K. Velk's Blog - Posts Tagged "siegfried-sassoon"

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It has been a couple of years since I read this book but it left a deep impression and I commend it to everyone. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells one man's experience at the end of England's Edwardian summer. Sassoon, and so many others and so much more, went over the cliff in World War One. It is the first of the three books known as the Sherston trilogy. They are all excellent, but this one is the pick of the litter of prize winners. Sassoon was a poet too, of course, and a great one. He writes like an angel. Below is one of my favorite passages. It comes just near the end of the book as Sherston is thinking back to the period of time on the Western front, shortly after the death of his best friend.

"I can see myself sitting in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris behind the support line. There is a strong smell of chloride of lime. I am scraping the caked mud off my wire-torn puttees with a rusty entrenching tool. Last night I was out patrolling with Private O'Brien, who used to be a dock labourer at Cardiff. We threw a few Mills' bombs at a German working-party who were putting up some wire and had no wish to do us any harm. Probably I am feeling pleased with myself about this. Now and 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 its trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash. A little weasel runs past my outstretched feet, looking 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 dissolved 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."






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