Sassoon's Travels

Someone recently asked me why the SSF is holding this year’s annual conference in Cardiff.  I found this question slightly puzzling.  Our previous conferences have been held in lots of different places: London, Oxford, Cambridge, Matfield, Marlborough, Stratford-upon Avon.  I suppose the reasoning behind the question is that most of the other places we have been (though not last year’s venue, Radley College) have had a fairly close association with the events of Siegfried Sassoon’s life, and Cardiff has no obvious link.  However, I think it should be recognised that Sassoon (despite a propensity for staying at home and enjoying his privacy) was both very sociable and very widely-travelled, more so than most men of his generation.

He did of course visit Cardiff.  In the course of his road trips in the early 1920s, there was scarcely any part of the UK that he did not visit.  As a soldier, he had been on active service in France, Belgium and Palestine and had temporarily been lodged in various military camps and hospitals in towns ranging from Lewes to Liverpool, from Edinburgh to Limerick.   After the war, he enjoyed visiting Europe despite the ravages left behind by the recent conflict in some areas; he dallied with a German prince in Rome, visited the South of France with a wealthy patron, went to Sicily with Stephen Tennant and to Switzerland with the composer William Walton.  Perhaps this eagerness to travel is one of the reasons for the many friendships he established with eminent people all over the world, of which I intend to say more in a future post.

Let us restrict ourselves to Sassoon’s travels for the time being.  In April 1921, Sassoon was in South Wales as a "correspondent" for The Nation, and visited industrial towns such as Neath and Llanelli (where he bought two large bananas and went for a walk) before arriving in Cardiff on 13 April.  He found the city "depressing" and went to bed before dinner, commenting wryly in his diary "What a vivid account I am writing".  He did, however, enjoy viewing Dante Gabriel Rossetti's altarpiece in Llandaff Cathedral in his few moments of leisure.  From there he went to Merthyr to see for himself the effects of the miners' strike.

David Gray, in his bibliography at http://www.siegfried-sassoon.co.uk, lays out the itinerary of one of Sassoon’s 1924 road trips, which lasted for a fortnight in September.  Earlier in the summer, he had been in Wales visiting his poet friend Walter de la Mare at Manorbier in Pembrokeshire.  Siegfried's diaries often record which hotels he stayed in, and these included the Royal at Ross-on-Wye, the Globe at King's Lynn and the Lamb at Ely.  Of the whole list, only one - "The Hotel" at Church Stretton - is no longer a hotel.  So there is plenty of opportunity to walk in Siegfried's footsteps or even sleep in a room where he once slept, if you are prepared to do the research.

A member of the SSF committee did in fact locate the very room Siegfried slept in when he was a convalescent patient at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1917.  It was temporarily occupied at the time by an overseas student on a summer course, who was delighted to learn that the room had been previously used by "a famous English poet".  We also located the rooms in Merton Street, personally selected by Lady Ottoline Morrell for Siegfried when he returned to Oxford after the war to pursue a "course of independent study"; he ended up spending most of his time visiting other literary acquaintances such as John Masefield and Robert Bridges, on "Parnassus" (as Boars Hill had become known).  The latter was the location for one of the most memorable SSF excursions of all time, back in 2008.

Perhaps one of Sassoon's most memorable journeys, and the one that forms a major part of such "action" as there is in one of his last books, Siegfried's Journey (1946), was the lecture tour of the United States, on which he embarked shortly after the First World War.  In addition to earning him over $2000, it opened his eyes to a way of life so different from his past experience that he found it almost overwhelming at first.  (On arrival in New York, he admitted to finding the city "depressing" - so perhaps Cardiff was not so bad after all.)

By the time he wrote Siegfried's Journey, Sassoon was at another emotional low point.  Now in his sixties and separated from his wife, he did little travelling after that date (although he never ceased to drive with panache, frightening the wits out of new friends like Dennis Silk).  His visits were now restricted to places like Cambridge, where his son George was an undergraduate in the 1950s, and Stratford, where he went to see plays produced by his old friend Glen Byam Shaw, who had become director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1952.

