by Max Egremont
Sassoon, (Georgiana) Theresa (née Thorneycroft; Siegfried’s mother)
Scarborough: Owen in
Schiff, Sidney
Schlieffen Plan
Schoenberg, Arnold
Scott, Marion
Scott Moncrieff, Charles
Second World War
Serbia
Service, Robert
Shaw, Glen Byam
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sidgwick and Jackson (publishers)
Silkin, Jon: (ed.) Penguin Book of First War Poetry
Sitwell, Edith; edits Owen’s Poems
Sitwell, Osbert
Sitwell, Sacheverell
Skyros
Soldier Poets (anthology)
Somme, battle of the (1916)
Sorley, Charles: wishes to work with poor; education; background; affection for Germany; poetic taste; sense of England; and outbreak of war; commissioned and trained; on lengthening war; on Brooke’s poetry; in France; killed by sniper; Graves admires; Sassoon reads; part-translates Faust; Nichols reads work in USA; post-war reputation; ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’; Marlborough and Other Poems; ‘Saints Have Adored the Lofty Soul of You’; ‘Such, Such is Death’; ‘To Germany’; ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’
Sorley, William Ritchie (Charles’s father)
South Africa
Spears, Sir Edward
Spender, Stephen
Squire, Sir John C.
Steep, Hampshire
Stewart, Patrick Shaw
Strachey, James
Strachey, Lytton
Strauss, Richard
Sudermann, Hermann: Undying Past
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
Tagore, Rabindranath
Tailhade, Laurent
Tennant, Stephen
Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron
Tennyson, Julian
Terraine, John
Thomas, David
Thomas, Edward: catches venereal disease; love of country; poetic taste; and Brooke; at Dymock; background; mental disturbance; meets Frost; patriotism; considers enlisting; writes poetry; enlists in Artists’ Rifles; reviews Brooke’s 1914 and Other Poems; life of Duke of Marlborough; at training camp; commissioned; moodiness; last leave in England and arrival in France; poetry noticed and published; diary; killed; book on Keats; post-war reputation; meets Gurney; ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’; ‘Cock-Crow’; Collected Poems; ‘The Combe’; ‘For These’; ‘Haymaking’; ‘Home’ (first of that title); ‘Home’ (second); The Icknield Way; ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’; ‘Lights Out’; ‘Lob’; ‘The Manor Farm’; ‘An Old Song II’; ‘The Owl’; ‘A Private’; ‘Rain’; ‘The Sun Used to Shine’; ‘There’s Nothing Like the Sun’; This England: An Anthology from her Writers; ‘This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’; ‘The Trumpet’; The Unknown Bird’; ‘Up in the Wind’
Thomas, Helen (née Noble)
Thomas, Mervyn
Thompson, Francis
Times, The: poetry in; prints Grenfell’s letters; reviews Brooke poems; publishes Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’; publishes Sassoon’s ‘To Victory’
Tolstoy, Count Leo
Toynbee, Philip
trenches: named
Turkey: successes against British; and Dardanelles campaign; Allenby’s victories against
U-boats: threat to supply
United States of America: enters war
Vachell, Horace: The Hill
Vaughan Williams, Ralph
Verdun, battle of (1916)
Versailles, treaty of (1919)
Vigny, Alfred de
Vimy Ridge
Vlamertinge
Wells, H. G.: Sassoon meets; Owen meets; caricatures Marsh; Men Like Gods; Mr Britling Sees It Through
Westminster Gazette
Wheels (journal)
Whitechapel
Wilde, Oscar
William II, Emperor of Germany
Winchester College
women: demand vote
Woolf, Leonard
Woolf, Virginia; Jacob’s Room
Wordsworth, William
Yeats, William Butler: xi; (ed.) The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
Ypres: 1st battle of (1914); ruined; Blunden moved to; 3rd battle of (Passchendaele, 1917)
Yser, River
Zimmermann telegram
Rupert Brooke. Virginia Woolf thought him beautiful and ‘the most restless, complex and analytic of human beings’.
Julian (centre inset and left) and Billy Grenfell (right) with their mother, Lady Desborough. Julian Grenfell thought ‘one loves one’s fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him.’
The Royal Naval Division ready for the Dardanelles. Rupert Brooke is in the middle row, second from the left.
Siegfried Sassoon. He thought courage was ‘the only thing that mattered’ in war.
Charles Sorley. Although an admirer of Germany and its culture, Sorley joined up promptly in 1914, declaring that ‘since getting a commission I have become a terror’.
Rugby chapel. The public schools instilled a belief in the nobility of patriotic sacrifice.
Isaac Rosenberg. ‘Death does not conquer me, I conquer death, I am the master.’
Jewish Whitechapel: the market in Goulston Street, near where Rosenberg grew up.
Ivor Gurney. He felt intensely moved by the comradeship that he found on the western front.
Edward Thomas. ‘I was born to be a ghost.’
Ivor Gurney’s ‘noble and golden’ Gloucestershire.
Robert Nichols after the war. He wrote of the shock of battle, ‘How can a boy consider what he can’t imagine?’
Edmund Blunden and his first wife, Mary. Blunden wrote later that ‘I was not anxious to go’ to the war yet thought ‘when will kindness have such power again?’
Robert Graves as a young officer. He was proud of having fought but thought his own war poems ‘journalistic’.
Wilfred Owen in uniform. He told his mother from the front that ‘I cannot do a better thing or be in a better place’.
Wilfred Owen and Laurent Tailhade. The Frenchman was the first poet that Owen knew well.
The first draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, with Siegfried Sassoon’s amendments.
The New Menin Gate at Ypres. Unveiled as a war memorial in 1927, it was derided by Siegfried Sassoon as a pompous ‘sepulchre of crime’.
Edmund Blunden (left), Siegfried Sassoon (centre), and Dennis Silk at Heytesbury, where the ageing Sassoon sought refuge from the modern world.
ALSO BY MAX EGREMONT
NONFICTION
The Cousins
Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour
Under Two Flags: The Life of Major General Sir Edward Spears
Siegfried Sassoon: A Life
Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia
FICTION
The Ladies’ Man
Dear Shadows
Painted Lives
Second Spring
Illustration Credits
The publishers gratefully acknowledge the following:
copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.
copyright © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.
copyright © Imperial War Museums (Q 71074).
copyright © Getty Images.
copyright © The Francis Frith Collection.
copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.
copyright © Jewish Museum, London.
reproduced with permission, The Ivor Gurney Estate.
special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University Library, and the estate of Edward Thomas.
copyright © Getty Images.
copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.
copyright © Edmund Blunden Literary Estate.
The private collection of William Graves.
with kind permission of the Trustees of the Wilfred Owen Estate, The Bodleian Libraries, The
University of Oxford. Image courtesy of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford.
with kind permission of the Trustees of the Wilfred Owen Estate, The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
With kind permission of the Trustees of the Wilfred Owen Estate and copyright © The British Library Board (Add MS 43721, f. 54).
copyright © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.
copyright © Edmund Blunden Literary Estate.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Max Egremont
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2014
Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits can be found at the back of the book.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014937209
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71303-4
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