Siegfried Sassoon's protest

On 30 July 1917 Hastings Lees-Smith, the MP for Northampton, read out in the House of Commons a letter from Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Sassoon, a poet and an officer decorated for gallantry, declared in it that he would not return to duty, because the war, which he had entered as “a war of defence and liberation”, had become “a war of aggression and conquest”, and was being “deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it”.

An officer from the front

Sassoon, born in 1886 in Kent, joined the army at the very start of the war, in August 1914, and was commissioned in May 1915. From November 1915 he was in France. That autumn his younger brother Hamo was killed at Gallipoli, and in March 1916 his close friend in the battalion, David Thomas, fell. Sassoon then became known for his daring, and his fellow officers called him “Mad Jack”. In 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing in wounded men under fire after a raid on the German trenches. In the spring of 1917 he fought in the Battle of Arras, where he was wounded in the shoulder, and at the end of April he returned to England.

The letter

While convalescing, Sassoon drew close to pacifist circles. He met the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who advised him to write a short personal statement and revised his draft. The text was written in June and dated July 1917. It began with the words: “I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority”. Sassoon wrote that he was acting on behalf of soldiers, that he was protesting not against the conduct of the war but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men were being sacrificed, and that he wanted to shake the complacency of those at home, who did not share and could not imagine the sufferings of the front. In July he sent the statement to his commanding officer and refused to return to duty.

The authorities did not want a court martial, which would have given the protest publicity. Sassoon’s friend Robert Graves, a poet and officer of the same regiment, persuaded him to go before a medical board, falsely warning him that otherwise he would be confined in an asylum for the rest of the war. In those days, while waiting in Liverpool for the authorities’ decision, Sassoon, according to accounts, threw the ribbon of his Military Cross into the Mersey (according to others, into the sea off Formby). On 20 July the board found that he was suffering a nervous breakdown and was not responsible for his actions, and on 23 July he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, which treated officers with shell shock.

The debate in the Commons

Lees-Smith reminded the House that Sassoon had enlisted in the first days of the war, had been wounded and decorated, and argued that sending him to hospital had been a political decision rather than a medical one, since the letter itself showed no trace of a breakdown. Replying for the War Office, the Under-Secretary of State, Macpherson, read out a telegram from the military authorities: discipline had been breached, but in view of the board’s finding no disciplinary action had been taken. Macpherson argued that the letter had been seen as a symptom of illness in an otherwise gallant officer, and defended the integrity of the board. In the same days the statement was printed by the left-wing press, and on the following day, 31 July, by The Times.

At Craiglockhart Sassoon came under the care of the psychiatrist William Rivers and met a younger poet there, Wilfred Owen, on whose work he had a great influence. The protest did not change government policy. In November 1917 Sassoon was declared fit for service, and in 1918 he returned to the front, although his views on the war had not changed.