disillusion after; however, in the novels, Sherston makes this transition reluctantly and much of the memoirs is told in an elegiac voice, lamenting the passing of Victorian England. Sherston’s inclination in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is very much towards the middle o f the nineteenth century, even as a child:

“Often when I came home for five o’clock tea I felt a vague desire to be somewhere else - in

1850, for instance, when everything must have been so comfortable and old fashioned, like the

Cathedral Close in Trollope’s novels” (80). The childhood world described by Sherston is one steeped in the Romantic traditions of the previous century:

Sir Walter Scott had no existence outside my aunt’s voice as she read him aloud in the

evening, Longfellow was associated with Mr. Star in the school room, Beethoven lived

somewhere behind the faded silk on the back of the upright piano, and I never imagined

any of them as in any other edition than those in which I knew them by sight. The large

photograph of Watt’s picture, “Love and Death,” which hung in the drawing room, gave

me the same feeling as the “Moonlight” sonata (my aunt could only play the first two

movements).

In this brightly visualized world of simplicities and mispronounced names

everything was accepted without question. I find it difficult to believe that young people

see the world in that way nowadays, though it is probable that a good many o f them do.

(22-23) 122

This connection to Victorian England was the source of Sherston’s love of hunting. He admits, “I wanted to be strongly connected with the hunting organism.. .And it was (though a limited one) a clearly defined world, which is an idea most of us cling to, unless we happen to be transcendental thinkers” (187). Sherston is cognisant that it is precisely this aspect of the

Victorian era, of simple, “clearly defined” assurances, that has been destroyed by the war. It is the disappearance of the nineteenth century that he laments in the modernist elegiac mode without resolution and without replacing the object mourned with another.

As early as 1915, Sherston is well aware of the threat modernity poses to the rational, optimistic attitudes of the nineteenth century and his emotional inclination is towards nostalgia and regret for its passing. At the end of Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. while still appointed as

Battalion Transportation Officer, Sherston receives a letter from his old groom, Dixon, who suggests he would like to be transferred to work for Sherston as his Transportation Sergeant; the idea means more to Sherston than the reunion of old comrades.

Everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering away and falling to

pieces: Denis seldom wrote to me, and he was trying to get a job on the staff; but with

Dixon to talk to I should still feel that the past was holding its own against the War; and I

wanted the past to survive and to begin again; the idea was like daylight on the other side

of this bad weather in which life and death had come so close to one another. (265)

Sherston is sobered by Dottrell, however, who says that the future bodes ill for the battalion and suggests, perhaps symbolically, that Dixon will not be up for the challenges at hand. Not long after, Sherston receives news that Dixon has died. Whether this is conscious metaphor or not, 123 what remains of Sherston’s capacity for optimism will soon be sorely tested with the death of

Dick Tiltwood and his own posting to the forward trenches.

Sherston undergoes a change in sensibility in the second volume of the Complete

Memoirs wrought initially by his reaction to the death of Tiltwood. Primarily, it is characterised by losing faith in the purpose of the war, although he is still striving to retain a belief in individual action.

Outside in the gloom the guns are shaking the hills and making lurid flashes along the

valleys. Inevitably, the War blunders on; but among the snoring sleeps I have had my

little moment o f magnanimity. What I feel is no more than the candle which makes

tottering shadows in the tent. Yet it is something, perhaps, that one man can be awake

there, though he can find no meaning in the immense destruction which he blindly

accepts as part of some hidden purpose. (359)

This “hidden purpose” is not discerned by Sherston who concludes the next day, “I could stare at the War as I stare at the sultry sky longing for life and freedom and vaguely altruistic about my fellow victims. But a second-lieutenant could attempt nothing” (360). He gives up his musings and comforts himself again “in jawing to young Femby about fox-hunting” (361). It is not long after his second convalescence, ironically stricken with German Measles while transiting through

Rouen, that he desires to reclaim his belief in the war, or at the least to achieve “mental acquiescence.. .to be like young Patterson, who had come out to fight for his country undoubting, who could still kneel by his bed and say his simple prayers, steadfastly believing that he was in the Field Artillery to make the world a better place” (401). In a modernist response, Sherston 124 consoles himself in this instance not with Christian prayer but with the poetry of Omar Kayyam, the mediaeval Persian poet, and a vague sentiment that the world requires universal forgiveness for the deeds of war.

Where modernist sensibility will tend to eschew traditional forms of comfort and resolve, especially those offered by Christian motifs, Sassoon may have anticipated this tendency even before the war as he does not appear to have been a writer of Christian inclination at this time.

There is no evidence in the Complete Memoirs that Sherston is drawn towards explicitly

Christian religious feeling despite Corrigan and Silk’s claim that this is Sassoon’s essential quality. Silk writes, “The truth of the matter was simple. An essentially religious man, he could find nothing to believe in and all the while the world was careering towards disaster” (Silk 22).

This view is not supported in the text except that Sherston does demonstrate a low tolerance for religious hypocrisy and complains about the exploitation of religious feeling by the powerful; however, he does not seem moved by any personal religious compunction. He is critical that,

“the principles of Christianity were either obliterated or falsified for the convenience of all who were engaged in [the war],. .The Brigade chaplain did not exhort us to love our enemies. He was content to lead off with the hymn ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!”’ (274). Sassoon does mention some religious feasts - usually ironically - and does not exploit the fact that Sherston is posted to the Holy Land for any literary purpose. One of the only explicit references to

Sherston’s posting into a Biblical setting was when he meets an artillery major just returned from

Bethlehem who offers the advice: “Don’t go to the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said. “It’s the duddest show I’ve ever seen!” (593), a funny comment in the mouth of a gunner. Among the 125

more “modem sounding” prose passages in the Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is his

description o f the 25th Battalion’s Base Camp in the desert:

Another day of arid sunshine and utter blankness. The sand and the tents and the faces -

all seem meaningless. Just a crowd of people killing time. Time wasted in waste places.

People go up the line almost gladly, feeling that there’s some purpose in life after all...

One hears a certain amount of “war-shop” being talked, but it hasn’t the haggard intensity

of Western Front war-shop. The whole place has the empty clearness of a moving

picture. Movements of men and munitions against a background of soulless drought.

The scene is drawn with unlovely distinctness. Every living soul is here against his will.

And when the War ends the whole thing will vanish and the sand will blot out all traces

of the men who came here (592).

Transcribed almost verbatim from Sassoon’s diary entry for March 4, 1918 (Diaries. 219-10), the preceding passage may indicate an aridity of faith commensurate with his surroundings. If there

is an inclination towards religious feeling in George Sherston, it is sounded only in its absence.

Modern Literary Technique: Binary Opposition, Juxtaposition and Graphic Realism

Sassoon contrasts the old and new order through his familiar literary technique of binary opposition, claimed by Fussell to be the primary mode of Sassoon’s prose writing. He does this even in the Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. During the Flower Show Match, the Butley brass band, significantly playing “The Soldiers of the Queen,” is suddenly beset by the “strident and blaring fanfaronade” from the mechanised steam organ of the carousel. “For a minute or two the contest of cacophonies continued. But in spite of a tempestuous effort the band was completely outplayed by its automatic and inexhaustible adversary” (61). The foreshadowing implicit in the uniformed Butely brass band playing patriotic, martial music ineffectually against a mindless, unstoppable machine is prescient of the war. In another example, Sassoon contrasts the field guns with his “unmodemisable” horses: Stephen Colwood, who has joined the Royal Artillery, is posted to a barracks in vicinity of the Ringwell Hunt. Sherston reports that Stephen “liked soldiering well enough, but the horses were his real interest. The guns, he said, were a nuisance, and he, for one, had no wish to chuck shells at anyone” (194). Newly arrived in France just after

Christmas 1915, Sherston notes the portentous arrival of gas masks and takes the opportunity for another old and new world contrast:

Early in the New Year the first gas-masks were issued. Every morning we practised

putting them on, transforming ourselves into grotesque goggle-faced creatures as we

tucked the grey flannel under our tunics in flustered haste. Those masks were an omen.

An old wood-cutter in high leather leggings watched us curiously, for we were doing our

gas-drill on the fringe of the forest, with its dark cypresses among the leafless oaks and

beeches, and a faint golden light over all. (257)

In this modernist excerpt, the woodcutter, emblematic of Old Europe and serene “in the golden light” is watching the goggle-eyed monsters emerge from his forest; in its fantastical pairing of the most fearsome aspects of the First World War emerging from the forest under the watchful eye of the homely character of the woodcutter, this passage is reminiscent of a children’s story.

One of Sassoon’s best metaphors of the new mechanised warfare is his Dantean description of

Clitherland’s industrial landscape and this manufactory o f soldiers. 127

From the first, Clitherland Camp is suggestive of hell. Its situation is in Britain’s industrial heartland, adjoining a Roman Catholic cemetery where “frequent funeral processions cheered up the troops,” and a T.N.T. factory, “a hissing and throbbing inferno,” (235) which spewed out noxious gas which choked the Fusiliers. “The surrounding country, with its stunted dwelling-houses, dingy trees, disconsolate canal, and flat root-fields, was correspondingly unlikeable” (235). When Sherston returns there much later, after his first sick leave from the front, he finds it more rooted to its place.

Clitherland Camp had acquired a look of coercive stability; but this is only natural, since

for more than eighteen months it had been manufacturing Flintshire Fusiliers, many of

whom it was now sending back to the Front for the second and third time. The Camp

was as much an essential co-operator in the national effort as Brotherhood and Co.’s

explosive factory, which flared and seethed and reeked with poisonous vapours a few

hundred yards away. (381)

Extending his metaphor, Sherston writes that he notes the difference in the “raw material to be trained;” he felt the quality of new soldiers was deteriorating as the conscripts “had joined the army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable. The

War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman. What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims” (382). Given the central role which he played in the training of these conscripted men and the sympathy he bore them, it is no wonder that Sherston says that the victimisation of men to the mechanisation of the war was beginning to awaken him to protest. Ironically, he finds comfort in his own submission to the impersonal nature of active service. Returning to France, Sherston describes his relief at being on the Channel crossing: “It 128 was no use worrying about the War now; I was in the Machine again, and all responsibility for my future was in the haphazard control of whatever powers manipulated the British

Expeditionary Force.” (396). As an officer, it is the same sense of mechanisation that removes his own moral force; he is comforted by this relief of responsibility for the war and his own culpability for its prosecution.

