Together

A recent enquiry came out of the blue, asking who was the friend referred to by Siegfried Sassoon in his poem "Together". I have to confess that I did not know the answer, though the wording of the poem suggested one of Siegfried’s hunting friends. The enquiry was passed on to more knowledgeable souls, who told me that the answer was probably Stephen Gordon Harbord, portrayed in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man under the name of Stephen Colwood. Those of you who came on the 2014 WFA Poetry tour may recall visiting Harbord’s grave at Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery near Ypres; he was killed in 1917.

Unlike his alter ego, Stephen Colwood, Gordon Harbord was not a schoolmate of Siegfried’s.  He went to Winchester, while Sassoon was at Marlborough; they first met around 1908. Harbord’s elder brother, Kenneth, four years Gordon’s senior, was a contemporary of Sassoon’s at Marlborough.  Kenneth went into the Royal Flying Corps and was one of the many servicemen who convalesced at Highclere Castle, “the real Downton Abbey”, under the patronage of Lady Almina Herbert.  (Since the surname “Harbord” is believed to have originated as a corruption of “Herbert”, this gives rise to further interesting possibilities.)

Almina’s husband, the Earl of Carnarvon (the very same treasure-hunter who later died of “Tutankhamen’s Curse”), became friendly with Kenneth during his convalescence, through their shared interest in flying machines.  Another of Gordon's brothers was Arthur Macdonald Harbord, who rose to the rank of major and married a daughter of Lord Louth, whilst Kenneth married a daughter of Sir William Goulding, Bt.

Colwood Park in Bolney, West Sussex, was the Harbords’ family home, hence Siegfried’s choice of this fictional surname for his late friend.  Like Stephen Colwood's father, Harbord senior was a clergyman, the Rev Harry Harbord, rector of East Hoathly.  I have been unable to establish any link between Gordon’s father and Australia’s legendary “bush poet”, Harry Harbord “Breaker” Morant; in the latter case, Harbord appears to have been an assumed name, possibly indicating an illegitimate line of descent – but I somehow doubt that the Harbords of Colwood Park were involved, and Morant seems to have been born in Devon.  The Rev Harbord was a follower of the Southdown Hunt, hence his acquaintance with the horse and hound loving Sassoon.  Gordon was a graduate and had ambitions to become an engineer. The firm friendship that grew between him and Siegfried was likened by the latter to a fraternal relationship; at times Siegfried felt closer to him than to his own brothers. Thus the death of the fictional Stephen Colwood would stand in place of the death of Siegfried's brother Hamo, George Sherston being an only child.

Gordon Harbord was in the Royal Field Artillery, which might initially sound safer than the trenches but in fact was equally dangerous as the enemy would naturally try to take out the guns and their crews and commanders who were doing all the damage to their forces.  Gordon was killed on 14 August 1917 while supervising the removal of guns from one position to another, in preparation for an assault on Passchendaele Ridge.  Not long before, he had won the Military Cross and been promoted to Captain.

Gordon's younger brother Geoffrey, who was also a friend of Siegfried's, had read the poems in "Counter-Attack" and written that he pitied Siegfried because he clearly felt the "horrors and bloodiness of it all more than I do".  Yet shortly before Gordon's death, Geoffrey (who was also in the Artillery), wrote to say how worried he was about Gordon because of his posting to Ypres, and commented that he wished to God it were all over. A few weeks later, after Gordon's death, he wrote that "you were easily his best friend".    

It seems to me that we don't pay enough attention to Siegfried's friendship with Gordon Harbord, possibly because it was a friendship formed through sporting activities and thus seems somehow less important than the more cerebral friendships with Graves, Owen, Hardy and the like.  However, Siegfried was fond enough of Gordon to write at least three poems about him, one being among my favourites.  "Idyll" is not a war poem, but Siegfried produced it in early 1918, while stationed in Ireland.  In 2014, a version in his own handwriting was sold at Bonham's auction rooms for £1,875. I wonder who bought it?

Has the British Museum lost its charm?

Ira Gershwin was only joking when he wrote the lyrics for “A Foggy Day in London Town” in 1937.  The Clean Air Act of 1956 gradually got rid of most of the pea-soup fogs but, thankfully, the museum remains.  Does it, however, retain its charm?  After a visit to The Celts exhibition (which ran until the end of January), I was somewhat disenchanted. 

