War Poems Read online

  WAR POEMS

  Siegfried Sassoon

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  MINEOLA, NEW YORK

  DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

  GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER

  EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: STEPHANIE CASTILLO SAMOY

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition is a new collection of poems selected from the following books: The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, published in 1917 by William Heinemann, London; Counter-Attack and Other Poems, published in 1918 by E. P. Dutton & Company, New York; The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, published in 1919 by William Heinemann, London; and Picture-Show, published in 1920 by E. P. Dutton & Company, New York. The Introduction by Robert Nichols first appeared in Counter-Attack and Other Poems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sassoon, Siegfried, 1886–1967, author.

  Title: War poems / Siegfried Sassoon.

  Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2018. | Series: Dover thrift editions

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018011979| ISBN 9780486826820 (paperback) | ISBN 0486826821 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: War poetry, English. | World War, 1914-1918—Great Britain—Literature and the war. | BISAC: POETRY / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | HISTORY / Military / World War I. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.

  Classification: LCC PR6037.A86 A6 2018 | DDC 821/.912—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011979

  Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

  826821012018

  www.doverpublications.com

  Epigraph from

  Counter-Attack and Other Poems

  Dans la trêve désolée de cette matinée, ces hommes qui avaient été tenaillés par la fatigue, fouettés par la pluie, bouleversés par toute une nuit de tonnerre, ces rescapés des volcans et de l’inondation entrevoyaient à quel point la guerre, aussi hideuse au moral qu’au physique, non seulement viole le bon sens, avilit les grandes idées, commande tous les crimes—mais ils se rappelaient combien elle avait développé en eux et autour d’eux tous les mauvais instincts sans en excepter un seul; la méchanceté jusqu’au sadisme, l’égoïsme jusqu’à la férocité, le besoin de jouir jusqu’à la folie.

  Henri Barbusse

  (Le Feu.)

  English language translation of Epigraph from Counter-Attack and Other Poems

  In the desolate truce of this morning, these men who had been tormented by fatigue, whipped by the rain, upset by a night of thunder, these survivors of volcanoes and floods glimpsed how much the war, as hideous to the moral as to the physical, not only violates common sense, degrades big ideas, commands all crimes—but they remembered how much it had developed in them and around them all bad instincts without excepting one; wickedness until sadism, selfishness up to ferocity, the need to come to madness.

  Henri Barbusse

  Le Feu. (Fire)

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  FROM The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917)

  Absolution

  Brothers

  The Dragon and the Undying

  France

  To Victory

  When I’m among a Blaze of Lights

  Golgotha

  A Mystic As Soldier

  The Kiss

  The Redeemer

  A Subaltern

  “In the Pink”

  A Working Party

  A Whispered Tale

  “Blighters”

  At Carnoy

  To His Dead Body

  Two Hundred Years After

  “They”

  Stand-To: Good Friday Morning

  The One-Legged Man

  Enemies

  The Tombstone-Maker

  Arms and the Man

  Died of Wounds

  The Hero

  Stretcher Case

  Conscripts

  The Road

  Secret Music

  Haunted

  Before the Battle

  The Death-Bed

  The Last Meeting

  A Letter Home

  FROM Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

  Prelude: The Troops

  Counter-Attack

  The Rear-Guard

  Wirers

  Attack

  Dreamers

  How to Die

  The Effect

  Twelve Months After

  The Fathers

  Base Details

  The General

  Lamentations

  Does It Matter?

  Fight to a Finish

  Editorial Impressions

  Suicide in the Trenches

  Glory of Women

  Their Frailty

  The Hawthorn Tree

  The Investiture

  Trench Duty

  Break of Day

  To Any Dead Officer

  Sick Leave

  Banishment

  Song-Books of the War

  Thrushes

  Autumn

  Invocation

  Repression of War Experience

  The Triumph

  Survivors

  Joy-Bells

  Remorse

  Dead Musicians

  The Dream

  In Barracks

  Together

  FROM The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (1919)

  Battalion Relief

  The Dug-Out

  I Stood with the Dead

  In an Underground Dressing-Station

  Atrocities

  Return of the Heroes

  Concert Party

  Night on the Convoy

  Reconciliation

  Memorial Tablet

  Aftermath

  Everyone Sang

  FROM Picture-Show (1920)