Sassoon’s prose relies to some extent on another modernist literary technique: juxtaposing incongruous images together. In one long passage, he describes several disconnected images: a visit to the “solemn and beautiful” cathedral at Amiens though it was

“crowded with sight-seeing British soldiers; the kilted ‘Jocks’ walked up and down the nave as if they had conquered France;” immediately after he describes sitting in the mess listening to popular music on Ormand’s gramophone but wishing he had some Handel instead; meanwhile,

Sherston is reading of his aunt’s “longing for the spring to come again” which makes him mindful that that would be when “the ‘Big Push’ would begin” (258-9). The disorderly jumble of ideas perhaps mirrors Fussell’s “messes of memory.” Note the meaninglessly connected details which congregate in this passage immediately following an action:

Last night I was out patrolling with Private O’Brien, who used to be a dock labourer in

Cardiff. We threw a few Mill’s Bombs at a German working-party who were out putting

up wire and had no wish to do us any harm. Probably I am feeling pleased with myself

about this. Now and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air

where the larks are singing. The sound of the shell is like water trickling into a can. The

curve of it trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash. A little weasel runs 129

past my outstretched feet, glancing at me with tiny bright eyes, apparently unafraid. One

of our shrapnel shells, whizzing over to the enemy lines, bursts with a hollow crash.

Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its

dingy wrestling vapours take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms.

Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the

attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness. Perhaps the shell

has killed someone. Whether it has or whether it hasn’t, I continue to scrape my puttees,

and the weasel goes about his business. The sun strikes the glinting wings of an

aeroplane, forging away westward. Somewhere on the slope behind me a partridge

makes its unmilitary noise - down there where Dick was buried a few weeks ago. Dick’s

father was a very good man with a gun, so Dick used to say... (277)

The reader is cast very much adrift within the jumble. This depiction may achieve the effect of realism precisely because it captures the confusion of thought after the experience of combat.

In a different attempt to attain a modernist presentation of realism in his account, Sassoon capably resorts to photographic description of the horrific details of warfare. While passing through Mametz, he sees his first dead Germans after eight months in France and is shocked by their appearance.

I saw, in the glimmer of daybreak, a dumpy, baggy-trousered man lying half sideways

with one elbow up as if defending his lolling head; the face was grey and waxen, with a

stiff little moustache; he looked like a ghastly doll, grotesque and undignified. Beside him was a scorched and mutilated figure whose contorted attitude revealed bristly cheeks,

a grinning blood-smeared mouth and clenched teeth. (337)

The same unadorned ugliness was employed to describe the burial of Dick Tiltwood. Sherston says “a flag covered all that we were there for” and reports nothing of the Chaplain’s service, only noting that his “words were obliterated by a prolonged burst of machine-gun fire.” Finally, at the appropriate moment, “A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was

Dick” (273-4). There is no imputation of meaning, no moralising. In these ways, the Complete

Memoirs, despite lapses into occasional archaic language and wistful remarks about the past, retains the qualities of the modernistic war novel. As discussed in Chapter Two, Sassoon’s poetry is increasingly recognisable as modernist as the war drags on; as one progresses through

Sherston’s experiences in prose, changes in tone and diction are noted as the narrator becomes more angry and disillusioned. Even the mode of narrative switches in the final volume as

Sassoon gives us the penultimate chapter of that book in diary form and then, claiming to have lost his last diary notebook, reverts to the form of memoir.

A Complicated Social Criticism

While the Complete Memoirs of George Sherston provides, primarily, an account of

Sassoon’s war experience, the work also serves admirably as a piece of contemporary social criticism. Sassoon tackles many modernist iconoclastic issues in this narrative including questioning the British class system and his own complicated relationship with it; the British army and the incompetencies of its senior leadership, the staff officers in particular; the war effort and the complacency or complicities of the civilians; and the antiwar movement and his conflicted role therein. Sherston, like Sassoon, is a member of the upper middle class: educated privately, moderately well-moneyed (at least enough to enjoy a life o f rural leisure on a modest annuity), but his family is no longer of the urban merchant class nor has it been elevated to the status of rural gentry. In the first volume, Sherston unreflectively seeks the society of the latter; he must hunt by subscription and he is always short of funds. Throughout the second volume, the army exposes Sherston to the inequities of division between the officers and the “other ranks;” to the socialism of Joe Dottrell, Old Man Barton and David Cromlech (Robert Graves); and to the privilege claimed by officers of the staff at the expense of officers of the line. It is during his time at the front, through the intensely paternalistic contact with his men in the battalion and fuelled also by his sense of righteous indignation at the staff, that Sherston begins to question the privilege of rank and class. His own status as a member of the privileged class, either by virtue of his fox-hunting or his commission, does not seem to have caused Sherston much anxiety, however.

One of the striking features of the first two volumes of the memoir is how the continuation of social norms from Sherston’s sporting life serves to undermine Sassoon’s socialist commentary. Several critics have noted that there are parallels between his shopping for a hunting costume, still very much a uniform in prewar England (103-5), and later a military uniform with the similar demands of accuracy in colour, decoration and cut. While critics recognise that this was a method of foreshadowing the fox-hunter’s enlistment, it also serves to stress the continuity between the moneyed classes and the officer corps. When Sherston first visits Stephen, there is this prescient exchange: “After breakfast he told me I had no more idea of 132 tying a stock than an ironmonger; when he had re-tied it for me he surveyed the result with satisfaction and announced that I now ‘Looked ready to compete against all the cutting and thrusting soldier-officers in creation’” (131). At the start of the war, all of Sherston’s hunting companions have taken commissions: Milden in the cavalry, Colwood in the Royal Artillery, and

Croplady in the Yeomanry. Of course, since Stephen Colwood had been in service in peacetime and has “hunted the Ringwell from his Barracks,” upon declaration of hostilities, the others would be “joining his club” in effect. Note how the patter remains decidedly civilian: “Stephen, when I wrote and told him about [taking a commission], replied that since I was so keen on getting killed I might as well do it properly dressed, and gave me the name of his military tailor” (232). Wisely, Sherston follows Stephen’s advice and reaps the reward when reporting for duty to the Flintshire Fusiliers with a recently enrolled merchant’s son named Mansfield:

The Adjutant was sitting at a table strewn with documents. We saluted clumsily, but he

did not look up for a minute of two. When he deigned to do so, his eyes alighted on

Mansfield. During a prolonged scrutiny he adjusted an eyeglass. Finally he leant back in

his chair and exclaimed, with unreproducible hauteur, ‘Christ! Who’s your tailor] ’ This

(with a reminder that his hair wanted cutting) was the regimental recognition which

Mansfield received from his grateful country for having given up a good job in the

woollen industry. My own reception was in accordance with the cut of my clothes and my

credentials from Captain Huxtable. (234)

Sassoon provides this anecdote as a humorous episode and cannot move himself to be wholly critical of the Adjutant who is justified as the product and keeper of the regimental traditions, which remain unquestioningly proper. 133

‘[T]emporary gentlemen’ (disgusting phrase) whose manners and accents were liable to

criticism by the Adjutant, usually turned out to be first-rate officers when they got to the

trenches. Injustice to the Adjutant it must be remembered that he was there to try and

make them conform to the Regular ‘officer and gentleman’ pattern which he exemplified.

(237)

When describing the social tensions that were created by the inclusion of those from the middle and lower-middle classes to the officer corps, Sassoon is of democratic perspective but also apologetic for the bias of the Adjutant.

The advantages of class and the presumption of it that hunting allows, are clear to

Sherston soon after, when he meets his Commanding Officer. Guessing by his boots

(“insinuating by every supple contour that they came from Craxwell”) that they are members o f the same hunting circles, they discover mutual acquaintance in the CO’s uncle, Sherston’s hunting companion, Col. Hesmon:

so it wasn’t to be wondered at that my new Commanding Officer could tell me the name

of my horse, or that I was already acquainted with his name, which was Winchell. For

the old Colonel had frequently referred to the exploits of his dashing young relative....

Anyhow it was to my advantage that I was already known to Colonel Winchell as

a hunting man. For I always found that it was a distinct asset, when in close contact with

officers of the Regular Army, to be able to converse convincingly about hunting. It gave

one an almost unfair advantage in some ways. (246) 134

Sherston does not avoid the perks afforded him as a fox-hunter. When trying to get a day’s hunting while at Clitherland Camp, he comments: “For this I was readily given leave off

Saturday morning duties, since an officer who wanted to go out hunting was rightly regarded as an upholder of pre-war regimental traditions” (383). Sherston’s attitude toward Julian Durley, a clerk before the war and now a fellow officer, is indicative. “He was an ideal platoon officer, and an example which I tried to imitate from that night onward. I need hardly say that he had never hunted. He could swim like a fish, but there was no social status attached to that” (248).

Hunting, and the regimental privilege afforded to officers, does not figure strongly in Sherston’s criticism of class.

Sherston receives his early education in socialism from Joe Dottrell, the doughty Quarter-

Master who was a career soldier, commissioned from the ranks, and something like a hero to

Sherston; Dottrell was to Sherston the soldier what Dixon had been to Sherston the hunter.

[Dottrell] got on to his favourite subject - “The Classes and the Masses.” For Joe had

been brought up in the darkest part of Manchester, and he prided himself on being an old-

fashioned socialist. But his Socialism was complicated by his fair-minded cognizance of

the good qualities of the best type of the officer class, with whom he had been in close

contact ever since he enlisted. (266)

Dottrell argues that the war was fought “by the highest and the lowest in the land” while the middle classes shirked their duty and even profited by the war. Old Man Barton, the affable company commander, toasts Dottrell’s diatribe while Sherston and Tiltwood sit by silently. 135

Sherston offers the following editorial comment, contrasting the assumed incompetence of the officers of the staff with two decent regimental officers:

Their generalizations, perhaps, were not altogether fair. There was quite a lot of blue

blood at G.H.Q. and Army Headquarters. And Mansfield and Durley, to name only two

of our own officers, were undoubtedly members o f “the middle class,” whatever that may

be. (266-7)

Although Sherston certainly also belongs to the middle classes, one may surmise by the foregoing that he does not identify himself as such. Since Sherston also excuses from social critique “the best type of the officer class” along with fox hunters, his enthusiasm for socialist principles seems rather haphazard.

