Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirized the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war with his "Soldier's Declaration" of July 1917, which resulted in his being sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital. During this period, Sassoon met and formed a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume, fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the Sherston trilogy, which is made up of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). Sassoon is also known for his poetry collection The Old Huntsman (1917).
Early life
Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-Gothic mansion named Weirleigh (after its builder Harrison Weir) in Matfield, Kent. His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895), son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family. Siegfried's mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London; among them her brother, Sir Hamo Thornycroft.
There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Wagner's operas. His middle name, Loraine, was the surname of a clergyman she respected.
Siegfried was the second of three sons, the others being Michael and Hamo. When he was four years old his parents separated. During his father's weekly visits to the boys, Theresa locked herself in the drawing-room. In 1895, Alfred Sassoon died of tuberculosis.
Sassoon was educated at the New Beacon School, Sevenoaks, Kent; at Marlborough College, Wiltshire; and at Clare College, Cambridge, where from 1905 to 1907 he read history. He left Cambridge without a degree and spent the years after 1907 hunting, playing cricket and writing verse, some of which he published privately.
Although his father had been disinherited from the Sassoon fortune for marrying a woman who was not Jewish, Siegfried had a small private income that allowed him to live modestly without having to earn a living. Later, he was left a large legacy by an aunt, Rachel Beer, allowing him to buy the great estate of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire.
His first published success, "The Daffodil Murderer" (1913), was a parody of John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy. Robert Graves, in Good-Bye to All That, describes it as a "parody of Masefield which, midway through, had forgotten to be a parody and turned into rather good Masefield."
Cricket Sassoon played for his village cricket team at a young age, and his brothers and three of his tutors were cricket enthusiasts. The Marchant family were neighbouring landowners, and Frank Marchant was captain of the county side between 1890 and 1897. Sassoon played for his house at Marlborough, once taking 7 wickets for 18 runs, and during this time he contributed three poems to Cricket magazine.
For some years around 1910 he often played for Bluemantles Cricket Club, at the Nevill Ground, in Tunbridge Wells, sometimes alongside Arthur Conan Doyle. He later played for a Downside Abbey team called "The Ravens", continuing playing well into his seventies.Coldham, James D (1954) Siegfried Sassoon and cricket, The Cricketer, June 1954. Republished at CricInfo.
War service
The Western Front: Military Cross
Sassoon joined the Army just as the threat of a new European war was recognized, and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on 4 August 1914, the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. He broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before leaving England, spending the spring of 1915 convalescing. He was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion (Special Reserve), Royal Welch Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant on 29 May 1915.
On 1 November, his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign, dying on board the ship after having had his leg amputated. In the same month, Siegfried was sent to the 1st Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, in France, where he met Robert Graves, and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed each other's work. Though this did not have much perceptible influence on Graves' poetry, Graves' views on what may be called "gritty realism" profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of what constituted poetry.
He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda. Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of "no truth unfitting" had a significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.
Sassoon's periods of duty on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions, including the single-handed capture of a German trench. Armed with grenades, he scattered sixty German soldiers:Sassoon's bravery was so inspiring that soldiers of his company said that they felt confident only when they were accompanied by him. He often went out on night raids and bombing patrols, and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander.
Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "Mad Jack" by his men for his near-suicidal exploits. On 27 July 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross; the citation read:
Robert Graves described Sassoon as engaging in suicidal feats of bravery. Sassoon was also later recommended for the Victoria Cross.
War opposition and Craiglockhart Despite his decorations and reputation, in 1917 Sassoon decided to make a stand against the conduct of the war. One of the reasons for his violent anti-war feeling was the death of his friend David Cuthbert Thomas, who appears as "Dick Tiltwood" in the Sherston trilogy. Sassoon spent years trying to overcome his grief.
In August 1916, Sassoon arrived at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for convalescing officers, with a case of gastric fever. He wrote: "To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for the first few days very much like a paradise". Graves ended up at Somerville as well. "How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies' College at Oxford", Sassoon wrote to him in 1917.
At the end of a spell of convalescent leave, Sassoon declined to return to duty; encouraged by pacifist friends such as Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration. Forwarded to the press and read aloud in the House of Commons by a sympathetic member of Parliament, the letter was seen by some as treasonous ("I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority") or at best as condemning the war government's motives ("I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest").
Rather than court-martial Sassoon, the Under-Secretary of State for War, Ian Macpherson, decided that he was unfit for service and had him sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he officially was treated for neurasthenia ("shell shock").
At the end of 1917, Sassoon was posted to Limerick, Ireland, where in the New Barracks he helped train new recruits. He wrote that it was a period of respite for him, and allowed him to indulge in his love of hunting. Reflecting on the period years later, he mentioned how trouble was brewing in Ireland at the time, in the few years before the Irish War of Independence. After only a short period in Limerick he was posted to Egypt.
Before declining to return to active service, Sassoon had thrown his MC ribbon into the sea at Formby beach; some people misinterpreted his description of this incident in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and believed that he had thrown the medal itself away, but this was retained and passed into the care of his family. He stated that he did not do this as a symbolic rejection of militaristic values, but simply out of the need to perform some destructive act as catharsis. His account states that one of his pre-war sporting trophies, had he had one to hand, would have served his purpose equally well. The actual decoration was rediscovered after the death of Sassoon's only son, George, and subsequently became the subject of a dispute among Sassoon's heirs.
At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, another poet. It was thanks to Sassoon that Owen persevered in his ambition to write better poetry. A manuscript copy of Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth containing Sassoon's handwritten amendments survives as testimony to the extent of his influence and is currently on display at London's Imperial War Museum.
Sassoon became to Owen "Keats and Christ and Elijah", according to a surviving letter which demonstrates the depth of Owen's love and admiration for him. Both men returned to active service in France, but Owen was killed in 1918, a week before Armistice. Sassoon was promoted to lieutenant, and, having spent some time in Palestine, eventually returned to France by 20 June 1918.
Sassoon was wounded again on 13 July 1918—reportedly by friendly fire when he was injured by a shot to the head by a fellow British soldier who had apparently mistaken him for a German, near Arras, France. As a result of this injury, he spent the remainder of the war in Britain. By this time, he had been promoted to acting captain. He relinquished his commission on health grounds on 12 March 1919, but retained the rank of captain.
After the war, Sassoon was instrumental in bringing Owen's work to the attention of a wider audience. Their relationship is the subject of Stephen MacDonald's play Not About Heroes.
Post-war life (editor and novelist)
Having lived for a period at Oxford, where he spent more time visiting literary friends than studying, Sassoon dabbled briefly in the politics of the Labour movement. In November 1918, he travelled to Blackburn to support the Labour candidate in the general election, Philip Snowden, who had been a pacifist during the war.
Though a self-confessed political novice, Sassoon delivered campaign speeches for Snowden, later writing that he 'felt grateful for [Snowden's] anti-war attitude in parliament, and had been angered by the abuse thrown at him. All my political sympathies were with him.'
While his commitment to politics waned after this, he remained a supporter of the Labour Party, and in 1929 'rejoiced that [they] had gained seats in the British general election.' Similarly, 'news of the massive Labour victory in 1945 pleased him, because many Tories from the class he had loathed during the First World War had gone.'
In 1919 Sassoon took up a post as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. He lived at 54 Tufton Street, Westminster, from 1919 to 1925; the house is no longer standing, but the location of his former home is marked by a memorial plaque.