[In the following excerpt, Crawford discusses Sassoon's outspoken antiwar sentiment, realistic evocation of combat conditions, and targets of satire and condemnation in his war poetry.]

Siegfried Sassoon （1886-1967） was the first soldier poet to achieve public notoriety as an opponent not only of the war, but also of those whose complicity allowed it to continue. His satiric targets included virtually everyone except fighting soldiers of both sides—civilians content to accept the casualties of the war as inevitable, staff officers whose incompetence contributed to the carnage, churchmen who abetted efforts to prolong the war, and profiteers who combined insensibility and greed to become “hard-faced men who did well out of the war.” During the war, Sassoon's The Old Huntsman and Other Poems （1917）, “A Soldier's Declaration” （July 1917）, and Counter-Attack and Other Poems （1918） drew attention to the war's effects.

Nothing in Sassoon's prewar life suggested he would become a public spokesman. Born in Kent, Sassoon was the second of three sons of Alfred Sassoon, who separated from his wife when Sassoon was five, and Theresa Thornycroft, whose family included several distinguished Victorian sculptors. Sassoon's connections were various. Cousins on his father's side intermarried with Rothschilds, and his father's sister Rachel at one point edited two rival London newspapers, the Observer and the Sunday Times （she owned one, her husband the other）. Sassoon attended Clare College, Cambridge, first in law and then in history, but he left without taking a degree. On an income of approximately œ500 per year, he devoted his energies to cricket, fox-hunting, book-collecting （chiefly for the bindings）, and poetry. By 1912 Sassoon had published nine volumes of verse, but he did not achieve recognition until 1913, when he published The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of Masefield. Both Edmund Gosse and Edward Marsh took an interest in Sassoon's verse, and Marsh convinced Sassoon to move in May 1914 to London, where he met Rupert Brooke and other Georgians.

Sassoon possessed an incredible physical and moral courage that prewar circumstances had not allowed to surface beyond his determination to master fox-hunting. When the war began, however, his response was immediate. By 5 August 1914 the twenty-eight-year-old Sassoon was in uniform as a cavalry trooper. As he recorded in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man （1928）, he “did not need Hardy's ‘Song of the Soldiers’ [“Men Who March Away”] to warn me that the Remounts was no place for me,” and he transferred to the Royal Welch Fusiliers as an infantry subaltern. Recalling the first weeks of the war, Sassoon commented, “Many of us believed that the Russians would occupy Berlin （and, perhaps, capture the Kaiser） before Christmas. The newspapers informed us that German soldiers crucified Belgian babies. Stories of that kind were taken for granted; to have disbelieved them would have been unpatriotic.” He also recalled, “Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.”

Sassoon survived the war chiefly through luck. While he was training with the Sussex Yeomanry in January 1915, his horse stumbled over a hidden strand of barbed wire, and Sassoon broke his arm. He did not arrive at the front until November 1915, with his early idealism intact. Little in Sassoon's early poetry distinguished it from Brooke's except for Brooke's superior talent as a poet. Sassoon's “Absolution” reveals the extent to which abstractions dominated his verse before Sassoon saw action: “War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.” “France” describes soldiers as “serene” when death is near and argues that “they are fortunate, who fight / For gleaming landscapes swept and shafted / And crowned by cloud pavilions white.” When his younger brother Hamo died at Gallipoli in August 1915, Sassoon wrote “To My Brother,” an elegy which concludes “But in the gloom I see your laurell'd head / And through your victory I shall win the light.”

One early poem, “The Kiss,” as Sassoon recalled with chagrin, attempts to satirize “the barbarities of the famous bayonet-fighting lecture. … The difficulty is that it doesn't show any sign of satire.” The poem, addressing “Brother Lead and Sister Steel,” can read as a fire-eating poem because it offers no clue to resolve the ambiguity of the last stanza:

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Still, the poem does reveal Sassoon's early tendency to respond to an outrageous occurrence in verse.

