Quotes from Siegfried Sassoon

O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood. Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood - Mud and rain.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

Life for the majority of the population. Is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds. Culminating in a cheap funeral.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.

In me the tiger sniffs the rose.

Let my soul, a shining tree, Silver branches lift towards thee, Where on a hallowed winter's night The clear-eyed angels may alight.

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land.

Who will remember, passing through this gate,The unheroic dead who fed the guns?Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate—Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

And when the war is done and youth stone deadI'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns beginThey think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I believe that the war, upon which I entered as a war of defense 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 prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

Suicide in the trenches: I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. * * * * * You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled, And one arm bent across your sullen cold Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you, Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold; And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder; Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head.... You are too young to fall asleep for ever; And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. We found the little kingdom of our passion that all can share who walk the road of lovers. In wild and secret happiness we stumbled; and gods and demons clamoured in our senses.

But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.

EVERYONE suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight. Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away ... O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green, Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes Remembrance of all beauty that has been, And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Who's this—alone with stone and sky? It's only my old dog and I— It's only him; it's only me; Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most—we two together? Smells, and awareness of the weather. What is it makes us more than dust? My trust in him; in me his trust.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.