I’ve been to several major exhibitions at the museum in recent years and had the same experience each time: missing some of the exhibits because of the random layout and having to wait ages to see the most popular ones because there is no control or even advice on how to approach them.  Some people come from the left, others from the right, still more from behind.  If you are British (i.e. not pushy) and short, you don’t have much chance of getting there within a reasonable time.  And some people are very slow readers…

“The Celts” was a particularly disappointing exhibition, beginning with the false premise that there is no connection whatsoever between the Celtic fringes of Britain and France and the “keltoi” identified by the ancient Greeks.  The curators seem to think that the Celts in Wales and the rest of mainland Britain did not convert to Christianity until the Romans had left and stopped imposing Christianity on them, which would be an extremely odd thing for them to have done at that point.  A disproportionate amount of space and attention is given to the Celtic revival – presumably because they ran out of prehistoric exhibits - with little explanation of the development and meaning of modern traditions; druidry, apparently, is a completely new invention; no mention, as far as I could see, of Suetonius Paulinus's campaign to root them out of Anglesey.

In case you haven't guessed by now, this is just a personal rant. If you are wondering what the exhibition has to do with Sassoon, any connections are very tenuous.  Let’s start with the BM itself.  It was founded in 1753.  It is a 15-minute walk from Raymond Buildings, Siegfried’s first London lodgings, and he certainly visited it.  In 1933 he even gave the museum £100 to assist in the purchase of some manuscripts of Wilfred Owen’s work.  The British Library was of course part of the museum then; in fact, the present exhibition area is located in the famous former reading room, once a gathering-place for the likes of Shaw, Wilde and Lenin.

Between 1950 and 1959, the Director of the BM was Sir Thomas Kendrick, whose daughter Frances was a close friend of the novelist Barbara Pym (regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will know of my interest in Pym).  Only recently did researches into the Pym archive reveal that Barbara herself had a long-running personal relationship with Sir Thomas, the exact nature of which remains unknown.  Sir Thomas Kendrick had served in the First World War, in the course of which he attained the rank of captain.   Unknown to me when I started writing this, his published works included a book on the history of Druidism.  Another of his interests was Victorian art, and his notable collaborators in this field included the poet John Betjeman, who was too young to have served in the first war but famously spied for the British government when working in Dublin during the Second World War.  Unlike the rampantly heterosexual Kendrick, Betjeman is believed to have had homosexual tendencies although, like Siegfried, he was attracted to members of the opposite sex, was married and had children.  

Whether Siegfried ever met Thomas Kendrick I have no idea, but he certainly knew Betjeman. The latter favourably reviewed Sassoon’s one full-length foray into biography, Meredith. The Cambridge Sassoon archive contains a letter Betjeman wrote him in 1957, after news of his conversion to Catholicism became public.  When the two men met at Alan Lascelles’ house in 1960, Betjeman declared, “I am nothing. You are a great poet.”

What about Sassoon’s Celtic connections? Are there any? Admittedly we are on slightly shakier ground with this. One cannot really count his association with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. However, in view of the concentration on the Celtic "revival" in the exhibition, it seems fair to mention W B Yeats, whom Sassoon knew well from visits to Garsington. Yeats was one of the prime movers in the revival also known as the “Celtic Twilight” movement, which thrived in the late 19^thand early 20^th century and in which Wilfred Owen also dabbled. Edinburgh, at the time Sassoon and Owen resided there, was a hotbed of the revival, led by figures like Patrick Geddes (whose son Alasdair was killed in action in 1917) and the artist Anna Traquair, whose work can be seen all over the city.

We are drawing further away from my ostensible subject and I have obviously run out of useful things to say.  But who knows what unexpected connections may turn up at some future date?

Who was Harry Ransom?

Does the name sound familiar?  If you are a Sassoon aficionado, it will, though you may not know anything about the man who bore the name.  If you are not a Sassoon enthusiast, the chances are you have never heard of him at all.  He was not a celebrity or even a significant historical figure.