Sassoon's conduct during the war exemplified the highest ideals of courage. He won the Military Cross for bringing back wounded men after a raid, and during the Somme Offensive he singlehandedly occupied a section of German trench. As an officer, his consideration and concern for his men recall the spirit of Read's “My Company.” As C. E. Maguire reports, “Ordered to rehearse his men—already much over-rehearsed—for an attack, he led them into a wood and read the London Marl to them.” Nicknamed “Mad Jack” by his men, Sassoon, like Julian Grenfell, made independent forays into No Man's Land to stalk German snipers. During the Battle of Arras in April 1917, Sassoon received a neck wound and returned to England for convalescence. He had met Ottoline Morrell in 1916, in whose home he spoke with pacifists and conscientious objectors for the first time. With the encouragement of Bertrand Russell, Lady Ottoline, and Middleton Murry, Sassoon wrote “A Soldier's Declaration” and mailed it to his commanding officer. Russell had the letter mentioned in the House of Commons. Robert Graves was quick to minimize the consequences of the protest by arranging for a medical board, but Sassoon, whose statement during wartime could have resulted in court martial and even execution for treason, had no reason to expect that he would avoid trial or punishment.

Sassoon's protest differs from today's notions of pacifism. Instead of protesting killing on humanitarian grounds, he opposed the victimization of the fighting soldier:

I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

Sassoon did not object to a war that sought and attained specified goals. His major grievance was that only part of the population bore the burden. He ends his declaration by condemning “the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.” After his medical board, Sassoon became a patient of W. H. R. Rivers at Craiglockhart, where he spent some months convalescing. At Craiglockhart Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, whom he influenced beyond his understanding. Only after the war, according to Sassoon, did he realize the importance of Owen's work. Sassoon could have safely spent the rest of the war at Craiglockhart, but he chose to return to the front.

In Sherston's Progress （1936）, Sassoon gave as reasons for his return to the front his personal wellbeing, his feeling for his men, and his desire to continue his protest. The effects of the war continued to plague him （he once told Graves of hallucinations of corpses lying on London streets）, and he felt that “Army life away from the actual Front is demoralizing.” For Sassoon, “The only way to forget about the War was to be on the other side of the Channel,” and he felt it was “Better to be in the trenches with those whose experience I had shared and understood than with this medley of civilians who, when one generalized about them intolerantly, seemed either being broken by the War or enriched and made important by it.” He justified his return to the front, ironically, in terms of

exasperation against the people who pitied my “wrongheadedness” and regarded me as “not quite normal.” In their opinion it was quite right that I should be safely out of it and “being looked after.” How else could I get my own back on them but by returning to the trenches? Killed in action in order to confute the Under-Secretary for War, who had officially stated that I wasn't responsible for my actions. What a truly glorious death for a promising young Pacifist! …

Sassoon's return to the front was not immediate. He was stationed in Egypt in February 1918, where he felt almost as uncomfortable among noncombatant officers as he had among civilians. However, his unit transferred to France in May 1918, where he served as a company commander （his second-in-command, a bespectacled subaltern, was Vivian de Sola Pinto）. Sassoon resumed his stalking as “Mad Jack.” When he returned from a foray into No Man's Land on 13 July 1918, after harassing a German machine-gun nest, his sergeant mistook him for a German and shot him in the head. Sassoon spent the rest of the war convalescing in England.

He had written the poems for Counter-Attack and Other Poems during his stay at Craiglockhart and must have viewed at least one effect of the volume with disgust. According to L. Hugh Moore, “Winston Churchill so admired [“Counter-Attack”] that he memorized it, seeing it, not as a protest against war, but as a means of increasing the war effort because it showed what the English soldiers endured.” Despite later appreciation of Sassoon's pioneering protests, several of his contemporaries dismissed them. Middleton Murry found that the verses of Counter-Attack “express nothing, save in so far as a cry expresses pain,” and another of Murry's comments anticipates one of Johnston's conclusions by fifty years: “Without the perspective that comes from intellectual remoteness there can be no comprehension, no order and no art.” Arnold Bennett had tried to dissuade Sassoon from issuing his declaration of protest. Gosse, respecting Sassoon's sincerity, objected to the verse on similar grounds: “His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage.” Sassoon's development as a satirist transcended techniques peculiarly Georgian. His rigidly bipolar view of ethical extremes made his poetry effective, although his perception of absolute truths sometimes limited his realism. Sassoon's poems were occasional. When the occasion passed, so did his prominence as a poet.

Before Sassoon's poetry, few civilians could know what the trenches were really like. The soldiers themselves, in their letters and infrequent leaves, kept silent, due partly to a feeling of decency and partly to civilians' incomprehension. In retrospect, Sassoon's satire seems heavy-handed when he dwells on the horrors of the trenches and on the villainy of those responsible, but civilians' prevailing ignorance of modern warfare demanded blunt depiction. The unprecedented carnage and unforeseen suffering were more shocking to Sassoon's audience than any pacifist argument could be. His aim was to force the noncombatant to contemplate the realities of the front. The task required some poetic innovation—Sassoon once commented that he had been the first to use the word syphilitic in a poem—but his impact derived chiefly from his new subject matter.