David Cromlech (Robert Graves) introduces Sherston to a more committed form of socialism than Dottrell’s broad-mindedness. When Cromlech leaves a socialist weekly paper behind him, perhaps carelessly and perhaps to goad his roommate, Sherston is introduced to

European propaganda in translation. “A Copenhagen paper said, ‘The Sons of Europe are being crucified on the barbed wire because the misguided masses are shouting for it.. .and the

Statesmen wash their hands. They dare not deliver them from their martyr’s death... ’” Sherston is left stunned. “Was this really the truth, I wondered; wild talk like that was new to me” (393).

That Cromlech saw Sherston as a child of privilege who is blind to his own social status is bome out in a rather comical exchange:

I remember one morning when he was shaving with one hand and reading Robinson

Crusoe in the other. Crusoe was a real man, he remarked; fox-hunting was the sport of snobs and half-wits. Since it was too early in the day for having one’s leg pulled, I

answered huffily that I supposed Crusoe was all right, but a lot of people who hunted

were jolly good sorts, and even great men in their own way. I tried to think of someone

to support my argument and after a moment exclaimed: “Anthony Trollope, for instance!

He used to hunt a lot, and you can’t say he was a half-wit.” “No, but he was probably a

snob!” I nearly lost my temper while refuting the slur on Trollope’s character and David

made things worse by saying that I had no idea how funny I was when I reverted to my

peace-time self. (385)

When Sherston’s own snobbery is brought into question by Cromlech, the narrator is left without adequate defence.

Sherston’s relationships with those of the working class are always cordial and sometimes quite affectionate, but never wholly egalitarian. Dixon is regarded as a hero and even into adulthood, Sherston desires Dixon’s approval, at least as far as horsemanship goes. However,

Dixon never becomes more intimate than a good and deferential servant, valued for his discretion and decorum as much as any other qualities. Likewise, the servant Flook is given very much the same treatment by Sherston. His attitude towards the lower classes is paternalistic and protective, but not democratic.

Unlike the Staff, they have no smart uniforms, no bottles of hair oil, and no confidential

information with which to make their chatter important and intriguing. John Bull and

ginger beer are their chief facilities for passing the time pleasantly. They do not complain

that the champagne on board is inferior and the food only moderate. In fact they make 137

me feel that Dickens was right when he wrote so warm-heartedly about “the poor.” They

are only a part of the dun-coloured mass of victims which passes through the shambles of

war into the gloom of death where even generals “automatically revert to the rank of

private.” But in the patience and simplicity of their outward showing they seem like one

soul. They are the tradition of human suffering and endurance, stripped of all the silly

self-glorifications and embellishments by which human society seeks to justify its

conventions. (606)

When describing the Other Ranks and identifying them with “the poor,” Sherston contrasts them not with himself and the officer class, but only to particular officers: those upon the Staff. The ironic quality o f this passage lies in how he seems to excuse himself again from his own critique.

He is able to identify instances of true inequity, however, as in the case of shell shock. Officers who “crumpled up” went home with a confidential report to a safe job; “But if a man became a dud in the ranks, he just remained where he was until he was killed or wounded. Delicate discrimination about soldiers wasn’t possible. A ‘number nine pill’ was all they could hope for if they went sick” (310). In this way, Sherston is a man who takes his own privileged position for granted; he points out obvious injustice, but he is not a deeply thinking social critic, nor a particularly self-reflective one.

Irony and Satire: the Brass Hats

On the subject of the British Army and its class structure and traditions, Sherston has much to criticise. However, in the decade following the war, he has become much more conciliatory. In his memoirs, Sherston reminisces not unkindly about some men he knew in his 138 youth who had served in the empire’s Victorian army. At the Ringwell Hunt’s point-to-point races, Sherston introduces Lieut.-Col C.M.F. Hesmon. In a passage that may be read as allegorical, the old colonel is literally weighing down young Stephen Colwood with lead weights before the contest in which the future subaltern will ride Hesmon’s horse “Jerry” in a dangerous point-to-point race - Sassoon’s preamble to the race fills seven ominous pages - promising the horse to the boy if he wins. While there is no malice in the old man, like the portraits of the other Victorian officers, Huxtable and Carmine, who will send the young men off to war shortly,

Sassoon renders them as affable and ineffectual old fools. Colwood and Sherston meet just before the race, and the narrator is privy to the last words of encouragement from the old man to the young rider.

Stephen was then turned adrift with all his troubles in front of him. No one could help

him any more.

Colonel Hesmon looked almost forlorn when the horse and his long-legged rider

had vanished through the crowd. He had the appearance of a man who had been left

behind. As I see it now, in the light of my knowledge of after-events, there was a

premonition in his momentarily forsaken air. Elderly people used to look like that during

the War, when they had said good-bye to someone and the train had left them on the

station platform. (100)

After the race, Colonel Hesmon shows the boys his stables where Sherston notes 27 pairs of meticulously preserved hunting boots. They pass by “as though Lord Roberts were inspecting the local Territorials.” He later considers there was “something dumbly pathetic about those chronological boots with their mahogany, nut-brown and salmon-coloured tops ... they symbolised much that was automatic and sterile in the Colonel’s career” (130). The essential qualities of the man were derived from his peacetime service in his regiment and fox-hunting.

The problem with Hesmon, concludes Sherston, is “the Boer War had arrived seven years too late for him, and ... he had never seen any active service” (130). Sherston suggests that experience of warfare would have finished or rounded or sensitised the Colonel in some way.

This comment is intriguing considering the balance of the Complete Memoirs in which the experience of combat is presented as essentially dehumanising and is another example of

Sassoon’s lack of consistency. In any case, those retired soldiers of Victoria’s Army are always rendered sympathetically but with a touch of caricature.

The senior serving officers of the peacetime army, especially those of the reserve or

Territorial Army, are a different matter. Sherston is not cruel in his portraiture, but he is unflattering. The Clitherland Depot CO is described as an old man who “toddled out after mess” to make a “stuttering little farewell speech” to those heading to France (237). O f the evening departure ritual, Sherston comments, “It wasn’t impressive, but what else could the Colonel and the clergyman have said or done?” (238). The peacetime reservists who performed well at the front are conspicuous in this regard. For the most part, he says that Clitherland Camp had a number of “easy-going Militia majors” who “weren’t mobile men, although they had been mobilized for the Great War. They were the products o f peace, and war had wrenched them away from their favorite nooks and niches.” (237)

There were several more majors; three o f them had been to the Front, but had remained

there only a few weeks; the difference between a club window and a dug-out had been 140

too much for them. Anyhow, here they were, and there was the War, and to this day I

don’t see how things could have been differently arranged. They appeared to be

unimaginative men. (237)

Sherston runs into more of this type of peacetime officer at the Hotel de la Poste in Rouen in

France. He refers to them as “London Clubmen dressed as Colonels, Majors, and Captains with a conscientious objection to physical discomfort” but offers, generously, “they were as much the victims of circumstances as the unfortunate troops in the trenches” (406). His vitriol is fully reserved for those on the Staff, and so he can afford to be less severe with those in supporting roles in England and at the rearward bases of Europe, though he remains disrespectful and sarcastic with them all.

The harsh critique observed in his poetry for officers of the general staff, who were distinguished from the officers of the line in dress and in privilege, has not abated with the passage of time. Despite his belief that “after all, somebody had to be at the Base; modem warfare offered a niche for everyone” (406), modem warfare also offered an inversion of status: until this war, it had favoured the red-tabbed staff officer. Sherston typifies the newfound chauvinism of the officers of the line and claims to speak for all the infantry in the disdain he feels for those who did not share the dangers with the troops. He says, “the distribution of

[decorations] became more and more fortuitous and debased as the War went on; and no one knew it better than the infantry, who rightly insisted that medal-ribbons earned on the Base ought to be a different colour” (330). After Sherston’s battalion had been ordered into Mametz Wood to help dig defences only to discover that it had not yet been cleared of enemy, Sherston writes, From a military point of view the operations had enabled the Staff to discover that

Mametz Wood was still full o f Germans, so that it was impossible to dig a trench on the

bluff within fifty yards of it, as had been suggested. It was obvious now that a few strong

patrols could have clarified the situation more economically than 1000 men with picks

and shovels. The necessary information had been obtained, however, and the staff could

hardly be expected to go up and investigate such enigmas for themselves. But this sort of

warfare was a new experience for all of us, and the difficulties of extempore organization

must have been considerable. (338)

When placed in command of a party of bombers in support of an attack on the German portion of the Hindenburg Line in 1917, Sherston spends several hours among the Staff. O f this he observes:

Wilmot and myself were fully justified in leaving the situation in the care of the military

caste who were making the most of the Great Opportunity for obtaining medal-ribbons

and reputations for leadership; and if I am being caustic or captious about them I can only

plead the need for a few minutes’ post-war retaliation. Let the Staff write their own

books about the Great War, say I. The Infantry were biased against them, and their

authentic story will be read with interest. (439)

Later, recovering from wounds, Sherston reads an account of an attack written by the Second

Battalion doctor where his unit had lost four officers and 40 other ranks: ‘“The occasion was but one of many when a Company or Battalion was sacrificed on a limited objective to a plan of attack ordered by Division or some higher Command with no more knowledge o f the ground than might be got from a map of moderate scale’” (457-8). There are numerous places where 142 either Sherston or one of his comrades will make a jibe at the Staff, but these are moderated by the occasional acceptance that someone had to do that job.