I could go on - but what, I hope, stands out from this short summary of Sassoon's travels is the enormous scope it gives the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship for future events and conference venues.  As a literary society, we are at a disadvantage in not having a "base", in the form of a house or museum open to the public where we could hold events.  On the other hand, moving from one location to another and still managing to find Sassoon connections is a wonderful way of bringing his life and work to the notice of people around the country, and indeed the world.  It also makes it possible to meet a large proportion of our membership; if you can't make it to one of our events because of the distance or difficulty of travel, do not despair: we are almost certain to be in your area, sooner or later.

Return to Heytesbury

I think it is time to start talking about our intentions for 2014.  Last year the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship was invited to participate in an event in Heytesbury, Wiltshire (the village where Siegfried Sassoon spent the last 33 years of his life), which was being planned by local people to commemorate the start of the First World War.  Naturally we agreed immediately, and arrangements for this event are now beginning in earnest.

Siegfried and his new wife, Hester, moved into Heytesbury House in 1934; he could afford to buy it only because of a legacy from his aunt, the fabulously wealthy Rachel Beer, who had died in 1927 after a lingering illness.  He loved the village, and remained there after his marriage broke up.  Its proximity to Downside Abbey and to Mells, the home of the Asquiths, was an additional attraction that greatly affected his social activities during the latter years of his life.  Siegfried's pastimes while he was there included playing cricket with the monks of Downside.  During the Second World War, however, much of the residential accommodation was given over to American soldiers.

It was at Heytesbury that Siegfried Sassoon died, and he left the house to his son George, who eventually and reluctantly sold it, unable to afford the upkeep of such an enormous property.  Our President, Dennis Silk, visited Siegfried at Heytesbury many times and has fond memories of the house, as does Dom Sebastian Moore of nearby Downside Abbey, who instructed the poet in the Catholic faith in the late 1950s. Another of the monks, Dom Philip Jebb (coincidentally the grandson of Hilaire Belloc), was one of the last people to see Siegfried and officiated at his funeral.

After some years of near-dereliction as the result of a fire in the late 1980s, the house was converted into the lovely apartments that can be seen today.  Although not open to the public, it has been well cared-for, but Siegfried would have found it disconcerting to see the amount of additional building that has taken up much of the original estate.  The house is, sadly, separated from the main part of the village by the A36 trunk road, which cuts through the surrounding countryside at this point.

The parish church of St Peter and St Paul is a medieval building with substantial 19th century alterations. Although it has undergone some restoration, it is costly to maintain, and the local community hopes to raise money for its upkeep as a result of the poetry reading planned for 2 August 2014, in which the SSF hopes to play a very active role.  In fact, we are in the process of devising a programme of readings and negotiating with a list of potential readers and actors who will be performing it.

Siegfried was not, of course, at Heytesbury when he enlisted in the army at the beginning of August 2014. He travelled to Sussex's county town of Lewes to join up, becoming a Trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, a role in which he was never called up for active service.  Although we cannot be in two places at once, it is our hope that the event at Heytesbury will directly reflect his experiences as well as exposing the audience to some of the lesser-known poetry of the First World War as well as some of the best-known.

Country Boys

While on holiday in the Orkneys recently, I visited the grave of Harry Reid, a private in the Seaforth Highlanders, who died in 1917 at his home at Melsetter on the island of Hoy and is buried on the smaller island of Rousay, next to his mother, who died shortly after his birth.  Assuming he had been wounded at Arras or in some contemporary action and brought home to die, I found the weathered stone a poignant sight but thought little more about it until my attention was drawn to the fact that Harry had never served overseas.

This got me wondering and I looked up his name in a list of Orkney’s World War I dead, suspecting what I might find.  I was not altogether surprised to learn that 23-year-old Harry had died of measles.  It may sound very odd but let us put this death into context.  In the early decades of the twentieth century, there were still many remote communities in Britain, and indeed throughout Europe, where a person might live his or her entire life without ever venturing as far as the nearest city.   The types of transport with which we have become familiar today, even if they existed, were beyond most people’s reach. 

Country folk did not have any great need to travel, particularly if they lived in agricultural communities, because they were self-sufficient to a far greater degree than almost anyone is now.  Although there were food shortages during World War I and food rationing was introduced in February 1918, the problem was mostly imported items such as tea and sugar, which might be regarded as luxuries.  Rural communities had their own sources of meat, vegetables and dairy products.