Ransom, who died in 1976, taught English and was an administrator, and later president, of the University of Texas at Austin.  In 1957, he founded the Humanities Research Centre at the university.  He wanted to make it a focal point for one of the best collections of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, America's equivalent of the Bibliotheque Nationale.   Specifically, he wanted it to be a research centre, not just a library.  Long before he acquired the Sassoon archive now held there, he had amassed a huge collection of English and American literary history, including significant content by British and Irish writers such as D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw.

When Ransom left his post as director in 1961, his successors continued to expand the collection, which subsequently moved to a new building of a more suitable size, designed by architects selected by Ransom himself.  Its present staff refer to it as a "place of discovery" and to Ransom himself as "a visionary".  The more I found out about it, the more I have come to realise that it is not merely a library but a gallery, a museum, a conservation centre and much more besides.

Siegfried Sassoon features prominently in the collection, along with other First World War poets. The HRC's holdings include letters to or from Max Beerbohm, Edmund Blunden, Sydney Cockerell, Henry Head, H M Tomlinson, Philip Gosse (junior), and other illustrious names from Sassoon’s social circle.  In Spring 2014, the centre hosted a special exhibition entitled (perhaps somewhat unoriginally) "The World at War 1914-1918". One of the organisers of the exhibition was Dr Jean Cannon, a member of the SSF whom I was lucky enough to meet at the 2014 conference on British First World War Poetry at Wadham College, Oxford.

A review of the exhibition in the New York Times (those who are interested can read the full review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/arts/design/viewing-world-war-i-through-the-prism-of-the-personal.html ) included Sassoon's original 1917 manuscript of "The General" (complete with drawing), and 469 other artefacts, and aimed to focus on individual experience, in the form of letters, diaries, photographs, posters, sketches and other items from the Harry Ransom Centre's collection. (It rather amused me to note that the NYT published an apology a week later for misspelling the word "Dulce" in the title of Wilfred Owen's famous poem as "Dolce".)

The next important visitor to the Harry Ransom Centre will be our own Vivien Whelpton, who will be there in April to research the second volume of her biography of Richard Aldington, to be published by Lutterworth.  I am looking forward immensely to hearing Viv talk about her experiences in Texas.  In the meantime, to see a fascinating short film about the Harry Ransom Centre, take this link: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2014/discovery/

Bringing Sassoon to Texas

One of our members has kindly sent me a present.  It’s a document I’d seen before but never had much time to study, as I didn’t have my own copy.  It is the catalogue of an exhibition that took place at The University of Texas at Austin in 1969, only two years after Siegfried Sassoon’s death.  You may be aware that this university holds an almost unparalleled collection of original Sassoon material, including diaries, letters, manuscripts and valuable first editions of some of his publications.

Looking through a catalogue like this has the serendipitous effect of bringing to mind many different aspects of Sassoon the man: his humour, his artistry, his courage and his sensitivity.  I was eleven when he died, and it is good to know that he was appreciated in his lifetime and so soon afterwards; the introduction to the catalogue is written by none other than his old friend Edmund Blunden, who himself would die five years later, having far exceeded Sassoon in academic achievement but never quite equalled him in fame or literary merit. Nowadays Blunden is becoming more appreciated, but Sassoon’s posthumous reputation has eclipsed all except Wilfred Owen among the war poets, his conduct during the First World War now being seen as an example to others in an increasingly violent international political climate.  Younger people are holding up Sassoon as an icon of our times and attempting to emulate him, in their writing and in their lives.

Blunden describes Sassoon as “more of a book-hunter than a fox-hunter” and comments on the religious aspect of his poetry, which sadly continues to be much ignored by other critics. It is clear even from this short introduction that Blunden understood Sassoon’s character better than almost anybody (he did after all arrange his first contact with Dennis Silk). He focuses on Sassoon’s originality as a person and as a writer, which I think is key to the continued popularity of his work.  To have had Siegfried as a friend, a privilege never granted to most of us who are alive today, would have been to experience his character in full, not only in person but in the shape of letters such as that written to Roderick Meiklejohn in 1917, a few days after making his Soldier's Declaration: “I saw the authorities here today, &, as I expected -- coals of fire were heaped on my rebellious head ... I have gone too far to withdraw, even if I had the faintest desire to do so." Or this one, to Blunden in 1944 after hearing of the death of their mutual friend Rex Whistler, killed in action aged 39: "I suffered a few minutes of bombed out feeling -- it really made me shake my fist at the war. But I have learnt to control such experiences..."

