Siegfried Sassoon
Encouraged by Betrand Russell and other war resisters, the British soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote a powerful declaration at the height of the bloody Great War: Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration
It was published and read in the British Parliament by a sympathetic MP – and created quite a stir.
Sassoon’s statement prompted demands for court-martial. In the end, an elegant compromise was struck. Instead of shooting the rebellious but socially prominent soldier, Sassoon was confined to an War Hospital for the remainder of the war on the pretext he was suffering from neurasthenia (shell-shock).
Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.
3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
July, 1917.
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. 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 prolonging 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.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy 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 enough imagination to realise.
Sassoon’s brief statement (emphasis added) has an honest eloquence that speaks directly to this generation.
That’s partly because each succeeding generation has shown a remarkable propensity to fall, all over again, for much the same lies, deceptions and mind-numbing bellicosity that fooled their fathers and grandfathers.
These days the First World War is typically represented as a necessary, although ultimately insufficient war. The involvement of English-speaking countries is lauded as a great act of collective sacrifice. Sassoon’s insight was far more accurate. Peace was negotiable as late as 1917, but Britain’s war leadership and their backers were bent on agression and conquest.
Unlike his friend and fellow-poet Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon survived the Great War and lived to a ripe old age.
He never shared in the fabulous wealth of the famous Sassoon family, as his father married a gentile for love and was disinherited. But Siegfried left the world something much finer than the trappings of an ill-gotten fortune, built largely on opium trading.
He left words that continue to inspire…
Siegfried Sassoon
By Siegfried Sassoon
WHEN Wisdom tells me that the world’s a speck
Lost on the shoreless blue of God’s To-Day…
I smile, and think, ‘For every man his way:
The world’s my ship, and I’m alone on deck!’
And when he tells me that the world’s a spark
Lit in the whistling gloom of God’s To-Night…
I look within me to the edge of dark,
And dream, ‘The world’s my field, and I’m the lark,
Alone with upward song, alone with light!’