Death from infectious diseases has traditionally been a common problem in wartime, but (if you are anything like me) your thoughts will immediately be drawn to Henry V's army dying from dysentery and starvation rather than to the events of the twentieth century.  Despite the improvements in medical treatment since the Napoleonic Wars, death from disease still accounted for one third of military deaths in World War I.  Among those we can count men like Rupert Brooke, who had foreseen a hero’s death for himself but actually died of an infected mosquito bite before even arriving in a theatre of war. 

More tragic, somehow, are those young men who came from places like the Highlands and islands of Scotland, the valleys of North Wales, the west of Ireland, and parts of France, Italy, Russia and even Germany where infections such as measles were almost unknown.  "Measles," says an American expert, "was essentially the disease of country boys coming for the first time into a densely crowded environment." Many recruits from the Southern United States, just like Harry Reid, died without ever being shipped overseas to fight the enemy.  For some reason, the disease was more likely to hit white US soldiers than their black fellow-countrymen.

Measles was a killer not so much because of the properties of the disease itself as because of the complications that often accompanied it.  Harry Reid contracted pneumonia, a common side effect.  The crew of an Australian cruiser stationed in the North Sea in 1915 suffered from outbreaks of measles and influenza, which were not easily eradicated in such cramped conditions. Troops of all nationalities in Macedonia, meanwhile, went down with malaria: a French general, when ordered to attack, is reputed to have declined with the explanation "My army is in hospital with malaria". 

Typhus, a very serious disease in its own right, broke out among soldiers on the eastern front early in the war, killing large numbers of soldiers and civilians alike.  Sexually-transmitted diseases were a different kind of hazard.  Robert Graves reports in his memoirs, rather callously, the suffering of strictly-brought-up Welsh soldiers in his battalion who had never been away from home before and realised too late the risk they were taking by visiting brothels.

Siegfried Sassoon, like so many of his fellow-soldiers, went down with trench fever on more than one occasion.  This rather mysteriously-named disease was carried by lice and characterised by a fever lasting about a week and accompanied by rashes and general aches and pains.  Although it claimed many victims, it was seldom fatal; it was, however, just like measles, the result of large numbers of men in close proximity, enabling the lice to breed and spread.  When Isaac Rosenberg wrote his famous poem "Louse Hunting", he described an activity that may sound light-hearted and even playful; in actual fact, these men were doing what they could to preserve their own health in the face of a threat to their well-being that was almost as great as the German guns.

The General and the Lieutenants

“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?

Of Men, Motivation and Morality

I think I may have to retract some of the things I said in my last post.  Perhaps I was a little too quick to dismiss the value of studying battlefields as a way of getting close to the past.  What I learned on Saturday morning, in a lecture delivered jointly by Chris Skidmore and Professor Glenn Foard at the Chalke Valley History Festival, is that a survey of the terrain on which a battle was fought, when combined with a discussion of the personal history and motivation of the participants, can be quite fascinating.

Of course, I was aware that events in history are usually less straightforward than they appear.  We all know that the human misery brought about by the First World War was not a simple case of stupid, incompetent generals disregarding the outcomes of their strategies, or even of youthful, public-school-educated officers innocently leading fearless working-class Tommies to their deaths.  The combination of circumstances that led to Siegfried Sassoon's protest of 1917 is difficult to unravel, and he recognised, later in life, that he might have been seeing things in black and white when in reality they were varying shades of grey.  Nevertheless, we don't often think too deeply about what was behind the bad decisions of politicians and military leaders, either in the First World War or any other tactical situation.

Skidmore, being an MP, perhaps has a better handle on this than I have, but his analysis of the historical context of the Battle of Bosworth was a masterly one.  A study of the personal histories of the battle commanders leads to some interesting conclusions about why the battle went the way it did.  Whilst it is true that it could have gone either way, and that the death of either Richard III or Henry Tudor would have ended the battle immediately (as in fact it did), there were various individual commanders involved in the action, each of whom had a degree of influence on the outcome.  Richard's final charge towards Henry's personal bodyguard - his only hope, at that stage, of winning the battle - is slightly reminiscent in some ways of Siegfried Sassoon's reckless ventures into No Man's Land and his single-handed but eventually pointless capture of a German trench.