It is just as well he had, because, at the time of Siegfried Sassoon's death, the world was in the throes of a conflict that would make a lasting impact on the international political scene as well as on the culture of many nations.  Noam Chomsky's important essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", had been published earlier in 1967, and Sassoon would certainly have been aware of it, since it had been published as a supplement to the New York Times Review of Books.  In it, Chomsky referred back to a quotation from the critic and philosopher Dwight  Macdonald: "Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster."  Surely Sassoon was one such, but (to the best of my knowledge) he did not condemn.

By the time the exhibition was put on, other events had stirred up even greater opposition to the Vietnam War, including film of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head.  The protests were spreading, and on 15 October 1969, while the Sassoon exhibition was running,  coordinated demonstrations were taking place throughout the USA.  The Kent State shootings and the "napalm girl" were yet to come.

I wonder how much influence reaction to the Vietnam War had on public perceptions of Sassoon, and whether the coincidence of his death during this period had something to do with the subsequent growth in his popularity.  I wonder, in fact, whether this is one of the reasons a university in Texas was keen to acquire a collection relating to Sassoon and his work.  Perhaps a subject for further investigation...

To Our Mothers

In years to come, I will look back on 2015 as the year I lost my mother.  It is an experience most of us eventually share, an unwanted bonus of advancing age.  Yet we never quite know what to expect until it happens to us.

Theresa Sassoon died in 1947, aged 93, having lived through two world wars.  By the time of her death, she had lost one son, seen another become a literary figure of international importance, and her eldest son, Michael, was settled with a wife and children close to where she lived.  Her son Siegfried wrote that he could not face attending her funeral: "I just resolved not to indulge in feelings".  Although he was by now a father, his marriage to Hester Gatty was effectively over, but the dutiful Hester would have attended the funeral (despite past friction with her mother-in-law) had Siegfried not instructed her to stay away.

Georgiana Theresa Thornycroft was born in 1853, a member of a notably artistic family, and Siegfried's own drawings show that he had inherited a modicum of talent.  Theresa's mother and father were both sculptors, her father Thomas being best known for his statue of "Boadicea and her Daughters", which can still be seen on London's embankment, beside Westminster Bridge. Theresa's brother, Hamo Thornycroft, would become at least as well-known as his father, producing such notable works as the statue of Alfred the Great in Winchester city centre and that of Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament.  Hamo had in fact obtained a commission from the wealthy Jewish Sassoon family early in his career, when he was chosen to sculpt Rachel, the older sister of Alfred - the young man who would become Theresa's husband.

Theresa was perhaps doomed by her gender not to equal her male relatives in renown, despite early success as a painter.  Had she not met and married Alfred Sassoon, eight years her junior, and had this not sparked a family split that resulted in Alfred being cut off financially from his rich relatives, her career might have been very different.  As it was, she gave birth to three sons within the space of four years.  Even with servants to deal with the humdrum domestic duties, the boys' upbringing made demands on her time.
 

Siegfried Sassoon’s feelings towards his mother seem to have been rather ambivalent.  He bitterly regretted the loss of his father, who left the family when Siegfried and his brothers were all under ten years old, and died when Siegfried was nine.  Effectively left without a male role model, he often turned for comfort not to his mother (who could hardly have been expected to preserve a “normal” family life while bringing up three boys without a husband) but to family friends and sometimes servants, such as Tom Richardson the groom, immortalised in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man as “Dixon”.  Anyone who has read the passage where young Siegfried returns to the house in embarrassment, after his horse runs away, will have observed the annoyance with which he receives the clucking concerns of the maids about his welfare.  Only Dixon – by his very silence - recognises the importance of allowing the child to retain his dignity.

