Joy was slack,
And Wisdom gnawed his fingers, gloomy-eyed.
Young Fancy--how I loved him all the while--
Stared at his note-book with a rueful smile.
Their training done, I shipped them all to France.
Where most of those I'd loved too well got killed.
Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance,
And many a sickly, slender lord who'd filled
My soul long since with litanies of sin.
Went home, because they couldn't stand the din.
But the kind, common ones that I despised,
(Hardly a man of them I'd count as friend),
What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!
They stood and played the hero to the end,
Won gold and silver medals bright with bars,
And marched resplendent home with crowns and stars.
This book (in consequence almost wholly of these
bitter poems) enjoyed a remarkable success with the
soldiers fighting in France. One met it everywhere.
"Hello, you know Siegfried Sassoon then, do you?
Well, tell him from me that the more he lays it on thick
to those who don't realize the war the better. That's
the stuff we want. We're fed up with the old men's
death-or-glory stunt." In 1918 appeared 'Countermans'
Attack': here there is hardly a trace of the 'paradise'
feeling. You can't even think of paradise when you're
in hell. For Sassoon was now well along the way of
thorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparently
to no purpose? Did not the fact of war arch
him in like a dirty blood-red sky? He breaks out,
almost like a mad man, into imprecations, into
vehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellish
laughters that arise from a heart that is not broken
once for all but that is newly broken every day while
the Monster that devours the lives of the young
continues its ravages.
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