Saturday 9 July 2016

S L Sassoon - 2nd Lt and Poet

There were lots of medical records stating that Siegfried Lorraine Sassoon was fit for military service in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers from 1914 onwards.

However it seems that on July 13th 1918 he had some poetry published in The Nation Vol XXIII No 15 and because of the controversial nature of his description of life as a soldier on the frontline he was deemed unfit to serve and be in in charge of men... it appears he was a Captain by this point.

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front,[1] he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war.[2] Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".

My father was not allowed to sign up to service in the second world war as he was suffering from a mental breakdown after a doodlebug collapsed the ceiling of his bedroom in their house on Green Street in Forest Gate, London. During Dad's last months in a hospice he told me that around this time he had to give up his university place at Kings College where he was studying a Physics degree. He was a very clever man (and possibly Aspergers - recognising himself in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night during his latter years!) and was always haunted by the fact that his two sisters both had degrees and he didn't. Sadly mental health issues in civilians weren't well supported as so many were coming back from the war with worse problems.









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