When relating any portion of his narrative that touches upon the General Officers

Commanding, Sherston’s tone remains as thoroughly caustic and sarcastic in prose as it does in his poetry. As Sherston and Allgood complete the Army School course at Flixecourt, the generals come in to see the final exercises and parade “not unlike an army of uniformed Uncles on Prize-giving day.” When Allgood mentions that the French generals appeared to be smarter than their British counterparts, “I told him that they must be cleverer than they looked, and anyhow, they’d all got plenty of medal-ribbons” (293). Later in the war, Sherston happens to see the “wine-faced” Army Commander who reviewed them at this event and wonders of his fellow candidates: “How many of them had been killed since then, and how deeply was he responsible for their deaths? Did he know what he was doing or was he merely a successful old cavalryman whose peacetime popularity had pushed him onto his present perch?” (394). Among Sherston’s major complaints about the senior leadership are their rudeness and the irrelevance of their complaints and concerns. On another occasion, the Brigadier commanding, while touring the trenches, had found fault with the Lewis Gun Officer, Fewnings, not because of his machine guns, but because his shirt was of the wrong colour. Sherston remarks, “It was odd how seldom these graduated autocrats found time to realize that a few kind words could make a platoon commander consider them jolly fine generals” (319). His Divisional Commander, whom he calls

Whincop, is singled out for his lack of compassion and common sense. 143

Whincop’s reputation as an innovator was mainly kept alive by his veto on the Rum

Ration. G.O.C.s, like platoon commanders, were obliged to devise “stunts” to show their

keenness, and opportunities for originality were infrequent. But since 1918 Generals

have received their full share of ridicule and abuse, and it would not surprise me if

someone were to form a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Great War Generals. If

such a society were formed, I for one, would contribute my modest half-guinea per

annum; for it must be remembered that many an unsuccessful General had previously

been the competent Colonel of an Infantry Battalion, thereby earning the gratitude and

admiration of his men. (408)

Despite the sarcasm of the passage, it is curious that Sherston again offers such an olive branch to the senior leaders: it is perhaps a nod to his first CO, the competent and affable Winchell who

“got his brigade” earlier in the narrative, that he reminds the readership that good service to the battalion, although invisible to the public, is at least of equal significance to the record o f a bad general.

Irony and Satire: Civilians and War Propagation

Sherston’s attitude towards civilians undergoes a profound change from the publication of his war poetry and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Despite the number of poems published that take direct aim at members of the public in various identifiable groups, the prose is milder and some segments of the public are not attacked at all. Sherston describes his attitude towards civilians as worsening incrementally over the course of the war. During his first leave, four months into his tour and before getting a real taste o f combat, he begins to feel uneasy at home.

Sherston says, “England wasn’t what it used to be;” and after offering a fond farewell to Captain 144

Huxtable, “kind Aunt Evelyn talked bitterly about the Germans and called them ‘hell-hounds’. I found myself defending them” (269). Sherston experiences his first sense that, “Perhaps, after all, it was better to be back with the battalion. The only way to forget about the War was to be on the other side of the Channel” (270). On his next leave, after he has participated in a raid, he says he felt “disinclined to talk about the trenches” (313) and when pressed by Captain Huxtable,

“I gave him to understand that it was a jolly fine life out at the Front, and, for the moment, 1 probably believed what I was saying” (314). In this way, Sherston has become complicit in maintaining the fiction that life in the trenches was tolerable. In his war poetry, Sassoon writes many poems criticising those who sanitise the suffering at the front; however in his prose account, Sherston on occasion finds himself perpetuating the myth of the happy warrior. Note this description of a visit to his neighbours while on sick leave:

Since I was welcomed rather as a returned hero, I was inclined to be hearty. I slapped

Protheroe on the back, told him he’d got the best dug-out in Butely, and allowed myself

to be encouraged to discuss the War. I admitted that it was pretty bad out there, with an

inward feeling that such horrors as I had been obliged to witness were now something to

be proud of. I even went so far as to assert that I wouldn’t have missed this War for

anything. It brought things home to one somehow, I remarked, frowning portentously as

I lit my pipe, and forgetting for the moment what a mercy it had been when it brought me

home myself. Oh yes, I knew all about the Battle of the Somme and could reassure them

that we should be in Bapaume by October. Replying to their tributary questions I felt that

they envied me my experience. 145

.. .it was a big thing to have been in the thick of a European war, and my peace-time

existence had been idle and purposeless. It was bad luck on Protheroe and the Doctor;

they must hate being left out of it.. ..I suppose one must give this damned War its due, I

thought. (375-6)

While convalescing, Sherston is visited at Oxford by Aunt Evelyn’s friend, Mr. Farrell, and

Sassoon paints quite a sympathetic portrait of the large-framed, old man: “I thought that his clothes had got too big for him although he had always worn them rather baggy. Could it be possible that scrupulous people at home were getting thin while the soldiers got fat on their good rations at the Front?” (370). At this juncture, Sherston can still make himself feel privileged to fight and sympathetic with the home front. This sentiment, however, is not to last.

By 1917, Sherston is feeling quite estranged from the civilian population. On the eve of the Battle of Arras, he is contrasting his current feeling of euphoria to the homesickness he experienced a year before:

It was some compensation for last year’s day dreams about England (which I could no

longer indulge in, owing to an indefinite hostility to ‘people at home who couldn’t

understand’). I was beginning to feel rather arrogant toward ‘people at home’. But my

mind was in a muddle; the War was too big an event for one man to stand alone in. All I

knew was that I’d lost my faith in it and there was nothing left to believe in except ‘The

Battalion Spirit’. (420-1)

During his second convalescence, he becomes aware of his altered state of mind, though he adds that he was feeling quite confused generally: “I began to feel that it was my privilege to be bitter 146 about my war experiences; and my attitude towards civilians implied that they couldn’t understand and that it was no Earthly use trying to explain things to them” (450).

Philosophically, he forms the notion that the civilian population has become complacent or complicit with the war profiteers:

From the visible world I sought evidence which could aggravate my quarrel with

acquiescent patriotism. Evidences of civilian callousness and complacency were

plentiful for the thriftless license of war-time behavior was an unavoidable spectacle,

especially at the Savoy Grill Room which I visited more than once in my anxiety to

reassure myself of the existence of bloated profiteers and uniformed jacks in office.

Watching the guzzlers in the Savoy (and conveniently overlooking the fact that some of

them were officers on leave) I nourished my righteous hatred of them, anathematizing

their appetites with the intolerance of youth. (483-4)

Sherston, by this point in the Complete Memoirs, has concluded that his own confusion of mind and immaturity have conspired to bring him into disillusionment, the culmination of which is his official rejection of the war. His anger at the civilian population mirrors the same development noted in his poetry where Sassoon writes more astringent verse after 1916. In the prose, it is clear that from his postwar vantage Sassoon seems to retract some of his criticism.

Sassoon’s critique of the clergy is not modified in the Complete Memoirs and follows the same line as poems such as “They” and “Joy Bells.” Although there is no evidence to support the notion that Sherston is in any way inclined to religious feeling, he is sympathetic to the type of the village parson, especially Reverend Colwood, Stephen’s father. After receiving a letter from him, in which the minister exhorts Sherston to accept the mysterious will of God, saying,

“Obedience and sacrifice for right and truth in spite of suffering and death is Christianity.”

Sassoon’s commentary is mild and kindly: “I felt touched by the goodness and patience of my old friend, but I was unable to accept his words in the right spirit. He spoke too soon. I was too young to understand” (269). Again, Sherston makes the appeal to his youth and inexperience. In contrast, Sherston considers the clergy to be very much politicised and even actively involved in promoting the war aims of the politicians, whether Church of England or French Roman

Catholic. He visits the Cathedral in Rouen, to “escape from the War for a while, although the

Christian Religion had apparently no claim to be regarded as a Benevolent Neutral Power...”

During this visit, he observes a child listening to a sermon: “That child couldn’t understand the sermon anymore than it understood the War.. .and the monotonous chanting began again in front of the altar (sounding, I thought, rather harsh and hopeless)” (404). Back in England, after reading that the Archbishop of Canterbury had temporarily allowed for field work on Sundays to aid the war effort, Sherston says,

Remembering the intense bombardment in front of Arras on Easter Sunday, I wondered

whether the Archbishop had given the sanction of the Gospel for that little bit of Sabbath

field-work. Unconscious that he was, presumably, pained by the War and its barbarities, I

glared morosely in the direction of Lambeth Palace and muttered, “Silly old

fossil!” (455).

Sherston has another even more overt example of the militarisation of the clergy during a routine church parade when his battalion is “addressed by a Bishop in a uniform, a fact which speaks for itself’ (631). As remarked earlier, Sherston seems to have a low tolerance for the suborning of 148 religious tenets to military ends and for the exploitation of religious sentiment; of both, he considers the clergy culpable.

Sherston remains as critical in prose as Sassoon is in verse of other particular groups of civilians whom he considers as complicit with the politicians in prolonging the war, among them profiteers and journalists. The business owner is singled out for criticism who appears unmindful of the fact that the war has increased his revenues. Very like “The Tombstone-

Maker,” Sherston’s tailor is mildly mocked and satirised in the memoir, a man who works for the sardonically named “Craven and Sons.”

[He] chatted his way courageously through the War; ‘business as usual’ was his

watchword. Undaunted by the ever more bloated bulk of the Army List, he bobbed like a

cork on the lethal inundation of temporary commissions, and when I last saw him, a few

months before the Armistice, he was still outwardly unconscious of the casualty lists

which had lost (and gained) him such a legion of customers. (233)

As the war drags on, Sherston’s criticism goes from mild sarcasm to open contempt as he becomes more enmeshed in its many tragedies. Gradually, he loses sympathy with civilians at home and soon anyone may be suspected of being a war profiteer.

I thought of the typical Flintshire Fusilier at his best and the vast anonymity of courage

and cheerfulness he represented as he sat in a frontline trench cleaning his mess-tin. How

could one connect him with the gross profiteer whom I’d overheard in a railway carriage

remarking to an equally repulsive companion that if the War lasted another eighteen

months he could retire from business? (481) The journalists also help perpetuate the war by sanitising it for the home front. “The newspapermen always kept the horrifying realities out of their articles, for it was unpatriotic to be bitter, and the dead were assumed to be gloriously happy” (364). After reading a particularly thrilling and uplifting account of frontline action, Sherston accuses “the woman journalist” who wrote it of “deriving enjoyment from the war” and considers that journalists provide a free advertising service to the government: “What was this camouflage War which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations of people who had never seen the real thing?” His antidote is that “[s]uch people needed their noses rubbed in a few rank, physical facts” (464), which reprises the sort of vitriol reserved for journalists in his poetry. The Complete Memoirs contain more of this sort of commentary as the war continues; one gets the sense that Sherston’s anger grows in proportion to his alienation from the civilian population.

