Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

by Siegfried Sassoon

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. While serving in the trenches during the First World War, he began to write poetry, and in 1917, while convalescing from wounds incurred during the fighting, he wrote a declaration against the war, for which he was sent to be treated for neurasthenia. Sassoon’s literary reputation grew after the war, and he is now known as one of the great World War I poets. His semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, which includes Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston’s Progress (1936), was incredibly successful during his lifetime. He published several more volumes of autobiography before his death in 1967.

  PAUL FUSSELL was born in 1925 and fought in World War II, where the death of a close friend on the battlefield next to him deeply affected his life and work, and eventually led to his writing the classic The Great War and Modern Memory, which won both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He edited Sassoon’s Long Journey for Oxford University Press and wrote or edited over twenty other books in his lifetime. He died in May 2012.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON

  Memoirs of an

  Infantry Officer

  Introduction by

  PAUL FUSSELL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited 1930

  First published in the United States of America by Coward, McCann, Inc. 1930

  This edition with an introduction by Paul Fussell published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright Siegfried Sassoon, 1930

  Copyright renewed Siegfried Sassoon, 1958

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Introduction by Paul Fussell from Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey:

  Selections from the Sherston Memoirs, edited by Paul Fussell (1983).

  Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press (USA).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Sassoon, Siegfried, 1886–1967.

  Memoirs of an infantry officer / Siegfried Sassoon; introduction by Paul Fussell.

  pages; cm.—(Penguin classics)

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59892-4

  1. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6037.A86M36 2013

  823’.912—dc23 2013000418

  Contents

  Introduction by PAUL FUSSELL

  MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER

  PART ONE At the Army School

  PART TWO The Raid

  PART THREE Before the Push

  PART FOUR Battle

  PART FIVE Escape

  PART SIX At the Depot

  PART SEVEN Rouen in February

  PART EIGHT The Second Battalion

  PART NINE Hospital and Convalescence

  PART TEN Independent Action

  Introduction

  The First World War, which lasted more than four years and killed seventeen million people, scored across twentieth-century history a deep dividing line, ugly as the scar of its own trenches. Before the war, the world could seem safely stabilized by monarchies, religious certainties, and patriotic pieties. But afterwards, the world appears recognizably “modern,” its institutions precarious, its faith feeble, its choices risky, its very landscapes perverted into the Waste Land. No one contemplating the events of 1914–1918 in relation to the years preceding can quite escape this sense of experience divided into “before” and “after.” Thus J. B. Priestley comparing the First War with the Second: “I think the First War cut deeper and played more tricks with time because it was first…. If you were born in 1894, as I was, you suddenly saw a great jagged crack in the looking-glass. After that your mind could not escape from the idea of a world that ended in 1914 and another one that began about 1919, with a wilderness of smoke and fury, outside sensible time, lying between them.” One reason we understand so readily this scheme of before and after is that we have been taught it by the young writers who found in the First World War their first important literary material and who addressed it with the thrill of discovery that has kept their works fresh and powerful. Writing within their various national styles, Henri Barbusse in France, Erich Maria Remarque in Germany, and Hemingway in America earned their earliest reputations by exploiting this theme of before and after. In England, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon did the same. All would agree with Priestley who says, “I left one world to spend an exile in limbo, came out of it to find myself in another world.”

  Why does Siegfried Sassoon seem so quintessentially English? One reason, surely, is his almost erotic fondness for the pastoral countryside. Another is his devotion to horses and horse culture. Another is his being equally skilled in prose and verse while declining to raise a clamor in either. And finally, there is his preference for experience over abstract thought, or, to put it more bluntly, his lack of interest in ideas. “My brain,” he says, “absorbs facts singly, and the process of relating them to one another has always been difficult.” When a reviewer observed of his book of poems Counter-Attack (1918) that Sassoon seemed “entirely devoid of intellectual edge,” he commented: “But I could have told him that myself.” What interests Sassoon instead is appearances, the look of things, especially the look of things in a past affectionately remembered, or even ambiguously remembered: “Oh yes, I see it all, from A to Z!” he says of the front line, recalling it with mingled love and horror at the end of these memoirs. These books emphasize Sassoon’s distinction as an observer and evoker of visible objects, both in peace and war. If the war came close to exterminating Sassoon, it also educated him, teaching him, he writes, “one useful lesson—that on the whole it was very nice to be alive at all.” It also developed in him “the habit of observing things with more receptiveness and accuracy than I had ever attempted to do in my undisciplined past.”

