War poet Siegfried Sassoon - in his own words

Published on Wednesday 21 July 2010 18:04

A TREASURE trove of journals, manuscripts and letters belonging to a celebrated war poet sent to an Edinburgh military hospital when he refused to serve any longer has gone on public display for the first time.

• Siegfried Sassoon. Picture: Complimentary

Siegfried Sassoon, who struck up his famous friendship with fellow poet Wilfred Owen while the pair were being treated at Craiglockhart Hospital, wrote a famous declaration against the First World War in 1917 after going AWOL.

Kent-born Sassoon, who kept extensive journals while fighting on the Western Front, was sent north for treatment for shell-shock rather than be court-martialled after denouncing the horrors of the trenches.

The exhibition unveiled by Cambridge University - which bought a vast archive of material from Sassoon's surviving relatives last year - includes two letters he wrote from the hospital, as well as one of his original poems, Glory of Women, which was penned there.

The letters, to his friend Edward Dent, reveal his fears about being declared insane and committed to an asylum for refusing to fight in the war, and tell how his psychologist William Rivers persuaded him to atone for the perceived abandonment of his men by resuming his duties as an officer.

Sassoon, who spent five months at Craig-lockhart, went on to serve in both Palestine and France during the last year of the war before a further wound in July 1918 brought his active contribution to a close. A campaign to secure Sassoon's personal journals and papers was mounted last year by Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate and later became an honorary fellow. Writers Andrew Motion, Sebastian Faulks and Michael Morpurgo were among those to back the campaign.

The vast majority of material in the exhibition has never been seen in public. It includes a notebook containing his famous statement against the war, accounts of the moment he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Arras and the battlefield burial of one of his close friends, and a sketch of a statue he wanted to have put up in Cambridge as a memorial after his death.

There are also notebooks and diaries recording his earlier fox-hunting, horse-riding and cricketing exploits, and childhood notebooks of poems and stories given as presents to his mother.

John Wells, the exhibition curator, said: "The period Sassoon spent in Edinburgh was crucial, as the relative calm gave him time to work on a number of poems, and was also where he met Wilfred Owen and formed their famous friendship.

"Sassoon felt he was certain to be court-marshalled after being summoned back to HQ by his commanding officer; he was surprised to be treated for shell-shock and the letters reveal how he felt he was being treated as an amiable idiot. In the later letter he admits that ‘going back to the war as soon as possible was my only chance of peace'."

Sassoon is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of the First World War thanks to classic works like Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.