Incidents like these convey the apparent loneliness of Sassoon’s early life as well as explaining his attitude towards his mother.  Siegfried expresses no anger over Theresa's part in his parents’ marriage break-up - she was clearly the wronged party, if there was one - yet it does sometimes appear that he resents her in some small measure and partly blames her for his father’s desertion and death, and thus for his own loneliness.  This is reflected, perhaps subconsciously, in the way he turns her into a spinster aunt in MFHM. The loss of her youngest son, Hamo, at Gallipoli, caused her to flirt with spiritualism, resulting in the incident that Robert Graves recorded for posterity in Goodbye to All That.  Despite his own sorrow at Hamo's death, Siegfried found her conduct an embarrassment. 

Nevertheless, their relationship was a close one.  There were certainly moments of conflict over the years.  Theresa was conservative and did not like it when her son took a job with the Daily Herald; she liked it even less when he considered standing as a Labour MP. Although she initially took to Siegfried's lover Stephen Tennant, she came to disapprove of the relationship, just as she had disapproved of his first lover, Gabriel Atkin.  By the 1920s, she and Siegfried had become somewhat estranged; he had begun to feel that they belonged to different worlds.  

In 1928 Sassoon produced "To My Mother", a poem dedicated to Theresa and published in a limited edition, illustrated by Stephen Tennant.  In this he recognised the "selfless duty" with which she had brought him up and cared for him even in adulthood.  Perhaps it was the re-living of childhood for his fictionalised memoir published in the same year, that had caused him to appreciate her efforts more fully.  In conversation, Siegfried affectionately called her "Ash"; the origin of the nickname would appear to be a supposed resemblance to a cleaning lady called Mrs Ash, once employed by the family. 

Some of her letters to Siegfried are held by Cambridge University Library and images can be seen on-line: https://specialcollections.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=5533 

After Theresa's death, her son was once more able to recognise her best qualities, commenting that "Somehow she seems nearer to me than before she died."  This strikes a chord with me in my present situation and others have made similar observations.  When someone close to us becomes ill and too old to enjoy life, their death can come as a relief and perhaps even free us from feelings of obligation, guilt and shame that may have been troubling us for years.  We gradually learn to remember them as they really were, and to view their imperfections, such as they were, in realistic proportion. 

A Delicate and Sensitive Nature

While leafing through Rupert Hart-Davis's edition of Siegfried Sassoon's letter for the years 1923-1925, I came across an entry that reproduces a letter Siegfried had received from Delphine Turner.  It concerns the conduct of her husband Walter.

 

Siegfried had been sharing a house with the Turners at Tufton Street in Westminster, but was not happy with the arrangement.  Although he had been very friendly with Walter Turner at one time, living in close proximity to the couple had proved difficult (as indeed often happens when friends try to share accommodation, however fond they may be of one another).  Siegfried had become particularly fond of Delphine, as is evident from the diary entry, where he mentions how much he appreciates her "direct and honest" approach.

 

Those of us who know a little about Siegfried himself may suspect that there was another side to him, a side that did not always want others to be honest and direct, because he was - as Delphine puts it in the letter - of a "delicate and sensitive nature".  Appealing to his kindness of heart (which she had cause to value, since without his assistance she and her husband might have been homeless), she suggests that Walter is going through a "period of apparent disintegration", and that she expects Siegfried to remember his friend's good side when he misbehaves, just as she is forced to do herself.  Delphine admits that she has considered leaving Turner, something that would have been very difficult for a woman of her time if she wished to continue to live in polite society, but stays because of an awareness of his finer qualities.

 

The blame for Siegfried's falling out with Walter Turner is put squarely on the shoulders of - who else? - Robert Graves, a mutual friend.  Siegfried had recognised, almost as soon as he met Graves during the war, that he was a difficult man who tended to make himself disliked.  Delphine suggests that Graves had deliberately tried to break up the friendship between Siegfried and the Turners by repeating, out of context, remarks made by her husband.  Among other things, Turner had accused Siegfried of meanness and said that he found his company annoying.

 

Siegfried received the letter on the day before his 39th birthday.  He was travelling in the West Country, and had just visited his great friends Thomas and Florence Hardy. The time spent in their welcoming company may have shown up, by contrast, his discomfort with the Turners.  Nevertheless, he wrote back to Delphine, promising to try to put his quarrel with Walter Turner behind him.