Sherston’s protest, presented throughout the Complete Memoirs and culminating in his

Letter of Resignation, focuses on the exploitation of the better parts of English culture. One of his themes is the conviction that the natural courage o f the Englishman is exploited for the war effort. The military ideal of personal, physical courage is presaged in the prewar sporting life of

Sherston and his many lengthy descriptions o f the anxiety and fear o f failure attributed to cricket matches, hunting expeditions, and races. In this passage, Sherston and Colwood meet just before the latter man races in a point-to-point: “He told me afterwards that there were two things which he wished at that moment: either that the race was all over or that something would happen to prevent it from taking place at all. It is sometimes forgotten that without such feelings heroism could not exist” (99). Sherston makes this connection between his military and sporting life explicitly in his own case. 150

Six years before I had been ambitious of winning races because that had seemed a

significant way of demonstrating my equality with my contemporaries. And now I

wanted to make the World War serve a similar purpose, for if only I could get a Military

Cross I should feel comparatively safe and confident. (At that time the Doctor was the

only man in the Battalion who’d got one.) Trench warfare was mostly monotonous

drudgery, and I preferred the exciting idea of crossing mine-craters and getting into the

German front line. (296)

This attitude may demonstrate no more than that Sherston is as much a victim of this exploitation as the other soldiers, but he was, consciously or not, a propagator of this exploitation as well. In either case, he has much to say about medal ribbons and this subject will be examined presently.

Sassoon reprises the idea throughout the Complete Memoirs, that there is a natural bravery, well-practised by English society in peacetime, which the nation draws upon in war.

However, that noble inclination can be bent to political ends unconsciously and often unwittingly by people of good will. Note this passage, describing Captain Huxtable’s aid in securing

Sherston a commission:

It may be inferred that he had no wish that I should be killed, and that he would have

been glad if he could have gone to the front himself, things being as they were; but he

would have regarded it as a greater tragedy if he had seen me shirking my responsibility.

To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And

that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the 151

essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against

humanity. (230)

Captain Huxtable represents the old-fashioned, rural gentry and, in his case, Sherston is mild and conciliatory in his rebuke of the old man for furthering war aims. As was demonstrated earlier, his approbation upon more anonymous civilians doing the same is much harsher. There is a parallel to the sympathetic and almost apologetic rendering of Rev. Colwood’s religious exhortations, but place the same message in the mouth of a bishop or more anonymous clergyman, and Sherston is quite derisive.

Where courage cannot be exploited, service may be forced, and conscription is another political topic which emerges. As with so much else, Sassoon mentions conscription first in

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. The fox hunter views conscription as a repellent, continental notion: “I had sometimes thought with horror of countries where they had conscription and young men like me were forced to spend two years in the army whether they liked it or not. Two years in the army!” (204). It is also in this context that the narrator allows the irony that the opposition to conscription resided among “those damned socialists who want to stop us hunting.. .1 should have been astonished if I’d been told that the socialists opposed conscription as violently as many fox-hunting men supported the convention of soldiering” (204). In this way, Sassoon foreshadows the ironical pairing of George Sherston and Thornton Tyrell and his own political stance, which will serve to place him so very far outside the assumptions of his fox-hunting circle. Similarly, Sherston claims ambivalence about conscientious objectors, but after an Irish Major with the Rifle Brigade gives his low opinion of “C.O.s” and describes how he has tortured and brutalised two of them into compliance, Sherston admits an admiration for their courage: “I hadn’t formed any opinion about Conscientious Objectors, but I couldn’t help thinking that they must be braver men than some I’d seen wearing uniforms in safe places and taking salutes from genuine soldiers” (403). By means of taking a jibe at the generals, he serves to further justify his own imminent act of disobedience.

Sherston makes no claim to be a systematic thinker and, as he approaches his decision to compose and post his letter of protest, he suggests he does so less from a rational platform and more from an overwrought emotional conviction that things are wrong and wanted correction.

I cannot claim that that my thoughts were clear or consistent. I did however, become

definitely critical and inquiring about the War. While feeling that my infantry experience

justified this, it did not occur to me that I was by no means fully informed on the subject.

In fact I generalized intuitively, and was not unlike a young man who suddenly loses his

belief in religion and stands up to tell the Universal Being that He doesn’t exist, adding

that if He does, He treats the world very unjustly. (454)

He writes about his gradual introduction to the antiwar movement through the Ormonds (the

Morrells) on whose estate he convalesced, and through Markington’s (Edward Marsh) invitation to meet Tyrell (Bertrand Russell). Sherston describes his association with these politically active pacifists as assimilative and says the whole thing made him feel uneasy. “The reason for this feeling was their antipathy to anyone in a uniform. I was still wearing mine, and somehow I was unable to dislike being a Flintshire Fusilier. This little psychological drama now seems almost 153 too delicate to be divulged” (483). He characterises Tyrell as an intellectual giant and he as the novice initiate into his philosophy.

For middle-aged persons who faced the war bleakly, life had become unbearable unless

they persuaded themselves that the slaughter was worth while. Tyrrell was

comprehensively severe on everyone except inflexible pacifists. He said that people who

tried to resolve the War into what they called ‘a higher harmony’ were merely enabling

themselves to contemplate the massacre o f the young men with an easy conscience. ‘By

Jingo, I suppose you’re right!’ I exclaimed, wishing that I were able to express my ideas

with such comprehensive clarity” (484).

Sassoon presents Sherston as a moral thinker who has lost his faith in the justification for the war, and a comparative dullard who relies on the reasoning of others to guide him to a new principle. After reporting for duty at Clitherland Camp, Sassoon reveals that a vulnerable

Sherston was misguided and misled into an act which he describes as rash and, ultimately, embarrassing.

Heroism, Cowardice and Shell Shock

As in the psychological poems, particularly those composed while at Craiglockhart, heroism, its attendant, cowardice, and shell shock are chief among the themes explored in the

Complete Memoirs. The pages of Sherston’s story abound with direct and veiled references to

“falling to pieces,” “crumpling up,” “getting windy” and others. Sherston claims to record the good and bad alike in his memoir and in the latter category is the case of G. Vivian-Simpson. He is a pretentious bank clerk who is revealed as a social-climbing good-for-nothing and referred to 154 as “Pardon-me” by his fellow subalterns. An object of ridicule and considered by all to be a thoroughly incompetent officer, after two years of desultory camp service, he was finally sent to

Ypres where he was shot by a sniper while trying to secure a second helping of breakfast.

It was a sad story, but I make no apology for dragging it from its decent oblivion. All

squalid, abject, and inglorious elements in war should be remembered. The intimate

mental history of any man who went to the War would make unheroic reading. I have

half a mind to write my own. (239)

After a fever has removed him from the trenches to a hospital, Sherston himself must face his own inglorious story: he finds himself fearing a recovery to good health and an imminent medical pass back to the front.

The door to safety was half open, and though an impartial New Zealand doctor decided

one’s destiny, there was a not unnatural impulse to fight for one’s own life instead of

against the Germans. Less than two weeks ago I’d been sitting in a tent thinking noble

thoughts about sharing the adversities of my fellow fusiliers, but that emotional defense

wouldn’t work now and the unutterable words “wangle my way home” forced their way

obstinately to the foreground, supported by a crowd of smug-faced excuses. (365)

In the private life of every soldier, admits Sherston, one’s secret thoughts make for unheroic reading. It is the public face of heroism and cowardice that form the bulk of Sherston’s motivation and his fear of failure.

On the issue of medals and medal-ribbons, and the visible assurance of one’s bravery that they afford, Sherston’s lack of consistency is clear. He admits to his own keen desire for public recognition of his courage, makes constant critical references to other people’s decorations, and offers acerbic editorialising on who should have medals and who should not. Members of the staff should not; senior commanders should not. In the case of the latter, it is always a point of irony that they have accumulated so much in the way of honorific decoration. In his own case, though, Sherston, after receiving his Military Cross, makes the following admission:

For the remainder of my military career the left side of my chest was more often in my

mind than the right - a habit which was common to a multitude of wearers of military

cross ribbons. Books about war psychology ought to contain a chapter on medal reflexes

and decoration complexes. Much might be written, even here, about their stimulating

effect on those who really risk their lives for them. But the safest thing to be said is that

nobody knew how much a decoration was worth except the man who received it. (330)

Sherston is frank about his desire for public recognition of his bravery, ostensibly, he says, as an extension of the competitive culture of the sporting man. Critics see Sherston’s prewar desire to win the Colonel’s Cup for horse racing as a parallel. However, Sherston hints that desiring a medal stems from a deeper psychological source. The ribbon should allow him the freedom to retire honourably from the fighting at several junctures in the narrative, but he does not do so.

Ironically, it is his decoration which draws him into the circle of the antiwar movement and perhaps, in recognition of this, he throws the ribbon into the Mersey River and comments, symbolically, on its buoyancy and necessary insubstantiality.

On the source of heroism, or more precisely, the antidote to cowardice, Sherston offers several possibilities including acquiescence and revenge. He writes often of the freedom from personal responsibility he feels whenever returning to the front and crossing the channel, a 156 feeling better described as “peace of mind.” However, this condition is of a particular type

“which resulted from a physically healthy existence combined with a sense of irresponsibility.

There could be no turning back now; one had to do as one was told. In an emotional mood I could glory in the idea of the supreme sacrifice” (257). This is the sort of courage required to leave one’s comforts and do one’s duty. The sort of courage for which he won his reputation and for which he was decorated was of another species; it was a kind of rash bravado and his motivation was always unclear to him, although Sherston cites a desire to revenge Dick’s death as the catalyst for his first burst of military recklessness.

I went up to the trenches with the intention of trying to kill someone. It was my idea of

getting a bit o f my own back. I did not say anything about it to anyone; but it was this

feeling which took me out patrolling the mine-craters whenever an opportunity offered

itself. It was a phase in my war experience - no more irrational than the rest of the

proceedings, I suppose; it was an outburst of blind bravado which now seems paltry when

I compare it to the behavior o f an officer like Julian Durley, who did everything that was

asked of him as a matter of course. (274-5)

Sherston contrasts his type of physical courage to the superior qualities he praises several times in Durley and also sees in the Canadian, Captain Duclos. Both of these exemplars personify professional competence and even-keeled sangfroid and make a very strong impression on

Sherston who sees himself in contrast as a rash, glory-seeker.

