false 146538 7 0 In November Sassoon received word that his brother Hamo had died at Gallipoli. On 17th Nov he was shipped to France with David Thomas. He was put into C Company, First Battalion. It was here that he met Robert Graves, described in his diary as ‘a young poet in Third Battalion and very much disliked’. He took part in working parties, but no combat. He later became transport officer and so managed to stay out of the front lines. After time on leave, on the 18th of May, 1916 he received word that David Thomas had died of a bullet to the throat. Both Graves and Sassoon were distraught, and in Siegfried’s case it inspired ‘the lust to kill’. He abandoned transport duties and went out on patrols whenever possible, desperate to kill as many Germans as he could, earning him the nickname ‘Mad Jack’. In April he was recommended for the Military Cross for his action in bringing in the dead and wounded after a raid. He received his medal on the day before the Somme. For the first days of the Somme, he was in reserve opposite Fricourt, watching the slaughter from a ridge. Fricourt was successfully taken, and on the 4th July the First Battalion moved up to the front line to attack Mametz Wood. It was here that he famously took a trench single handed. Unfortunately, Siegfried did nothing to consolidate the trench; he simply sat down and read a book, later returning to a berating from Greaves. It was in 1917, convalescing in 'Blighty' from a wound, that he decided to make a stand against the war. Encouraged by pacifist friends, he ignored his orders to return to duty and issued a declaration against the war. The army refused to court martial him, sending him instead to Craiglockhart, an institution for soldiers driven mad by the war. Here he met and influenced Wilfred Owen. In 1918 he briefly returned to active service, in Palestine and then France again, but after being wounded by friendly fire he ended the war convalescing. After the war he made a predictably unhappy marriage and had a son, George. He continued to write, but will be remembered as a war poet.]]> male Matfield, Kent 1901/12/13 1967/09/01 250839 1931313814 9781931313810 4 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173143890m/250839.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173143890s/250839.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/250839.Memoirs_of_an_Infantry_Officer 4.30 64 146538 4.11 263 26 1974 1391333 0571202659 9780571202652 4 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183222891m/1391333.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183222891s/1391333.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1391333.The_War_Poems 4.28 58 Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

]]> 146538 4.11 263 26 1983 334776 1846641136 9781846641138 4 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173840933m/334776.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173840933s/334776.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/334776.Memoirs_Of_A_Fox_Hunting_Man 3.82 57 146538 4.11 263 26 1929 1812959 0571132626 9780571132621 2 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188684571m/1812959.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188684571s/1812959.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1812959.Collected_Poems_1908_1956 4.24 17 Diaries, have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famous War Poems of 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.
</div>]]> 146538 4.11 263 26 1986 421056 0571099130 9780571099139 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174590407m/421056.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174590407s/421056.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/421056.The_Complete_Memoirs_of_George_Sherston 3.89 9 The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs.
</div>]]> 146538 4.11 263 26 1960 1542063 1932512144 9781932512144 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184949194m/1542063.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184949194s/1542063.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1542063.Sherston_s_Progress 4.14 7 146538 4.11 263 26 1983 2314273 1406538698 9781406538694 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2314273.Counter_Attack_and_Other_Poems 4.50 6 146538 4.11 263 26 2006 1620914 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187287474m/1620914.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187287474s/1620914.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1620914.Siegfried_Sassoon_Diaries_1923_1925 4.00 2 146538 4.11 263 26 750484 4.00 2 0 1985 1206123 0195033094 9780195033090 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1206123.Siegried_Sassoon_s_Long_Journey_Selections_from_the_Sherston_Memoirs 3.50 2 146538 4.11 263 26 1983 675210 057111685X 9780571116850 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187303557m/675210.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187303557s/675210.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/675210.Siegfried_Sassoon_Diaries_1920_1922 4.00 1 146538 4.11 263 26 1983