Abstract
If one wished to construct a composite of the conventional view of Siegfried Sassoon’s writings, it would run something like this. A minor Georgian poet, aware of his own lack of intellectual grasp, uses his power of visual documentation and strong sense of injustice to write trench verse that makes up in ironic satire what it lacks in verbal sophistication. Then, after the war, he finds his true voice in prose that reveals the idiocy and waste of the fighting by presenting it against a view of the Edwardian autumn afternoon that in its richness can only be called nostalgesic.
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Notes
Page references are to Rupert Hart-Davis’s edition of The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. London: Faber, 1983.
The clearest example of this is in Michael Thorpe, Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden and London: Oxford UP, 1986. Thorpe finds failures ‘of poetic tact’ and situations where Sassoon ‘overbalances into the ludicrous’ (29), writes lines ‘marred by a high-pitched rhetorical tone’, and shows ‘indisciplined expression’ (30). Most particularly, he talks of how, in the poems, ‘feeling outruns expression’ leading to the use of a ‘dangerously high proportion of cliché’ (30).
By contrast, the memorial at Thiepval, unveiled in 1932, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott to contain as many internal surfaces as possible so that the names of the 73,357 men killed on the Somme during 1916–17 could be inscribed upon it. It is hard to say whether this or the Menin Gate is a more or a less complete statement of the failure of language and identity in war: Allison Booth, in Postcards from the Trenches, Oxford: OUP, 1996 has claimed, with justification, that the central element of First World War memorials is the absence of the bodies that they memorialise, but the inadequacy of language seems just as forceful a presence of grieving and loss. Further irony is added by the circumstance that, before designing the Menin Gate, Scott had just completed the new University Library in Cambridge. Words, words, words …
Letter number 634, to Osbert Sitwell, July 1918. Collected Letters, 562.
The irony here is very powerful indeed, since the final stanza of the song runs: ‘If you want to find the old battalion,/I know where they are,/They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.’ The use of irony in such circumstances confirms its widespread nature as something approaching a survival mechanism in the discourse of the trenches, in using which Sassoon is displaying another sort of loyalty to his troops. The full text of the song is given in Brophy, John and Eric Partridge, ed., The Long Trail: Soldiers’ Songs and Slang 1914–18, 1931. London: Sphere, 1969, 53–4.
Although the word had been used dismissively since the early nineteenth century of a person regarded as weak or worthless, the specialised usage only came into existence during the war, to become more generalised in later years about a mechanical object that fails in its designed purpose, so that, when Sassoon is writing, it is to all effects part of the restricted code of trench warfare and those who practise it. See The Long Trail, 94 and Eric Partridge, ed. Jacqueline Simpson, A Dictionary of Historical Slang. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, 284–5.
See Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That, rev. ed. London: Cassell, 1957, 208: ‘Not carrying rifle and bayonet made officers conspicuous during an attack; in most divisions now they carried them.’
The full text is given in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber, 1937, repr. 1964, 496.
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© 1999 Stuart Sillars
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Sillars, S. (1999). ‘The singing will never be done’: Siegfried Sassoon and the Exile of Language. In: Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27664-6_5
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