It becomes clear to Sherston that his own sort of heroism is not sustainable in the long run and he considers himself at risk of an emotional collapse that he fears might appear to others 157 as cowardice. He even admits to the thought of suicide in the face of such a public shaming.

While preparing himself mentally and emotionally for his role in the 1917 offensive, he contemplates what he is to do to preserve his nerve in the trenches. He had been considering his widely varying emotional states on the eves of several battles: having experienced the sort of fear that made him long for home and an end to it all, he is surprised that he has also been euphoric in similar circumstances.

I had often read those farewell letters from Second-Lieutenants to their relatives which

the newspapers were so fond of printing. “Never has life brought me such an abundance

of noble feelings,” and so on. I had always found it difficult to believe that these young

men had really felt happy with death staring them in the face, and I resented any

sentimentalizing of infantry attacks. But here I was working myself up into a similar

mental condition, as though going over the top was a species of religious experience.

(420)

He resolves that he will resort simply to acting out the part of the Happy Warrior as an act of will and accept that death may be inevitable.

That was the bleak truth, and there was only one way of evading it; to make a little drama

out of my own experience - that was the way out. I must play at being the hero in

shining armour, as I’d done last year; if I didn’t, I might crumple up altogether. (Self-

inflicted wounds were not uncommon on the Western Front, and brave men had put

bullets through their own heads before now, especially when winter made trench warfare

unendurable.) Having thus decided on death or glory, I knocked my pipe out and got up

from the tree stump with a sense of having solved my problems. (421) 158

Sherston believes that there is a motion of the will that may prevent the grip of cowardice; however, he also considers that “shell shock” or mental collapse may be inevitable in the front lines.

Much has been written about Sassoon’s personal state of mind when diagnosed with neurasthenia by his military medical board. Several critics have used the Complete Memoirs as the source of their own musings on the psychological health of the author. The Complete

Memoirs, however, present us with Sherston and not Sassoon, and it is Sherston’s firm conviction that at the time of his diagnosis, he was overwrought, confused, full of youthful arrogance and self-righteousness, but that he was not shell shocked. Unlike others, perhaps,

Sherston acknowledges that one’s nerves will eventually break down in such conditions, as he notes the conditions in other good men who have proved themselves redoubtable warriors.

Miles, my platoon sergeant, hadn’t been quite his usual self since the raid; but he’d been

in France nearly a year which was longer than most men could stick such a life. The

chances are, I thought, that if Sergeant Miles is still here a few months hence, and I’m

not, some fresh young officer from England will be accusing him of being windy. Sooner

or later I should get windy myself. It was only a question of time. But could this sort of

thing be measured in ordinary time, I wondered.. .No; one could not reckon the effect of

the war on people by weeks and months. I’d noticed that the boys under twenty stood it

worst, especially when the weather was bad. (310)

His own extended stay at Slateford is excused as a result of his obstinacy in refusing to retract his war protest and not to shell shock. Sherston’s convalescence exposes him to the revitalising 159 influence of Rivers - significantly, the only character in the Complete Memoirs who appears under his own name - and after a period of physical and emotional rest, Sherston is steered out of his muddle by the sagely guidance o f the doctor, and is able to resume his duties in France.

Sherston offers for proof of his misdiagnosis his subsequent traverse of No Man’s Land and saunter among the German trenches armed only with a bayonet: “It had been great fun, I felt.

And I regarded myself as having scored a point against the people who had asserted that I was suffering from shell-shock” (643). Sherston considered that he had been rested and reoriented, perhaps even rescued from the antiwar movement at Slateford, but not that he had been cured of shell shock.

While Sherston may deny the diagnosis provided him by the medical board, he did not arrive at Slateford “in the pink” of mental health. He admits only to being “worried by bad dreams” and opens the door to the possibility that he may have been hallucinating rather than dreaming: “More than once I wasn’t sure whether I was awake or asleep; the ward was half shadow and half sinking firelight” (453). He describes the images that trouble him in grim and ghastly detail:

Shapes of mutilated soldiers came crawling across the floor; the floor seemed littered

with fragments of mangled flesh. Faces glared upward; hands clutched at neck or belly; a

livid grinning face with bristly moustache peered at me above the edge of my bed; his

hands clawed at the sheets. Some were like the dummy figures used to deceive snipers;

others were alive and looked at me reproachfully, as though envying me the warm safety of life which they’d longed for when they shivered in the gloomy dawn, waiting for the

whistles to blow and the bombardment to lift. (453-4)

Other than the vividness of these images, he is worried by what he fears may be a death-wish,

“that semi-suicidal instinct which haunted me whenever I thought about going back to the line?

Did I really feel an insidious craving to be killed or am I only imagining it now? Was it

“spiritual pride,” or was it just war-weariness and repressed exasperation?” (559). Sherston resolves to make himself “feel some sort of way heroic - that was the only means I could devise for ‘carrying on’. Hence when I arrived back at Clitherland, my tragedian soul was all ready to start back for the trenches with a sublime gesture of self-sacrifice” (559). The importance of

Rivers cannot be overstated both to the character of Sherston and to the narrative itself, as

Sherston uses the doctor as the literary means of achieving something like a denouement in his trilogy.

The last image of the Complete Memoirs is that of Sherston in a hospital, newly wounded at the front, wallowing in anger at the war and claiming to have lost all his faith and purpose.

Sherston’s Progress appears to have been retrograde or ironically titled. The narrator has just resolved to surrender him self to the idea o f war as a social institution. He says he is becoming reconciled to the “Prussian system” whereby the “finest instincts” of youth and culture are offered for “exploitation to the unpitying machinery of scientific warfare” (655). Then Rivers enters like a priest. Sherston describes the doctor’s “benediction” which serves “to empty the room of everything that needed exorcising” (655). Rivers remains silent. “He did not tell me that I had done my best to justify his belief in me. He merely made me feel that he took all that 161 for granted and now we must go on to something better still. And this was the beginning o f a new life toward which he had shown me the way” (656). The resolution is suggested but not achieved. If there is a pilgrimage allusion in the structure of these memoirs, by the end of

Sherston’s Progress, it is incomplete. It is reminiscent of Virgil leading Dante through the depths of Hell to the top of Mount Purgatory, but from here, the poet must change guides.

Conclusion

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a complex and at times contradictory text, but in broad terms, it is one that conforms to the tendencies of early twentieth-century modernism despite its diction. It maintains and continues a number of the elements that distinguish the earlier war poetry. The poems, in their vivid detail, are like postcards from the front, written in the pressures of the moment. As time softens the writer’s perspective, the prose form and its structure allows for a broader context in which to explore and weigh experience.

But the inherent confusion of mind and the doubt, the anger and the edge, are still there. In fact, many of the literary tools sharpened earlier in poetic form are still in use. The novelistic self- portrait reveals a young man who “can’t go home again” after his experience of combat on the

Western Front. This transformation is due to the unresolved anger, despair, guilt and the complete loss of faith in the cultural matrices that sustained him in youth and propelled him to

France. The war is presented as a meaningless atrocity and the civilian population at home, for whom the war is waged, as complacent or complicit propagators. The writer, unable to reconcile his experience of the war with his nineteenth-century world view, is abandoned to an existential quandary in which he cannot make meaning out of a cultural cataclysm which has suborned his future and even his past to its absurdist sacrifice. When compared to the poetry Sassoon composed during the war itself, the Complete Memoirs function like a modem battlefield tour: the combatant returns to visit again the same scenes and experiences of his essential trauma and, despite a softening of effect, especially in the satirical portraits, there is no resolution to the problem of how one survives the war. There is a suggestion of resolution on the last page of the text, as the protagonist vows to make meaning out of his experience, but as the reader is reading the fruits of that attempt, Sherston’s postwar memoir, we know the determination is ironic and futile. This study of the war writing of Sassoon demonstrates that any rendering of his experience o f combat in the Great War, whether in poetry or prose, can only be memorialised in modernist terms despite his own reluctance to do so. 163

Chapter Four A Reluctant Modernist: Reassessing the Modernist Themes and Modes in Sassoon’s War Writing

Sassoon was not a particularly consistent thinker, so his ideas are sometimes difficult to generalise and systemise. The implications are obvious for the present study which endeavours to explore how Sassoon’s wartime writing fits into the canon of First World War literature. The existential elements associated with iconoclasm, fear of cultural negation, despair of personal actuality, victimisation and self-pity, subjectivism and others, are quite consistent in the war poems - more so than in his memoirs - but these poems are rooted to Sassoon’s particular experience of the Great War and some critics say he was only a temporary or accidental modernist. A close thematic reading of his Complete Memoirs, however, indicates that his world view has been altered permanently by the experience of combat and that he is unable simply to return to his prewar optimism and acquiescence. Sassoon’s critical response to the social and cultural elements of wartime European society, which he attacked insistently in his poems, are, for the most part, unaltered except that his critique has become a little more conciliatory in prose a decade later. The suggestion at the end o f the Complete Memoirs is that Sherston has lost his faith in his prewar assumptions and that he recognises the significance of this loss; he commits himself to reconciling his desire to believe in something positive and meaningful in his life with his experience of cultural destruction in the war. In the concluding scene of the trilogy, however, the narrator has no idea how to do this. Sherston’s Progress - and by extension, Sassoon’s - is towards finding the will to make meaning out o f one’s life and to find some purpose and belief in 164 positive action despite one’s loss of faith. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston remains a modernist text, but one in which the tone is nostalgic for the assurances and unquestioned assumptions of the romantic, fox-hunting milieu of his childhood and one where his modernism is moderated in places.

