Siegfried Sassoon - To the Warmongers

Most traumatised soldiers want to forget their experiences, but Siegfried Sassoon was different. He wanted to remember, to retell and to challenge.

In Regeneration, her partly speculative biographical novel of the poet, Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker says that he wrote this poem (as well as a few others) in hospital ten days after he was wounded. About "To the Warmongers" Pat Barker says: "Everything about the poem suggested that Sassoon's attitude to his war experience had been the opposite of what one normally encountered." This was because most traumatised soldiers wanted to forget what had happened to them. Sassoon, courageously, wanted to remember and to retell. It is fortunate he did, for no history book could convey, even in many pages, the reality of war that Siegfried Sasson encapsulates in one poem.

Siegfried Sassoon ~ The General

In this short but powerful poem, Siegfried Sassoon launched a powerful attack on the military authorities of the First World War.

Siegfried Sassoon joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in World War I and fought in France. Having been wounded twice, he was awarded the Military Cross. He threw it away in disgust because he believed that the war was being prolonged by those who had the power to end it. This disenchantment with the ideals of his superiors is savagely unleashed in the bitterness of the irony in "The General", a short but extremely powerful poem.