The antichivalric “A Working Party” presents a modern “hero” who is commonplace, dull, weary, and unimaginative:

He was a young man with a meagre wife
And two small children in a Midland town;
He showed their photographs to all his mates,
And they considered him a decent chap
Who did his work and hadn't much to say,
And always laughed at other people's jokes
Because he hadn't any of his own.

Unlike the nondescript of Asquith's “The Volunteer,” Sassoon's soldier does not experience an ennobling death: as he fortified his trench with sandbags, “the instant split / His startled life with lead, and all went out.” Sassoon's most gruesome depiction occurs in the first stanza of “Counter-Attack”:

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps;
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags, loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A war correspondent's bloodlessly abstract report—“The effect of our bombardment was terrific”—inspired “The Effect,” which introduces the palpable realities behind the journalist's empty phrase: “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. …”

In “The Rear Guard （Hindenburg Line, April 1917）,” Sassoon describes a lost soldier who angrily kicks a reclining figure for not responding to his request for directions. His flashlight reveals “the lived face / Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore / Agony dying hard ten days before; / And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.” Sassoon duplicates the surprise and shock of the soldier, who, “with sweat of horror in his hair,” emerged from the trench, “Unloading hell behind him step by step.” Sassoon also described soldiers' departures from traditional attitudes. In “Stand-To: Good Friday Morning,” a sentry ill with fatigue, sick of the rain, offers a prayer that belies civilian expectations of a Happy Warrior: “O Jesus, send me a wound today, / And I'll believe in Your bread and wine, / And get my bloody old sins washed white.”

Sassoon was at his best when attacking those who mismanaged the war. “The General,” which nearly resulted in the censor's refusal to allow the publication of Counter-Attack and Other Poems, satirizes the ineffectiveness of military leadership with masterful economy:

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
..............................
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The poem demonstrates Sassoon's most frequent satiric device, reserving a bitterly ironical twist for the last line. The poem is not pacifistic: Sassoon does not object to the general because he is a military man, but because he does not wage war well enough.

“Base Details” emphasizes the opposition Sassoon frequently exploited between the men doing the fighting and the others （garrison officers wore scarlet tabs to distinguish them from line officers, causing combatants to refer often to the “Red Badge of Funk”）:

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. “Poor young chap.”
I'd say—“I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.”
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Whereas “The General” is a narrative, “Base Details” moves closer to dramatic irony in a monologue, although Sassoon stops short of having an officer condemn himself in his own words.

The opening lines of “Banishment” reveal Sassoon's regard for the men of the trenches:

I am banished from the patient men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
...........................
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour.

At the end of the poem, Sassoon justifies his soldier's declaration and his ultimate return to the trenches in terms of his feeling for his men: “Love drove me to rebel. / Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; / And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.” Sassoon's satire derives force from his conviction that only malice or incompetence could explain others' willingness to allow the fighting to continue.

Had one only the record of Sassoon's verse, one might conclude that the war was fought between soldiers and civilians. As critic Joseph Cohen has observed, Sassoon's “approach was direct and his technique simple: he emphasized and re-emphasized the contrast between the relative comfort and safety of the homefront and the misery and insecurity of the trenches. While the poetic worth of his formula was questionable, its communicative potential was unlimited.” Sassoon referred to his “acute antagonism toward anyone whose attitude to the War was what I called ‘complacent’—people who just accepted it as inevitable and then proceeded to do well out of it, or who smugly performed the patriotic jobs which enabled them to congratulate themselves on being part of the National Effort.”

His contempt for civilians who desired to win the war at all costs appears frequently. In “Ancient History,” he has “Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain” recall Cain affectionately and Abel contemptuously: “‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? … / ‘God always hated Cain’ … He bowed his head—/ The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.” In “How to Die” her ridicules civilian misapprehensions of reality. In the first half of the poem, he presents an idealized version of a soldier's death, complete with “skies / Where holy brightness breaks in flame.” Then comes a realistic picture of soldiers who die “with sobs and curses, / And sullen faces white as chalk.” Sassoon's ironical conclusion, reserved for the end, is that soldiers die “not with haste / And shuddering groans; but passing through it / With due regard for decent taste.” Unlike the early “The Kiss,” this poem's consistency enables one to recognize the irony.