Sassoon’s formalism is more conservative in his poetry, which is modelled on the

Georgian poetics of his youth, than it is in his prose writing which has more in common with other modernistic novels of the interwar period. So much of Sassoon’s war poetry follows the metrical and rhyming rules from older poetical traditions. Many poems are structured as

Petrarchan sonnets. There are only four unrhymed poems of the seventy examined, and each of these is written in blank verse; there is no free verse poem in the collections. The diction of the poems varies widely from archaic, formal speech patterns to colloquial, conversational language replete with contemporary slang. The prose writing of the Sherston trilogy is more innovative in form as it is a fictive autobiography. The narrative’s realism is enhanced by direct addresses to the reader regarding the writing process, appeals for understanding regarding the subjectivity of the narrator’s perspective and, in the third volume, a transition to diary form. The tone of the

Complete Memoirs is confessional but Sassoon’s diction is not consistent, varying from the colloquial to the formal. The poetry and the prose remain logical in exposition: the poems are primarily experiential while the memoirs follow a chronological narrative. Settings are necessarily modernistic in that trench warfare demands a focus on the grisly, ugly details of this sort of combat, but Fussell notes the return to pastoral imagery at least in places inComplete the

Memoirs and the notable absence of the same in the war poems with very few exceptions 165

(Fussell 236,242). On balance, the Complete Memoirs are less traditional in form, structure, tone and diction than the war poetry.

Both the Sherston trilogy and the war poems demonstrate a modernist tendency toward subjectivity. The perspective is consistently first-person point-of-view in the prose and most of the poetry; in the latter, though, the speaker is often the satirical object of attack and much of

Sassoon’s best satire is derived from the dramatic irony achieved through this technique. The realistic perspective in the Complete Memoirs is achieved through the narrator’s occasional direct address to the reader, lapses into “stream of consciousness,” and graphic, photographic presentation of detail. Private symbolism is avoided and meaning is seldom obscure; in all his writing, Sassoon is fundamentally an accessible writer. The modernist tendency to juxtapose is a favoured technique and he manages some of his most effective writing through striking contrast and the accumulation of incongruous detail. All of Sassoon’s war writing may be described as subjective and realistic, but he achieves this effect without recourse to particularly avant garde techniques. In mood and theme, there is a marked distinction to be made between Sassoon’s war poems and his accounts of the Great War in prose. About a quarter of his war poems read as highly acerbic attacks on specific aspects of prewar society and conventional sentiment. In these poems of anger, he seems to reject Victorian ideality. His iconoclasm is somewhat modified, certainly qualified, in the prose work and then further tempered by his insistence that things were better before the war; however, as a modernist, he offers no new world view to the reader and reveals his nostalgia as merely a form of escapism. 166

The mood of the poetry varies from piece to piece, but the collections present a majority selection of angry social critique, where the prose account is consistently elegiac for what has been lost. The wartime hunting episodes always make Sherston wistful and usually serve to recommit him to a positive inclination. Hunting after convalescent leave elicits this sentiment:

I was due back at the Depot the next day, but we’d had a good woodland hunt with one

quite nice bit in the open, and I’d jumped a lot of timber and thoroughly enjoyed my day.

Staring at the dim brown landscape I decided the War was worth while if it were being

carried on to safeguard this sort of thing. Was it? I wondered; and if a doubt arose it was

dismissed before it had been formulated. (380)

When an episode recounted in a poem is retold in prose, its effect is somewhat softened in retrospect. Lehmann notes the “curious fact that when Sassoon came to write Memoirs of an

Infantry Officer in 1930.. .several of the episodes which form the stark subjects of his poems of the time suffer a modification, or rather mollification of effect” (Lehmann 50). This is very true of the satirical poem “Lamentations” and the account of the same incident in the memoir which becomes empathetic in tone and treatment. In the poem, the grief-stricken soldier under guard is presented to the reader sympathetically, and the speaker of the poem comes off as the villain for chiding the man’s lack of “patriotic feeling” (10) in allowing himself such “rampant grief’ (7)

“just because his brother had gone West” (6). In this way, the theme of the poem is the callous disregard of personal tragedy by the military and by those supporting the war effort. In the

Complete Memoirs, it is Sherston who stumbles upon the scene quite by accident and the commentary is more complex. The guards appear embarrassed and the sergeant supervising the group is “patient and unpitying” in his professional way. Sassoon then relates the conversation 167 between the sergeant and Sherston in which two observations are made: the hapless prisoner

“Seems to take it to ‘eart more than most would ... almost like a Shell-shock case;”’ and that the soldier has been three times wounded and returned to duty. To the latter point, the NCO comments: “A Blighty one don’t last a man long nowadays, sir” (397). The detailed description of the prisoner’s appearance and actions are identical between the two accounts of the anecdote but the portrait of the NCO is tempered: he is presented as one resigned to the state of affairs, but also recognising that there are wounds that go undetected, and that there is more to the psychological state of the man than simple grief. The sergeant’s tone suggests that while things are as they are, they ought to be different. In the poetical version, the reader feels outrage at the anonymous speaker, but in the prose version, there is pathos to be shared among the three figures.

In describing the visceral conditions of the trenches, Sassoon does not spare the reader his photo-realistic accounts in the Complete Memoirs any more than in the poetry. The details provided in poetry or in prose are remarkably similar, even to the point of retaining whole descriptive phrases and conversation. In 1917, Sassoon was in the reserve of a Cameronian

Battalion attack, commanding a bombing party in the formerly German tunnels of the

Hindenburg Line. He writes of this experience in the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and of one aspect of it in the poem, “The Rear-Guard.” Delirious and irritated by lack o f sleep and lack of clarity on his orders, he is stumbling about in the dark, falling over the debris and refuse strewn about, looking for the Cameronian HQ.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie 168

Humped at his feet, half hidden by a rug,

And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.

“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)

“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,

And flashed his beam across the livid face

Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore

Agony dying hard ten days before;

And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. (8-18)

The account of the same exchange with the ten-day corpse is given in the following excerpt from the Complete Memoirs:

Once, when I tripped and recovered myself by grabbing the wall, my tentative patch of

brightness revealed somebody half hidden under a blanket. Not a very clever place to be

taking a nap, I thought as I stooped to shake him by the shoulder. He refused to wake up,

so I gave him a kick. “God blast you, where’s Battalion Headquarters?” My nerves were

on edge; and what right had he to be having a good sleep, when I never seemed to get

five minutes rest? ... Then my beam settled on the livid face of a dead German whose

fingers still clutched the blackened gash on his neck. (437)

In the prose version, the incident is only accidental to Sherston’s search to find the Adjutant’s office. The episode is understated and elicits the response from Sherston that “this was really a bit too thick” as he rebukes himself for allowing even this emotional reaction since “there is 169 nothing remarkable about a dead body in a European War” (437). In the poem, the corpse is emblematic of the Hell which he “unloads” upon his ascent; it serves the literary purpose of providing the subject something from which to escape. In both renderings, though, the realistic details are almost photographically similar and this example is typical in this regard.

As far as the social commentary may be compared in the two modes o f writing, Sassoon maintains the general thrust of his criticism from his war poetry but moderates some particular issues in the Complete Memoirs. Women, for example, are criticised in several poems for romanticising the war and thereby prolonging it. In two poems, this criticism forms the main theme of the work. However, there is no such idea presented in the Complete Memoirs. In fact, if there is a problem with the presentation of women in the prose accounts of the war, it is that there are almost no women who surface as major characters. His aunt is always kindly and in need of protection from the ugly truths of life in the trenches. The exception is the “woman journalist” whom he wishes to subject to some ugly visceral truth but, presumably, this is due to her profession and not her gender. His opinion of the “yellow pressmen” remains consistent as the journalists are considered sanitisers and, wittingly or not, war propagandists. The depiction o f fathers in the poems is quite unflattering: they appear as tottering old fools conspicuous in their impotence as in “The Fathers;” or they are presented as mean-spirited men who pressure their sons to fight for their own renown as in “Memorial Tablet.” The one memorable image of fathers in the Complete Memoirs is the sympathetic account Sherston observes of a father visiting his irritable, injured son who is convalescing at Oxford (371). In this scene, Sassoon illustrates that the generation gap has been widened by a war in which the young man has fought, 170 a fact of which his father is awkwardly proud. It is a sad image of the estranged father and son, but Sassoon’s commentary is not accusatory. Politicians, a group which Sassoon demonises and which he fantasises about bayoneting in poetry, have very little mention in the Complete

Memoirs except around the issue of his protest; the parliamentary “Junkers” presented in “Fight to a Finish” have become mere politicians in the memoir towards whom Sherston maintains a neutral equilibrium.

There are several groups for whom the weight of years has altered nothing. Clergymen are considered irrelevant at best and vilified as war-promoters at the worst. Sassoon’s anger seems to reside in a sense that they exploited something benign and decent in English culture to support the war aims of the State. There is a kindly description of Reverend Colwood, but that may have as much to do with his status as a fox hunter and as a fully developed character. War profiteers, even those of modest means, were satirised and ridiculed. The tailor from “Craven and Sons” in the memoir gets roughly the same treatment as the tombstone maker in the poem of the same name. The industrialists are always depicted in caricature as gulping, cowardly, sensualists. While dining in an American-style hotel in Liverpool, filled with linoleum and imitation marble, Sherston says,

“Fivers” melted rapidly at the Olympic, and many of them were being melted by men

whose share in the national effort was difficult to diagnose. In the dining-room I began to

observe that some non-combatants were doing themselves pretty well out of the War.

They were people whose faces lacked nobility as they ordered lobsters and selected

colossal cigars. I remember drawing Durley’s attention to some such group when he 171

dined with me among the mirrors and mock magnificence. They had concluded their

feed with an ice-cream concoction, and now were indulging in an afterthought - stout and

oysters. I said that I suppose they must be profiteers. (387)

Sassoon offers the occasional qualification that general condemnations of all non-combatants is unfair - that, in fact, many of those overindulging during wartime were soldiers on leave - but there is an ironic inconsistency in that Sherston, by vilifying those who have escaped frontline service, has positioned himself as something of a war-supporter in places.

