It was chance, if anything, that brought Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen together at Craiglockhart. This meeting served one of the major catalysts in the development of Anglo-modernist poetry.
Biographical accounts report that Sassoon and Owen met in person sometime between the 15th & 19th of August, 1917. Craiglockhart, located in the south-western suburbs of Edinburgh, was occupied during the war by the British Army to house soldiers suffering from what was then known as "shell-shock" but what we now term post-traumatic stress disorder. Prior to their union at Craiglockhart, these two officer-poets traversed vastly dissimilar paths leading to this strange meeting.
Before the war, Sassoon lived the life of a Kentish, country-gentleman, occupied his time in the leisure's of writing poetry and hunting. Owen, on the other hand, lived an itinerant life, leaping from roles as a lay assistant of Reverend Herbert Wigan of Dunsden, to a school teacher in Shrewsbury, followed by a year-long stint in France at a boarding school in Bordeaux. Like Sassoon, Owen’s constant star was poetry. But by 1914, the onset of war became their primary focus.
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
with perishing great darkness closes in.
From 1914, W.Owen,
The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Til beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge: yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free
from Absolution, Sassoon
A year into the war, both men assumed frontline positions as officers. By late 1915, Sassoon had steadily earned a reputation among his men as ‘Mad-Jack’, due to his brave and foolhardy exploits. For Sassoon in particular, 1915 proved a year of military esteem, toppled by personal tragedy. Awarded the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded Lance-Corporal under heavy machine gun fire and artillery bombardment, Sassoon was later awarded the Victoria Cross for single-handedly capturing a German trench. However, tragedy struck when Sassoon discovered his brother, Hamo, had been killed at Gallipoli and buried at sea.
Give me your hand, my brother, search my face;
Look in these eyes, lest I should think of shame;
for we have made an end of all things base.
We are returning by the road we came.
Your lot is with the ghosts of soldiers dead,
and I am in the field where men must fight.
But in the gloom I see your laurel’d head
and through your victory
I shall win the light’
To My Brother, Sassoon, 1915
It is reported by Sassoon's biographer, John Stuart, that in the same month, November 1915, Sassoon met Robert Graves, an aspiring fellow writer and poet. Graves outlived the war to mine the classical tradition with translations and adaptations of the Greek, Roman and Biblical cannon, producing books such as ‘I, Claudius’ & retellings of ancient mythologies.
By 1917, the pitiful tragedy & horror of war finally took its toll on Sassoon, after an event which irrevocably changed his fundamental attitudes and behaviour. After witnessing the death of his close friend David Thomas, witnesses recount how Sassoon’s brave exploits teetered on the suicidal. An early disdain for the brutalities of trench warfare began to manifest in apathy, outrage & soon, rebellion.
On the night of the 14th April 1917, Sassoon recorded in his diary that he was ‘fully expecting to get killed on Monday morning’. The next day, after apparently making himself an ‘easy target’ for German snipers, he carelessly stuck his head above the parapet of a trench and was struck in the temple. Somehow, Sassoon survived and was sent back to recover in England.
During his convalescence, Sassoon met H.W. Massingam, editor of The Nation (which by 1931 ceased and absorbed into the New Statesman), alongside the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell. Both men encouraged the highly decorated officer to make a public statement denouncing the war. Many years later in his autobiography Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sassoon revealed that one night during this period, he tossed his Military cross into the River Mersey.
One can infer from this his personal & moral disenfranchisement of the war. So it was that Sassoon decided to openly express his opposition to the war. In July 1917, he wrote A Soldiers Declaration and sent it to the commanding officers of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers. This letter outlined his opposition to the war and stated that he would not be returning to the frontline. He fully expected to be court martialled, writing to Robert Graves ‘(I am) fully aware of what I am letting myself in for’.
On the 30th July, as the British army prepared for the third offensive at Ypres in the Battle of Passchendaele, Sassoon’s A Soldier's Declaration was read aloud in Parliament, and published in The Times, next day. Sassoon opened his declaration attesting
“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 this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed”.
However, instead of being court martialed, Sassoon was declared unfit for duty by a British Army medical board, who wished to avoid the controversial publicity that would surround a military tribunal in which the accused was a decorated war hero.
by mid-July 1917, Sassoon was sent, in a form of military exile, to Craiglockhart, out of immediate reach from publicity.
In contrast to Sassoon, Owen had been engaged on the frontline at the Battle of the Somme since January 1917. After a heavy period of relentless hardship in combat, Owen began to manifest signs of psychological trauma. As a result of his worsening condition, he too was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in June 1917.
The stage was set for one of the great, strange encounters of English literary history.
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