  Memory

  Devotion to Duty

  Titles Index

  First Lines Index

  INTRODUCTION

  by Robert Nichols1

  New York City, November 20-23, 1917

  Sassoon the Man

  In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw, wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled leaf (as I have noticed is common in many poets). His nose is aquiline, the nostrils being wide and heavily arched. This characteristic and the fullness, depth and heat of his dark eyes give him the air of a sullen falcon. He speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if they pained him, in a voice that has something of the troubled thickness apparent in the voices of those who emerge from a deep grief. As he speaks, his large hands, roughened by trench toil and by riding, wander aimlessly until some emotion grips him when the knuckles harden and he clutches at his knees or at the edge of the table. And all the while he will be breathing hard like a man who has swum a distance. When he reads his poems he chants and one would think that he communed with himself save that, at the pauses, he shoots a powerful glance at the listener. Between the poems he is still but moves his lips. . . . He likes best to speak of hunting (he will shout of it!), of open air mornings when the gorse alone flames brighter than the sky, of country quiet, of his mother,2 of poetry—usually Shelley, Masefield and Thomas Hardy—and last and chiefly—but always with a rapid, tumbling enunciation and a much-irked desperate air filled with pain—of soldiers. For the incubus of war is on him so that his days are shot with anguish and his nights with horror.

  He is twenty-eight years old; was educated at Marlborough and Christchurch, Oxford; was a master of fox-hounds and is a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Thrice he has
fought in France and once in Palestine. Behind his name are set the letters M.C. since he has won the Military Cross for an act of valour which went near to securing him a higher honour.

  Sassoon the Poet

  The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon divides itself into two rough classes—the idyllic and the satiric. War has defiled one to produce the other. At heart Siegfried Sassoon is an idealist.

  Before the war he had hardly published a line. He spent his summers in the company of books, at the piano, on expeditions, and in playing tennis. During winter he hunted. Hunting was a greater passion with him than poetry. Much of his poetry celebrated the loveliness of the field as seen by the huntsman in the early morning light. But few probably guessed that the youth known to excel in field sports excelled also in poetry. For, in its way, this early poetry does excel. It was characteristic of him that nearly every little book he then wrote was privately printed. Poetry was for him just something for private and particular enjoyment—like a ride alone before breakfast. Among these privately printed books are Twelve Sonnets (1911), Melodies, An Ode for Music, Hyacinth (all 1912). The names are significant. He was occupied with natural beauty and with music. In 1913 he publishes in a limited and obscure edition Apollo in Doelyrium, wherein it seems that he is beginning to find a certain want of body and basis in his poems made of beautiful words about beautiful objects. Later in the same year, with Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy (1911), Widow in the Bye Sheet (1912) and Daffodil Fields (1913) before him, he starts to write a parody of these uncouth intrusions of the sorrows of obscure persons into his paradise but half way through the poem adopts the Masefield manner in earnest3 and finishes by unsuccessfully endeavouring to rival his master. In 1914 the War breaks out. Home on leave in 1915 he privately prints Discoveries, a little book which contains some of the loveliest of his “paradise” poems. In 1916 the change has come. He can hardly believe it himself. Morning Glory (privately printed) includes four war poems. He has not definitely turned to his later style but he hovers on the brink. The war is beginning to pain him. The poems “To Victory” and “The Dragon and the Undying” show him turning toward his paradise to see if its beauty can save him . . . The year 1917 witnesses the publication of The Old Huntsman.4 This book secured instantaneous success. Siegfried Sassoon, on its publication, became one of the leading young poets of England. The book begins with the long monologue of a retired huntsman, a piece of remarkable characterisation. It continues with all the best of the “paradise” poems, including the loveliest in Discoveries and Morning Glory. There are also the “bridge” poems between his old manner and his new such as the “To Victory” mentioned above. But interspersed among the paradise poems are the first poems in his final war style. He tells the story of the change in a characteristic manner—“Conscripts.”5 For like nearly every one of the young English poets, he is to some extent a humourist. His humour is not, however, even through The Old Huntsman all of such a wise and gentle tenor. He breaks out into lively bitterness in such poems as “ ‘They,’ ” “The Tombstone Maker” and “ ‘Blighters.’ ”