The professional senior officers of the peacetime army get a fair dose of parody and stinging criticism in both the poetry and prose. The General Officers Commanding are always shown to be rude, incompetent and self-aggrandising while their staff officers are always sycophantic shirkers. The cutting portrait of the “scarlet Majors” in “Base Details” is reprised in the Complete Memoirs with a similar burlesque of a green-capped Colonel in Rouen: “A bulky grey-haired Colonel, with green tabs and a Coronation Medal stepped heavily out [of the elevator], leaning on a stick and glaring around him from under a green and gold cap and aggressive eyebrows.” The Colonel gazes disapprovingly at a group of young officers of the line on their way to the front. Sassoon contrasts these youthful soldiers against the aged senior officer who

probably supervised an office full of clerks who made lists of killed, wounded and

reinforcements.. .But the contrast between the Front Line and the Base was an old story,

and at any rate the Base Details were at a disadvantage as regards the honour and glory 172

which made the war such an uplifting experience for those in close contact with it. I

smile sardonically at the green and gold Colonel’s back view. (405-6)

The deep anger of the poetry has given way to a biting sarcasm in the memoir but satire remains the weapon of choice for Sassoon when dealing with the higher levels of military hierarchy. He writes in the Complete Memoirs, again sarcastically, that as a result of the general approbation which has been heaped upon the GOCs by the general public in the decade between the war and

Sassoon’s prose work, he would consider subscribing to a society for the preservation of cruelty to Great War generals.

Where the poetry responds in outrage and anger to the victimisation of the combatants, the Complete Memoirs have mitigated this emotion to one of pity. Sassoon continues to resist the sentimentalisation of soldiers’ deaths (although he has several poems of his own - mainly his elegies for friends - where he is not entirely successful in this regard). There are some themes which reprise just as strongly in the prose: his constant examination of heroism on several levels; his preoccupation with cowardice as opprobrium on malingerers and shirkers and as a motivator for action; the ultimate senselessness and futility of the Great War; and the certainty that whatever might be meant by “war’s glories,” they are no compensation for what is lost in war’s more dehumanising aspects. There are other thematic ideas, though, where he has altered his position. There are many poems, composed or revised while at Craiglockhart particularly, where there is a decidedly psychological focus on his own trauma and the effects of shell shock in others. There is little in the Complete Memoirs with the same overtly Jungian process of self- analysis which Sassoon learned at Craiglockhart from Rivers (although it is hinted at in places) in which he explores his own deeply wounded psychological state through his poems; in the

Sherston version of his story, the narrator insists that although he needed the rest, he is admitted to Slateford on political grounds and not as a neurasthenic. Of this though, it should be noted that the character of Rivers remains a reverenced figure and is the means of resolution in the final scene of the Complete Memoirs. The emphasis in these psychological poems is on survivor guilt with a strong sense that the narrator suffers intensely from a lost fraternity. That essential loneliness is largely absent in the Complete Memoirs where Sherston remains a fairly solitary character who seems content to remain so; he misses absent friends and home but not stridently.

Overall his cynicism at the world and pessimism in humanity’s ability to solve its own conundrums and resolve its implacable differences, have given way somewhat to resignation.

Sherston maintains a wistful certainty that England was better before the war, but he is just as certain that the assurances and preconceptions of that rational and optimistic perspective will not be recaptured. Although he holds steady in his reluctance to make meaning out of the sacrifice of his generation, the Complete Memoirs do end with Sherston’s insistence that despite the war and its destructiveness on both grand and minute scales, he will strive to make meaning in his own life, although he does not know yet how this will be accomplished.

This comparison of Siegfried Sassoon’s war writing, his two volumes of poetry composed between 1916 and 1918, and his prose account written almost a decade later, demonstrates that Sassoon renders his experiences using existential modes associated with literary modernism. This position has been obscured by various factors such as the Georgian formalism of the poetry and the nostalgic tone and occasionally archaic diction of the prose, and especially by Sassoon’s own disavowal of modernity. Deconstructing Sassoon’s writing thematically rather than aesthetically, however, this study asserts that Sassoon remains unable to reconcile his experience of the war with the positivist tendencies of the prewar era. Despite a clear desire to return to the rational optimism and unquestioned assurances associated with his fox-hunting milieu, Sassoon cannot regain this nineteenth-century inclination. The Complete

Memoirs provides no resolution to the essentially modernist problems that Sassoon explores in his poetry, such as his unfocused anger at the war, his general cynicism and pessimism for humanity’s future, and the underlying possibility that individual action may ultimately be futile and meaningless. This assessment of Sassoon’s war writing repositions him as a modernist and his own denial of modernity does not refute, but rather demonstrates dramatically, the inexorable, transformative power of the Great War. 175

Works Cited or Consulted

Primary Sources

Blunden, Edmund. Undertones o f War. 1928. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Sassoon, Siegfried. Counter Attack and Other Poems. 1918. Teddington, Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006.

______• The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. 1919. Teddington, Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006.

______. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.

______. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.

______. Siegfried’s Journey. 1916-1920. London: Faber and Faber, 1945.

______. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. 1937. London: Reprint Society & Faber and Faber, 1940.

Anthologies of War Poetry

Stallworthy, Jon, Ed. Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984

Dominic Hibberd and John Onions. Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology. New York: St Martin's P, 1986

Walters, George, Ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Essays on Modernism

Bell, Michael. “The Metaphysics of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levanson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. “The Name and Nature of Modernism.” Modernism: 1890-1930. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976. 176

Fletcher, John and Malcolm Bradbury. “The Modem Novel.” Modernism: 1890-1930. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “Rats’ Alley: Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999).

Harding, Jason. “Modernist Poetry and the Canon.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. (eBook) Random House, 2011.

Levanson, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levanson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkley: U California P, 1995.

Rae, Patricia. “Introduction.” Modernism and Mourning. Ed. Patricia Rae. Cranbury, NJ: Associated U P, 2007.

Rainey, Lawrence. “The Cultural Economy of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levanson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Ramazani, Jahan. “Thomas Hardy”. The Poetry of Mourning: Modem Elegy from Hardy to Heanev. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1994.

Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Criticism of Sassoon

Allen, Brooke. “Rediscovering Sassoon.” The New Criterion 24.3 (2005): 15-20.

Baldick, Chris. “Modernism” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Barlow, Adrian. The Great War in British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

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Cobley, Evelyn. Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Naratives. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1993. 177

Campbell, Patrick. “Thoughts that You’ve Gagged All Day: Siegfried Sassoon, W.H.R. Rivers and ‘The Repression of War Experience.’” The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave P, 2001.

Corrigan, D. Felicitas. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage. London: Victor Golancz Ltd, 1973.

Edwards, Paul. “British War Memoirs.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 15 - 33.

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modem Age. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989.

Fleishman, Avrom. “The Memoirs of George Sherston: Sassoon’s Perpetual Pilgrimage.” Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modem England. Berkley: U California P, 1983. 337 - 353.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modem Memory. 1975. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Gregson, J. M. “Siegfried Sassoon: Disillusion and Anger.” Poetry of the First World War. London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1976. 29-40.

Hipp, Daniel. “Siegfried Sassoon, Shell Shock and Living through the Dead.” The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen. Ivor Gumev and Siegfried Sassoon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2005. 150 - 190.

Hoare, Philip. “Siegfried Sassoon: AestheteManque .” Focus on Robert Graves and his Contemporaries 9.1 (1989): 15-18.

Johnston, John H., English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964.

Lane, Arthur E. An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.

Lehmann, John. “Owen and Sassoon.” The English Poets of the First World War. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982.

Mallon, Thomas. “The Great War and Sassoon’s Memory.” Modernism Reconsidered. Eds. Robert Kiely and John Hildebidle. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 81-99.

Matalon, Avi. “Difference at War: Siegffeid Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, U.Z. Grinberg, and Poetry of the First World War.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 21.1 (2002): 25-43. 178

Pinto, Vivian de la Sola. Crisis in English Poetry 1880-1940. 1951. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1967.

Press, John. “Siegfried Sassoon.” Poets of World War 1. Windsor, England: Profile Books Ltd, 1983.

Quinn, Patrick J. “Siegfried Sassoon: the Legacy of the Great War.” The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered. Eds. Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave P, 2001. 230-238 .

Rowley, Brian A. "Journalism into Fiction:Im Westen nichts Neues." The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Holger Klein. London: MacMillan Press, 1976.

Shelton, Carole. “War Protest, Heroism, and Shellshock: Siegfried Sassoon: A Case Study.” Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries. 1.13 (1992): 43-50.

Silk, Dennis. Siegfried Sassoon. Tisbury, Wiltshire: Compton Press, 1975.

Thorpe, Michael. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. London: Oxford UP, 1966.

Williams, Jeffrey C. “The Myth of the Lost Generation: The British War Poets and their Modem Critics.” CLIO: A Journal of Literature. History and the Philosophy of History. 12.1 (1982): 45-56)

Biographies of Sassoon

Egremont, Max. Siegfried Sassoon: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet: A Biography 1886-1918. New York: Routledge, 1998.

. Siegfried Sassoon: The Joumev from the Trenches: A Biography 1918-1967. New York: Routledge, 2003. 179

Curriculum Vitae

Bom in Weston, Ontario in 1968, Lieutenant Colonel Finley Mullally was sworn into the primary reserve in May 1990. After completing the Reserve Entry Scheme for Officers programme, LCol

Mullally served with the 1st (Halifax Dartmouth) Field Artillery Regiment, Royal Canadian

Artillery (RCA) until his transfer to the 30th Field Artillery (Bytown Gunners) Regiment, RCA in 1999. Over 23 years, he has held most regimental appointments.

After completing Militia Command and Staff College, he commanded 1st Battery from

2005-2007. He was promoted to Major in July 2007 and took command of the famous 2nd

Battery until deploying to Regional Command (South) HeadQuarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan in August 2009. He was appointed Chief of Operations in the Combined Joint Operations Centre, a post he held until redeployment in March 2010. He was acting as Divisional Current

Operations Officer during O per a tio n M o s h t a r a k , the British-US clearance of Marjah and

Nad-e-Ali in February 2010. Upon his return to Canada, he was promoted to his current rank and appointed Commanding Officer of the Bytown Gunners.

In his civilian career, LCol Mullally is Head of the English Department and sometimes Vice-

Principal at Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Stittsville, Ontario. He holds a B.A. (Hons) from the University o f King’s College, Halifax, and a B.Ed. from Mount Saint Vincent

University, Halifax. He lives in Perth, Ontario with his wife of thirteen years, Leydin Mullally, and their three children.