Sassoon, of course, did not have the power to end a battle, or indeed the personal or political influence to end a war, but he was one of many individuals who led the troops, for better or worse.  It would be unreasonable to compare him to the Lancastrian nobleman and experienced battle commander John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, whose leadership on the day of Bosworth played a crucial part in Henry's victory and whose actions on that day were significantly influenced by the mental scars of his previous military experience, or to his opponent John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, whose death in the battle caused Richard such distress that it proved a turning-point in the hostilities.

More realistic, perhaps, to compare Siegfried with another of Henry's supporters, Sir John Cheney, whose tomb can be seen in Salisbury Cathedral.  Standing approximately six feet eight inches and a notable horseman, Sir John was the knight who dashed in to rescue Henry's standard and put himself between the rivals for the crown during Richard's final charge.  Richard personally unhorsed this seasoned soldier, knocking him unconscious, but Cheney's action proved critical, giving Henry's bodyguards time to fight off the attack.

By now, unless you have a keen interest in battlefield archaeology, you are probably wondering about Professor Foard and where he comes into the matter of Bosworth.  He is in fact the archaeologist who has spent the past few years proving that the Battle of Bosworth (or more accurately, the Battle of Redemore as it was called by contemporaries) took place, not on Ambion Hill where the Bosworth Visitor Centre is located, but in a marshy area several miles away.  Archaeological finds support the theory, based as it originally was on a study of local place names and first-hand accounts of the battle.  You may have heard about the silver-gilt badge depicting a boar (Richard III's personal emblem) which was found on the site and is considered almost conclusive evidence.

Archaeologists, battlefield guides and ignorant tourists alike can still pick up finds that reveal previously-unknown facts about military actions of the First World War.  Human remains are still being discovered and families informed of the final fate of their missing ancestors or relatives, almost a hundred years after those men were lost in action.  Likewise, new facts about the way the First World War was fought and the reasons for it are still being brought to light.  We can never hope to answer the question of whether it was right or wrong, or what might have happened if these events had never taken place.  Historians and archaeologists can satisfy our curiosity on many points but they cannot answer moral or hypothetical questions for us. 

Sassoon's approach to the problem of the continuation of the war was certainly a simplistic one, but what would have happened if he had not made his protest?  The war would probably not have ended any sooner or lasted any longer.  What a lone voice such as his could do, and has done over the many decades since, was to strengthen the resolve of other men and women who feared the consequences of making a moral stand.  It is this, rather than his military prowess, that makes him a hero of our times.

All Roads Lead to France

I'm visiting Arras and the Somme region again next month, to see some of the places where Siegfried Sassoon fought, loved, read books, wrote verse and enjoyed the fellowship of other British soldiers exiled from their homeland, each of them conscious that every day might be their last.  While looking at these places and imbibing their atmosphere, we will read and discuss poetry that was written during and about the First World War.  It should be another memorable trip for me and for those members of the SSF who will be with me.

"Battlefield pilgrims", however, is a term I don't particularly care for.  It seems to me inaccurate on both counts.   Technically, the groups of tourists that make these journeys do visit battlefields, but few limit themselves to that.  Even the most enthusiastic of military historians and archaeologists would find it a sterile experience if they spent all their time analysing the terrain and mentally re-fighting armed conflicts that took place almost a hundred years ago.   Although this particular tour is organised by the Western Front Association, it is one of a special series taking place in consecutive years, each concentrating on a particular area and on particular poets who fought and often died in that region.

Geography is the key to history.  That's not an original saying of mine; I got it from Michael Wood, but it struck me immediately as a truth we do not always recognise.  To read Sassoon is to be transported to many places in turn: to the Weald of his youth, to the Edinburgh where he met Wilfred Owen, and of course to the Somme battlefields.  To be, physically, in those places is something rather different.  To see the landscape, still much as he saw it, is to understand him better.  This is what we go to the battlefields for, I think: to see the ground that was fought over, certainly, but mainly to share an experience with those men - and the occasional woman - whom we admire so much.