  This book (in consequence almost wholly of these bitter poems) enjoyed a remarkable success with the soldiers fighting in France. One met it everywhere. “Hello, you know Siegfried Sassoon then, do you? Well, tell him from me that the more he lays it on thick to those who don’t realize the war the better. That’s the stuff we want. We’re fed up with the old men’s death-or-glory stunt.” In 1918 appeared Countermans’ Attack6 [sic]: here there is hardly a trace of the “paradise” feeling. You can’t even think of paradise when you’re in hell. For Sassoon was now well along the way of thorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparently to no purpose? Did not the fact of war arch him in like a dirty blood-red sky? He breaks out, almost like a mad man, into imprecations, into vehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellish laughters that arise from a heart that is not broken once for all but that is newly broken every day while the Monster that devours the lives of the young continues its ravages. Take, for instance, the magnificent “To Any Dead Officer,” written just before America entered the war. Many reading this poem would think Great Britain was going to cease fighting. But nothing of the sort. One must always remember that bitter as these imprecations are against those who mismanaged certain episodes in the war, the ultimate foe is not they but the German Junkers who planned this war for forty years, who have given the lovely earth over to hideous defilement and the youths of all nations to carnage . . .

  Sometimes in this book Sassoon fails to express himself properly. This fact is, I think, a tribute to his sincerity. For his earlier work very clearly displays his technical proficiency. But here what can he do? Indignation chokes and strangles him. He claws often enough at unsatisfactory words, dislocates his sentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp the makers of war beneath them. Very rarely does he attain to the poignant simplicity of “The Hawthorn Tree” or the detached irony of “Does it Matter?”

  Can he then see nothing else in war? I remember him once turning to me and saying suddenly apropos of certain exalté poems in my Ardours and Endurances [1917]: “Yes, I see all that and I agree with you, Robert. War has made me. I think I am a man now as well as a poet. You have said the things well enough. Now let us nevermore say another word of whatever little may be good in war for the individual who has a heart to be steeled.”

  I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with war inclines me to his opinion.

  “Let no one ever,” he continued, “from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals. Were there anything to say for it, it should not be said for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.”

  For myself this is the truth. War doesn’t ennoble: it degrades. The words of Barbusse placed at the beginning of this book7 should be engraved over the doors of every war office of every State in the world.

  While war is a possibility man is little better than a savage and civilisation the mere moments of rest between a succession of nightmares. It is to help to end this horror that Siegfried Sassoon and the many others who feel like him have continued to fight as after the publication of this book he fought in Palestine and in France.

  You civilized persons who read this book not only as a poet but as a soldier I beg of you not to turn from it. Read it again and again till its words become part of your consciousness. It was written by a man for mankind’s sake, that might once more become “that which is humane” not an empty phrase, that the words of Blake might blossom to a new meaning—

  Thou art a man, God is no more,

  Thine own humanity learn to adore.

  * * *

  1Robert Nichols (1893-1944) was, like his good friend Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), both a poet and a soldier who served in the First World War. His Introduction originally appeared in Sassoon’s Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918), one of the volumes used to compile the current work (see Contents, page vi). [ED.]

  2His father was a well-to-do country gentleman of Anglo-Jewish stock, his mother an English woman, a Miss Thornycroft, sister of the sculptor of that name. [R.N.]

  3I had this from his own mouth. [R.N.]

  4See pages 1 to 45 for poems from this collection. [ED.]

  5The full text of the poem “Conscripts” appeared between this paragraph and the next in the original version of this Introduction, but is omitted above since it is included in its entirety on page 30. [ED.]

  6Counter-Attack and Other Poems, see pages 46 to 90. [ED.]

  7See page iii of this edition for the quotation from Barbusse that appeared as the epigraph for Counter-Attack and Other Poems. [ED.]

  WAR POEMS

  ABSOLUTION

  The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes

  Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

  War is our scourge; yet war has
made us wise,

  And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

  Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,

  And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

  We are the happy legion, for we know

  Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

  There was an hour when we were loth to part

  From life we longed to share no less than others.

  Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,

  What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

  BROTHERS

  Give me your hand, my brother, search my face;

  Look in these eyes lest I should think of shame.

  For we have made an end of all things base;

  We are returning by the road we came.

  Your lot is with the ghosts of soldiers dead,

  And I am in the field where men must fight.

  But in the gloom I see your laurell’d head

  And through your victory I shall win the light.

  THE DRAGON AND THE UNDYING

  All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings

  And beats upon the dark with furious wings;

  And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,

  Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;

  He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,

  And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

  Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,

  Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder’d seas.

  Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,

  And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.

  Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,

  They wander in the dusk with chanting streams;

  And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,

  To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.

  FRANCE

  She triumphs, in the vivid green

  Where sun and quivering foliage meet;

  And in each soldier’s heart serene;

  When death stood near them they have seen