“The Hero” makes it almost impossible for a reader to miss the point. Sassoon called the plot of the narrative “Brother officer giving white-haired mother fictitious account of her cold-footed son's death at the front.” In the second stanza, the officer reveals that he has lied, and in the third he expresses his contempt for Jack, “cold-footed, useless swine” who panicked in the trenches, tried to effect his transfer home, and died ingloriously, “Blown to small bits” by a shell. The poem inspires conflicting sympathies. One can pity the officer who puts the coward's death in a good light for the mother, one can pity “that lonely woman with white hair,” and one can even pity Jack, for the last lines reveal him as a victim for whom no one cares except his mother. The poem almost meets the objection that Sassoon's poetry does not communicate the truth of his conflicting loyalties. Although Sassoon was aware of civilians' ignorance, he invites sympathy with an officer who deliberately ennobles the slain.

“Suicide in the Trenches” is Sassoon's most blatant lapse into overt propaganda. In the first stanza, a soldier maintains an “empty joy” that does not interfere with his peace of mind. In the second, “cowed and glum,” after experiencing winter in the trenches, “He put a bullet through his brain.” Had Sassoon left the stark biography to speak for itself, the poem might have been more effective, but, after a typographical separation that suggests the impossibility of transition, Sassoon shifts from simple narrative to pointed accusation:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Sassoon could not resist the opportunity of an easy target.

Sassoon is more sophisticated in “To Any Dead Officer,” which presents one side of a telephone conversation between a living officer and his dead comrade. The monologue moves quickly through a description of the officer who had “hated tours of trenches” and desired to live, but who fell, machine-gunned, “in a hopeless dud-attack” and appeared in “the bloody Roll of Honour.” After a typographical separation, Sassoon indicates his specific target:

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,
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 into the dark, Cheerio!
I wish they'd killed you in a decent show.

Sassoon's expression of his hatred for excessive patriotism approaches the rabid. In “Blighters,” Sassoon attacks the frenzied jingoism of the music hall, using an experience from a convalescent leave that recalls E. A. Mackintosh's “Recruiting.” Civilians heartily approve “prancing ranks / Of harlots” as they sing “We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!” Sassoon imagines a tank coming down the aisle to clear the stage of the performers, to end jokes that “mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.” Similarly, “Fight to a Finish” presents soldiers taking revenge on civilians after the war. At a celebration designed to “cheer the soldiers who'd refrained from dying,” the “Grim Fusiliers” fix bayonets, charge the civilians, deal “Yellow-Pressmen” their just deserts, and go “To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.” The poem neither introduces nor attempts to change any idea but is merely a moment of wishful thinking. “They” is also weak, primarily because the target presents no real challenge. The role of the clergy in encouraging the war made a bishop too obvious a target even for civilians, while at the front many churchmen were beneath contempt for the hypocrisy of exhorting others to fight while remaining outside the fighting areas themselves. In “They,” a bishop says that returning soldiers “will not be the same; for they'll have fought / In a just cause,” will have opposed Anti-Christ, and will have “challenged Death and dared him face to face.” To this the soldiers respond “We're none of us the same!”, since one has lost his legs and another his sight, a third has received a bullet through the lungs, and a fourth has contracted syphilis. Like the poems of soldiers' revenge on civilians, “They” communicates little except the poet's resentment.

Sassoon's poems of brutal reality and vindictive satire, particularly when compared with Owen's verse, have obscured his attempts to convey a sense of pity for the soldier/victim, most of which did, to be sure, appear in combination with satiric thrusts aimed at the insensitive civilian. Sassoon's disgust for the acquiescent obscured his other feelings. He had personal experience of civilians' indifference. According to Robert Wohl, Lady Brassey told Sassoon that “he had nothing to lose in going back to France as he was not the bearer of a great name.” Sassoon frequently attacked such attitudes. One of his more successful satires is “Lamentations,” which uses a persona instead of an authorial intrusion to make its point. The poem reveals the insensitivity of one soldier who sees a second soldier shaken by inconsolable grief at the death of his brother:

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.
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.

Two locutions, “it was no good trying / To stop it” and “all because his brother” has died, establish the narrator's lack of feeling and prepare the reader for the final irony of the poem.

