A Poem for Armistice Day
Jason’s post on what is properly called Armistice Day, and the end of the myth of the nobility of war make this pertinent.
Suicide in the Trenches
by Siegfried Sassoon
- I knew a simple soldier boy
- Who grinned at life in empty joy,
- Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
- And whistled early with the lark.
- In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
- With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
- He put a bullet through his brain.
- No one spoke of him again.
- 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 served as a commissioned officer with the Royal Welch Fusilliers during the Great War alongside fellow poet Robert Graves. Amongst his wartime achievements was the single-handed capture of a German trench on the Hindenburg line, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. Sassoon became a pacifist, and upon the conclusion of his convalescence in the summer of 1917, he refused to return to war, penning a widely-published open letter, entitled “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” to his commanding officer. The letter concluded:
“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.”
“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.”
Amen.Report
I suppose then that even if we do dismiss Shelley, we have another poet who can help us to understand war.
Scott, what say you?Report
Indeed. Sassoon was also not afraid to call it murder:
Survivors
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I guess one person’s murder is the lawful killing of any enemy combatant. I guess the various Geneva Conventions must be all wrong.Report
Murder is more than a legal definition.Report
Unlike some folks , I don’t pretend to be a priest or a philosopher, but I am a lawyer.Report
Which means….what, exactly?Report
You say murder is more than a legal definition, then who is it that decides what that non-legal definition is?Report
Philosophers. Since it’s “Quote Hayek Day” for me once again, I’ll give you this:
The rule of law is something we discover through tradition, firsthand experience, and the public exercise of reason. We write it down not because we have settled it perfectly, once and for all, but because we are trying to settle it the best that we can.Report
Given that we must judge truth by the utterer, and that soldiers are the ones qualified to know…
…whom should I believe now? I’m so confused.Report
Sassoon knew what he was talking about and I respect that, though I disagree with him on the point that WW1 turned from a war of liberation into one of aggression and conquest.Report
Me too. It was never a war of liberation. One side consisted of imperial Britain, imperial France, Tsarist Russia, and the United States, and this was the more benevolent of the two sides.Report
So I guess if you were a Frenchman or a Belgian you would have been happy with the Germans occupying your country? Remember it was the Germans who invaded Russia and France. Not to mention that they promised the Mexicans a large chunk of the US to fight with them.Report
Actually, the Russians opened in the East when they invaded EastPrussia and Polish Galicia.Report
No, but if I were a native of the Belgian Congo or one of France’s many colonial occupations, I would probably be happy to see my masters under assault.Report
You would have only traded one master for another. Would your new German mater have been any kinder, I doubt it. In any event the German didn’t invaded Belgiam to help the Africans.Report
Even in the annals of war, World War I was a spectacular compendium of stupidity.
Although, in a way, we should thank Kaiser Wilhelm for once-and-for-all destroying the notion that hereditary monarchies (or families of same) had any special claims to intelligence, wisdom, or general worthiness.Report