  The countryside he liked to feel alive in was the Weald of Kent, the wooded and agricultural part of that county southeast of London. He was born there in 1886, one of three brothers. His brother Hamo was to be killed at Gallipoli in 1915. The house of his well-to-do family stood at the edge of the green in the village of Matfield (here, in these fictionalized memoirs, “Butley”), a few miles from Tunbridge Wells. When Siegfried was five, his Spanish-Jewish father left his wife and died soon after. The boy grew up protected and encouraged by his mother, who had artistic and literary relatives. She knew critics and editors like Edmund Gosse and Edward Marsh, who interested themselves both in the boy and in his early verses. (The “Aunt Evelyn” of these memoirs is a fiction.) He went to Marlborough College (here, “Ballboro”), whose headmaster told him as he left, “Try to be more sensible.” He proceeded to Clare College, Cambridge, where he began reading law but shifted to history and finally to nothing at all, leaving after four terms and returning to Kent. Delighted to be reinstalled at home, far from demands that he think, he collected books, read (with hea
vy emphasis on the hunting whimsies of R. S. Surtees), played cricket and golf, fox-hunted, and mooned shyly about, versifying in the vague sentimental mode customary in pre-war minor poetry. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six he published privately nine volumes of dreamy romantic verse, a fact he omits entirely from the “outdoor” version of his life he presents here.

  This idyll was ended by the outbreak of war on August 4, 1914. He was healthy, naïve, unthinkingly patriotic, and horsy, and by August 5 he was in the uniform of a cavalry trooper. He was twenty-eight years old. Soon he transferred to the infantry and became a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Before long he was in action in France, where his initial enthusiasm gradually yielded to outrage as he learned that the war was not at all the heroic, high-minded operation pictured by propaganda. He was a brave and able officer, and his men, with many of whom he was in love, liked him for his kindness to them. One remembers: “It was only once in a blue moon that we had an officer like Mr. Sassoon.” He turned fierce after his friend, fellow-officer David Thomas (“Dick Tiltwood”), was killed. Lieutenant D. C. Thomas had been Sassoon’s current ideal companion, a Galahad figure,

  One whose yellow head was kissed

  By the gods, who thought about him

  Till they couldn’t do without him.

  (“There is no doubt that I am still a Pre-Raphaelite,” Sassoon once wrote in his diary.)

  Conceiving that the cause of David’s death was the Germans rather than the war, Sassoon set himself to avenge him by bolder and bolder forays against the enemy. These helped earn him the nickname “Mad Jack” from his platoon. He won the Military Cross for bringing in wounded under fire, and he was soon wounded in the shoulder himself. While convalescing at home, pity for his men grew on him, together with a conviction that the war was a fraud, a swindle practiced on the troops by bellicose civilians at home and their viceregents, the staff, safely ensconced back at the Base. He began writing anti-homefront poems satirizing the cruelty and complacency of those whose relation to the war was rather forensic than empirical. These poems were very different from the ones he’d written before the war. Then, he had been content to turn out courteous little verses like this:

  NIMROD IN SEPTEMBER

  When half the drowsy world’s abed

  And misty morning rises red,

  With jollity of horn and lusty cheer,

  Young Nimrod urges on his dwindling rout;

  Along the yellowing coverts we can hear

  His horse’s hoofs thud hither and about:

  In mulberry coat he rides and makes

  Huge clamour in the sultry brakes.

  Before the war his poems had celebrated Dryads, “roundelays and jocund airs,” dulcimers and shoon, daffodillies, shepherds, and “ye patient kine.” Indeed, as the eminent pastoralist Edmund Blunden once said, “No poet of twentieth-century England…was originally more romantic and floral than young Siegfried Sassoon from Kent.” But now he unleashed a talent for irony and satire and contumely that had been sleeping all during his pastoral youth:

  “THEY”

  The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back

  They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

  In a just cause: they lead the last attack

  On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought

  New right to breed an honourable race,

  They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.”

