34. Soldier’s Declaration

Sassoon joined the British Army as the war was breaking out in 1914 but reached the front line only a year later. During the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916, he was awarded a high honor for bravery — the Military Cross — and in 1917 he was hit by a sniper’s bullet at the Battle of Arras.

That same year, he refused to return to the front and threw away the ribbon of his Military Cross and composed his “Soldier’s Declaration,” in which he said, “I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.”

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” his declaration read.

A poem called “Memory,” dated Feb. 1, 1918, exuded an elegiac tone, all the more so in the handwritten pages of a notebook contrasting his youthful fecklessness with the experience of war.

My heart is heavy-laden now; I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all I have lost.

Unlike his fellow war poet Owen, Sassoon survived the conflict and died in 1967.

/ Alan Cowell, NYT 2.8.