Sassoon uses a similar technique in “Survivors,” employing a speaker who discusses shell shock victims with little understanding of their plight. The speaker feels that the soldiers will soon recover, that “they'll be proud / Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride,” but Sassoon assures the reader's sympathy for the patients: they are “boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,” they suffer from “dreams that drip with murder,” and they are “Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.” The memorable phrases of the poem focus on the suffering of the patients.

Sassoon's response to insensitive civilians was either to lash the target directly or to dramatize an unsympathetic situation. In “Glory of Women” Sassoon attacks women who allow their patriotic chauvinism to prevail over pity:

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed,
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.
                    O German mother dreaming by the fire,
                    While you are knitting socks to send your son
                    His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Sassoon's anger seems hardly fair since he is condemning attitudes he himself had held before he went to the trenches. However, he explicitly decries support of the war effort by the ignorant who “delight” in “tales of dirt and danger.”

More effective as a criticism of insensitivity is “Does It Matter?”, which dramatizes the plight of a soldier crippled by the war. The second stanza is particularly fine:

Does it matter?—losing your sight? …
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

The effect of combining the clichés of consolation with vivid description is to make the victim pathetic, partly because he is subjected to the “sympathy” of the indifferent. In “The One-Legged Man,” whose “Thank God they had to amputate!” deflates civilian expectations of a soldier's unflagging fighting spirit, the poem's effect results from the reader's recognition that, if one prefers amputation to the front, war must indeed be horrible. In “Does It Matter?” the reader cannot help feeling that the victim would be better dead than an object of insincere pity.

In “Dreamers” and “Attack,” Sassoon communicates his pity for soldier/victims. In the sonnet “Dreamers,” the octave discusses soldiers in abstract generalizations and, standing alone, would not have been out of place in a Victorian anthology of romantic war poetry. The sestet, however, offers an officer's concrete observations, conveying his pity for his men:

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.

By limiting himself to straightforward “reporting,” Sassoon conveys more feeling than when his focus shifts to his audience. “Attack” describes dawn as the men attack:

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

The technique of expressing pity through the eyes of an officer/narrator worked well in other poems. In “The Dug-Out,” written in July 1918, the speaker addresses a soldier sleeping in the trench. Usually poets described the dead as sleeping, but Sassoon inverts this: “You are too young to fall asleep for ever; / And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.” “In the Pink” describes the thoughts of an officer whose duties include censoring the letters written by his men. He reads between the lines of a soldier's letter to his sweetheart which ends “This leaves me in the pink.” In contrast to the soldier's assurances, the officer understands what the soldier is actually thinking: “to-morrow night we trudge / Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.” The officer summarizes the soldier's situation: “To-night he's in the pink; but soon he'll die. / And still the war goes on—he don't know why.”

Sassoon's remarkable “Repression of War Experience” （which takes its title from a paper read by W. H. R. Rivers to the Royal Society of Medicine on 4 December 1917） delineates the thought processes of a shell shock victim who cannot keep his mind from the war. The soldier's thoughts return to war when other subjects cannot hold his attention:

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a month;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—
No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war. …

When the soldier lights his pipe, he notes that his hand is steady. When he examines a shelf of books, he sees them “dressed” in the colors of uniforms, a “jolly company” waiting in formation, “quiet and patient.” After a typographical separation, Sassoon has the soldier consider his situation:

You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You'd never think there was a bloody war on! …
O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease—
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy;
I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

This dramatic presentation of the shell shock victim's suffering is among Sassoon's more successful efforts.

Sassoon's achievement as a war poet does not depend on his poetic techniques, which are essentially Georgian, but on the insights that he forced upon the modern consciousness. Chiefly through his poetic protests the public became aware of the brutal reality of trench warfare, the disproportionate burden of suffering borne by the fighting soldier, and the growing disparity between soldiers and civilians. His satires of indifferent civilians, jingoistic patriots, and military incompetents communicated a sense of reality not accessible through the newspapers. His success has obscured his attempt to convey his sense of the pity of war. Sassoon was able to respond to the new world that the war introduced, but, when the Armistice ended the war, it also ended Sassoon's effectiveness as a poet.

During the war Sassoon was not alone in his poetical expressions of dissatisfaction. Several other poets directed satire against civilian and political targets, and some went beyond Sassoon's protest against the conduct of the war. Sassoon was the first, at great risk, to accuse openly those whose complicity was responsible for the prolongation of the war and to reach a large audience with his protests. However, others later attacked the same targets in their verse, and some writers articulated protests comparable to those of the late 1960s and early 1970s.