  “We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

  “For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

  Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

  And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

  A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

  And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”

  (As Wilfred Owen noticed, “Sassoon admires Thos. Hardy more than anybody living.”)

  In the blank verse in which formerly he had described rural delights he now delivered outdoor views of a different sort:

  We’d gained our first objective hours before

  While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

  Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.

  Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

  With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

  And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

  The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

  High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

  And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

  Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

  And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

  Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

  And then the rain began—the jolly old rain!

  Back home the recruiting posters depicted women proudly watching the troops march away (“Women of Britain Say—‘GO!’”), and Phyllis Dare’s music-hall song was heard everywhere:

  Oh, we don’t want to lose you,

  But we think you ought to go;

  For your King and your Country

  Both need you so.

  We shall want you and miss you,

  But with all our might and main

  We will thank you, cheer you, kiss you,

  When you come back again.

  Sassoon’s response:

  GLORY OF WOMEN

  You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,

  Or wounded in a mentionable place.

  You worship decorations; you believe

  That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

  You make us shells. You listen with delight,

  By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

  You crown our distant ardours while we fight,

  And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.

  You can’t believe that British troops “retire”

  When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,

  Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.

  O German mother dreaming by the fire,

  While you are knitting socks to send your son

  His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

  Popular as poems like these were with the young avant-garde back in London, they scandalized the respectable. The critic John Middleton Murry found Sassoon’s performances “verses,…not poetry,” mere “violent journalism”: “He has no calm,” Murry wrote, “therefore he conveys no terror; he has no harmony, therefore he cannot pierce us with the anguish of discord.” Indeed, “Mr. Sassoon’s mind is a chaos.” Not certain whether to back this horse or not, Gosse straddled the critical fence, saying of Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917): “His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage….” One might imagine that the scandal produced by Sassoon’s anti-war poems would have been noticed everywhere in lettered England. But two years after the Armistice Rider Haggard confesses that he’s never heard of Siegfried Sassoon and wonders whether he’s not just another “Jew of the advanced school,” like Bakst, Epstein, or Proust. Urged by an acquaintance to read Sassoon’s poems, he finally does so, to find them “feeble and depressing rubbish.”

  But Sassoon was maturing an outrage more offensive than a few poems calling into question the official, sanitized view of the war. In July 1917, encouraged by H. W. Massingham (“Markington”), editor of the liberal weekly the Nation, and Bertrand Russell (“Thornton Tyrell”), he set off his own bombshell. He published his famous document “A Soldier’s Declaration,” in which he explained “his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army”:

  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 s
oldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

  I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong 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 practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

  S. SASSOON.

  He expected to be court-martialed for this, the attendant publicity, he hoped, adding force to the tiny public sentiment in favor of ending the war through a negotiated peace. Instead, assisted by his friend and fellow Royal Welch Fusilier Robert Graves (“David Cromlech”), he was sent by the authorities before a medical board, as if anyone voicing such pacific sentiments must be deranged. The medical officers found him overstrained and consigned him to a comfortable army mental hospital, Craiglockhart (here, “Slateford”), near Edinburgh.

  In the hospital he met a poetical fan of his, Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, currently being treated for combat neurasthenia. Owen’s enthusiasm for Sassoon’s poetry and person was unbounded. He wrote his mother: “I have just been reading Siegfried Sassoon, and am feeling at a very high pitch of emotion. Nothing like his trench life sketches has ever been written or ever will be written.” Owen quickly sought out his idol and sent this report to a friend: “He is very tall and stately, with a fine firm chisel’d (how’s that?) head, ordinary short brown hair. The general expression of his face is one of boredom…. The last thing he said was ‘Sweat your guts out writing poetry.’ ‘Eh?’ says I. ‘Sweat your guts out, I say!’ He also warned me against early publishing…. He himself is thirty! Looks under 25!” (Typically, in the horsy Memoirs of George Sherston Sassoon says nothing about this meeting, while dealing with it extensively in his report on his literary life, Siegfried’s Journey.)