I will never forget, last year, our guide pointing out the exact spot where Roland Leighton, the fiancé of Vera Brittain, was killed in 1915.  That one event set off a chain reaction that had enormous consequences for English literature and for many of the feelings we have about the "Great" War today; Testament of Youth has probably done more than any other prose work in our language to influence the modern view of that war.  How thrilling - and chilling - it was to be so close to that tragic moment, even though separated from it by a century.  At the same time, it was in no way a celebration of "battlefields".

Much of our tour centred on graveyards.  To anyone who hasn't been, that must sound terribly depressing, if not mawkish.  I won't deny that seeing the graves of all those young men is not exactly a laugh a minute.  The British cemeteries of World War I are nevertheless peaceful places, places where the visitor can feel at one with the lost and fallen and can try, if not to make sense of it all, at least to recognise the impact their loss made on individuals, families and society in general.  Being there also enables us to appreciate the fantastic job done by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission - not just in France, but throughout the world.  If you are unfamiliar with it, please do have a look at their website: http://www.cwgc.org

In 2010 the SSF made a group visit to Ieper (Ypres), a city that was effectively razed to the ground during the First World War.  We stood on the spot where the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge met his death, coincidentally only a hundred yards from the place where the best-known Welsh-language poet of the war, Hedd Wyn, is buried.  It was a memorable visit, but of equal interest were several museums and visitor centres where people like Piet Chielens (curator of the recently-refurbished "In Flanders Fields" museum) have used their expertise to bring the war closer to those of us who find it difficult to imagine what the average serviceman endured.  One such place particularly stands out in my memory: the museum at Hill 62 which was not on our official itinerary.  Piled high with "junk" picked up from the battlefield, it made an impression precisely because of the refusal to attempt to analyse the content.  You can get some idea of it from looking at this website, which includes some film of the interior: http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/sanctuarywood.htm  "Make of it what you will," commented one of my fellow members, and, at this distance in time, it is difficult to do anything else.  Neither military nor social historians can make up their minds about the significance of that war.

That's the "battlefields" dealt with, but what about those "pilgrims"?   One definition of a pilgrim is "one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee".  It's true up to a point - we are devotees of the history and literature of the First World War, but I don't think we see the Western Front as a holy place.  A sacred place, perhaps, if that is different, a place that demands our respect and thoughtfulness; but, if we go there merely to say we have gone there, as pilgrims often do, we will be missing the point of the exercise.  Nor do we go for religious reasons, though many do go in order to pay their respects to a distant relative; nowadays it is no longer possible for us to seek the memorials of anyone we remember in person.  A moving experience it certainly can be; but I still don't think it is a pilgrimage.

Last year, just before we set out, a friend told me that her great-grandfather was killed on the first day of the Somme and that his name was on the Thiepval Memorial.  Fortunately he had a very unusual surname and I was able to located him fairly quickly and photograph the result of my search.  What I didn't know was that she had never been there herself and she was thrilled to see the photograph.  It is not her great-grandfather's grave, but it is the nearest it is possible to get to it; the names on the monument are those of the missing.  I also didn't learn, until later, the human story behind the inscription; this particular soldier  left behind four children, who were orphaned a few years later when their mother died of tuberculosis. 

It is hard for us to imagine that level of human suffering in a country like the UK and, although hardship still occurs, we have made a certain amount of progress in a hundred years.  What has not, unfortunately, changed is our willingness to involve ourselves in armed conflicts, whether the causes be "good" or "bad" ones.  Sassoon saw this in 1917 and tried to make a lone stand against it.  Today he is often cited as an inspiration by those who make a similar protest.  Go and see what remains of the Western Front, whether as a "pilgrim" or as an interested visitor trying to get in touch with history, and you will appreciate him more than ever.

The Flower Show Match

Siegfried Sassoon, as anyone who has read his prose works will be aware, was a great lover of the game of cricket.  Two of his greatest friends, the poet Edmund Blunden and the schoolmaster Dennis Silk, were also enthusiastic cricketers.  In fact, it was through Blunden that Sassoon met Silk, and the occasion of their first meeting is recorded in all biographies of Sassoon as well as in an interview Silk gave to Graham Lampard, which was published in an early edition of Siegfried's Journal.  The young Silk, then playing cricket for Cambridge University, mistook the elderly and rather eccentric gentleman who approached him at that first meeting for a practical joker, put up to it by another member of the team, and was astonished to discover his true identity.

