“For they were only your
fathers,” wrote Ewart Alan Mackintosh in 1916, addressing the troops slaughtered
in a raid on Arras that he had personally led, “but I was your officer”. The
message in Mackintosh’s touching poem “In Memoriam” is that he considered
himself responsible for ensuring his men’s safety and therefore suffered as much
as their families did when he failed in this task. Although only 23 and a
temporary lieutenant, he regarded himself as standing in loco parentis, a father
figure to those he led into battle. The officer himself was killed in action
the following year.
Mackintosh had done his best to
save the life of the mortally-wounded young soldier, David Sutherland, whose
death inspired the poem. Despite his best efforts, the boy's body went missing, and, instead of a grave, Sutherland's name appears on the Arras Memorial, where I saw it last Sunday afternoon, in the course of another very enjoyable poetry tour organised by the Western Front Association. Since then, I have been reflecting on what I heard, saw and learned, and feel I am beginning to understand a side of Siegfried Sassoon that I had previously not considered.
Like Siegfried Sassoon, the Scotsman Mackintosh was a product of
the English public school system, though St Paul’s School was a very different
place from Marlborough College. Different again were Uppingham and Chigwell, the
schools attended by Roland Leighton and his famous circle of friends,
immortalised in the memoirs of Leighton’s fiancée, Vera Brittain. Most of these
schools had a common ethos, holding patriotism, loyalty and courage in the
greatest regard. Along with this went a sense of responsibility to one’s
inferiors as well as respect for one’s superiors. Leighton and his friends
Victor Richardson and Edward Brittain were known as “The Three Musketeers” even
before they left school, and these solid boyhood relationships were of a kind that could
be built on to form the links that bound the British armed forces
together.
Some schools, like Uppingham,
included military training corps among their extra-mural activities, and they
were the breeding-ground for a large proportion of the young officers
commissioned early in the First World War. Robert Graves, educated at
Charterhouse, was, like many of his contemporaries, forced to cut short his
academic career before taking up his place at Oxford and reached the rank of
Captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the age of twenty. Charles Sorley, like Sassoon an Old Marlburian, whose sense of honour was so strongly-developed that he
is said to have volunteered for punishment when he broke school rules, enjoyed
the briefest of university careers and, also a captain, was barely twenty when
killed at the Battle of Loos. Edward Brittain, Vera's brother, felt that it was his duty to go to war, and took unkindly to his father's efforts to prevent him signing up, going so far as to suggest that Brittain senior's failure to attend public school was an important factor in his pacifism. There was certainly some priggishness involved in Edward's reaction.
The responsibility of officers
towards their men did not stop with lieutenants and captains, but continued up
the chain of command. If the junior officers considered themselves honour-bound
to protect the common soldiers, they also had certain expectations of their
superiors. This fact may be a key to the understanding of Sassoon’s outburst
against “The General”.
Sassoon, however, was not typical
of the junior officer class. This, too, may be a key to understanding his
actions, particularly the Soldier’s Declaration of 1917 and the one-man mutiny
that resulted in his being exiled to Craiglockhart Military Hospital to have his
war “neurosis” cured by pioneering psychiatrists. Educated at home until the
age of 13, he was never fully imbued with the public school cast of mind, which
may go some way towards explaining the brevity of his Cambridge career. By the
time he enlisted in 1914, he was nearly 28 years old. Instead of seeking a commission, he defied convention by entering the Sussex Yeomanry as an ordinary trooper. It was partly a practical decision; he did not wish to see his beloved hunting horse commandeered, and the only way to avoid this was to take Cockbird with him into a cavalry regiment; but the regular cavalry was an expensive place to be. The decision to enlist as a trooper, however, revealed how little he understood of military life. Believing himself unfit to be an officer, he imagined he would find comradeship amongst the ranks, but he soon realised that he was something of a misfit there. Nevertheless, the time he spent in the company of ordinary soldiers must have given him an edge later, when it came to understanding their mentality.
Admittedly the 28-year-old
Sassoon was not a particularly mature young man for his age. He had been
cosseted by his mother and encouraged to live at home on an unearned income,
spending his substantial leisure time on activities such as riding, cricket, and
(from a very early age) writing poetry. Life as a junior officer on the Western Front came as a
huge shock to his system, but he seems to have adapted with alacrity. He
wanted to have someone to care for, something to take responsibility for,
and the members of his platoon fulfilled that long-dormant emotional
need. It is hardly any wonder, then, that he saw red when he realised that
those further up the line of command were not demonstrating the same sense of
parental responsibility that he and his fellow lieutenants felt so strongly. He
was appalled when a senior commander insisted on a colonel dismounting in order to salute, and he was even more irritated by the general who came to give the troops a pep talk, ironically only revealing how out of touch he was with their situation.
Up until now, Siegfried had been a
conventional young man, with no inherent tendency to defy authority. Sassoon
the rebel was born when, three years into the war and aged 30, he participated
in the Battle of Arras He had already lost numerous friends in action, notably his beloved
David Thomas, but now he was beginning to feel he had a duty to do something
about it. Buoyed up by the publication of his first major collection, The Old Huntsman, and egged on by the socialist circle of Lady Ottoline Morrell, he took the action that made him notorious. Futile and foolhardy as others may have felt his gesture to be, he
summoned up the strength of character to make it, unfettered by the
pseudo-military discipline that had been inculcated in so many British
schoolboys over the previous century or so.
"The Lost Generation", as they are often referred to, were certainly the men who would have led Britain into the post-war world. Leighton, Sorley, Grenfell, Brooke and company were the brightest and best of young men and might have had glittering careers in public service or government. What was left, after so many of them had given their lives for their country, included the lucky, the lazy, the cowardly and the cunning. It also included a few men like Sassoon, who retained their individuality and questioned the war, choosing either to stay out of it or to make a stand against it; the latter were few in number. The Soldier's Declaration makes it quite clear that Sassoon was never a pacifist; his early belief in the justice of Britain's cause had endured. Perhaps surprisingly, he does not aim his criticism at the generals, but at the politicians who, he believed, were deliberately prolonging the war for their own ends, without considering the loss of humanity. Had not so many illustrious youths been killed, the face of post-war Britain would have been very different - but can we be sure it would have been for the better?