Despite the disparity in age, the two men became close friends and remained so for the rest of Sassoon's life.  Dennis Silk, whose own exploits would fill a book in themselves, is now the President of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship.  This year, on 24th July, the SSF, in association with Matfield Cricket Club, will replay the Flower Show Match for the eighth time.  The original match, described by Sassoon as a turning-point in his childhood, in his first major prose work, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man,  took place at a local fete. 

Our replaying of the match bears little similarity to the original, although it is often graced with the presence of gawky teenagers who impress the spectators with an unexpected level of cricketing prowess.  However, the original Flower Show Match, which in Sassoon's memoirs is described as an experience of his fictional alter ego, George Sherston, actually took place at Brenchley, a neighbouring village, but the annual match between Sherston's XI and  Matfield Cricket Club  is played on Matfield Village Green, and attendance is free.  It is not the large impressive occasion described in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, but it does have its own cachet.  Matfield boast that they never have difficulty in finding volunteers to play in the match, despite the fact that it takes place on a weekday afternoon.  Another point of interest is the quirky rules, although some effort is made to follow authentic Victorian cricketing customs. 

This does not always make for a decisive result.  Of the seven matches played so far, three have ended in a draw, but, for most of us, the enjoyment of the occasion is not dependent on an exciting finish on the pitch.  There are all kinds of other contributory factors, not least of which is the wonderful tea served up by the Matfield ladies in the pavilion.  Participants in last year's match, however, had to make do with temporary facilities, since the Jack Wish Pavilion of which the club was so proud had been destroyed by fire in September 2011, as a result of a small rodent chewing through electrical wires.  Matfield will soon open a fine new building, courtesy of grants from the Lottery Heritage Fund and donations from organisations and individuals that include the SSF and many of our members.

For most of the match’s history, Dennis Silk, our president, who is himself a former President of MCC and the Test and County Cricket Board, has been an umpire and judge at the annual match.   Those to whom he has presented the coveted Man of the Match award over the years include Ted Miller, the grandson of Edmund Blunden, and Andrew and Jeremy Lawson, great-great nephews of Siegfried Sassoon.  I regret to say that this year Dennis will not be able to carry out his usual duties, because of continuing medical treatment.  However, his doctor is pleased with his progress and we expect to see him back on form in time for next year’s match.  Another eminent cricketer who often puts in an appearance at the match is “Deadly” Derek Underwood, who has in the course of his distinguished international career been President of both MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) and the “real” MCC (Matfield Cricket Club).

Cricket was one of Siegfried's great pleasures in later life.  He continued to play into his seventies, sometimes representing Downside Abbey, where the community had finally helped him to achieve the spiritual fulfilment he craved.  He wielded the bat but drew the line at running, needing a younger assistant to perform those exertions for him!

Who can forget the iconic photograph of Sassoon, Blunden and Dennis Silk, sitting on the porch of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, Siegfried's last and longest home, listening to an Ashes Test on the wireless.  It conjures up a picture of life in 1950s Britain that compares with the nostalgia of the prose works Siegfried wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, celebrating his Victorian childhood and youth.  Using cricketing terminology, he told Silk that The Old Century was "a daisy of a book", and many of those who have read it will agree.    We can all relate to that little boy, with his tin of Blanco and his admiration for the senior batsmen who, to his admiring eyes, were the equal of W G Grace.  The Matfield team of today remain men (and sometimes women) who inspire our admiration.

The revival of the Flower Show Match was the idea of the renowned Bob Miller, who last year became only the third person to be honoured with life membership of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, in recognition of his enormous contribution to the society’s continued success.  It is Bob who recruits players for Sherston’s XI and ensures that the match takes place.   He joins the ranks of those immortals – Blunden, Sassoon and Silk – who personify a love for the game of cricket combined with an appreciation of great literature.  Bob’s post-match readings are always a joy, and help remind us all why we are present by emphasizing the many and diverse ways in which Siegfried Sassoon has been an inspiration.

If you would like to know more about the match and its history, there is plenty of information on the SSF website: http://www.sassoonfellowship.org/flower-show-match.html