 

It was not to be.  On his return to London, Siegfried heard another third-hand account of unkind things Turner was supposed to have said about him, this time from Robert Ross's old landlady Nellie Burton.  Between them, Nellie and Ottoline Morrell (who was already upset by Turner's behaviour towards her personally) persuaded them to look at other accommodation.  Eventually he took rooms at 23 Campden Hill Square, a house once owned by Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her family, and often visited by J M Barrie.  Siegfried was embarking on a happier time of life, at the root of which was a fulfilling relationship with the young actor Glen Byam Shaw.  I believe his only regret, as he left Tufton Street, was having to say goodbye to his beloved Delphine.

French Leave

The expression "to take French leave" is no longer widely used. It was first recorded in the 18th century and essentially refers to the habit of leaving without saying that one is going.  As a social behaviour, it might be regarded as rude (leaving a party without thanking the host) or alternatively as polite (leaving a party without disturbing the host).  It's clear, however, that the origin of the term is military, and therefore hardly surprising that the French use the equivalent term "filer a l'Anglaise", i.e. they take "English" leave.

 

I've been on leave from this blog, and I suppose it was French leave in a sense, as I didn't announce to the world that I was going anywhere - I try not to do that when I'm going on holiday, for obvious reasons.  I just annoy people with my holiday photos when I get home.  If you want to see those, they are viewable on Facebook if you are one of my "friends", as many of you are.  You might also notice that I've changed my profile picture and overlaid it with the French flag, as many of my friends have done. 

 

I don't know if Siegfried would have taken such an action.  I often wonder what he would have thought of Facebook and other social media (incidentally, a novelty publication entitled The History of the World through Twitter includes a section in which Sassoon and Wilfred Owen have a playful argument with Rupert Brooke - I didn't find it very funny but others might).  Owen was, to my mind, more the kind of person that might have done so, particularly in view of his pre-war residence at  Bordeaux and Bagnères-de-Bigorre.  His knowledge of the French nation and its language must surely have been far superior to Siegfried's.

Siegfried Sassoon knew all about patriotism, and I'm sure could understand the feelings of French people on being invaded and defeated by the Germans, but he might not have had the same degree of empathy with them that Owen would have done.  Despite his anger at the death of David Thomas and his willingness to take part in wild raids on the German trenches, he seems in general to have felt almost as much sympathy for the enemy as he did for his own side.  Many have referred to him as "the quintessential English gentleman", but that might carry with it implications of blinkered obedience to popular national sentiment that would be quite unjustified.

To the best of my knowledge, Siegfried had never been to France before he arrived at Boulogne in November 1915; I do not think he had been outside Britain, and thus his awareness of the world beyond his native land was limited, certainly by comparison with men like Owen, Charles Sorley, and Richard Aldington, all of whom had lived abroad prior to their enlistment.  In that sense, and perhaps in many others, Sassoon was an innocent.

The same would have been true of most of his fellow soldiers, probably even including the junior officers.  Very few would have been outside the British Isles before.  Television was decades in the future and cinema images were still monochrome; even books rarely contained coloured photographs. I cannot help wondering what he made of it.  As the troop ship pulled into the quay, was his eye caught (like mine, the first time I ever went to France) by the tall, narrow houses, so different in style from what he had left behind in Britain?

 

Always a nature lover, Sassoon would quickly have fallen in love with the French countryside.  He had been all over England and seen various landscapes, and he would surely have appreciated northern France just as much.  The evidence that he felt this way is to be found in a little-known poem, "France", which would be published in his collection, The Old Huntsman, in 1917.  It is written in a traditional vein.  Though not without merit, it is not one of his best known, and for fairly obvious reasons, as it appears – up to a point – to glorify the soldier’s role.  Siegfried seems to be saying that the country, with its “radiant forests” and “gleaming landscapes”, is well worth fighting for.  At this moment, I am certain that many French people feel exactly the same.  Was France, for the poet, just a hook on which to hang a poem?  I’m not sure whether, in his mind, it represents a mother land, whose defence is a good reason for its people to be prepared to go to war, or just a place Siegfried felt was beautiful and deserved to be saved.

At the weekend I heard a lot about France at the Wilfred Owen Association's AGM.  As most of you reading this will be aware, there is a thriving French organisation, based in Ors where Owen is buried, dedicated to preserving his memory.  The Forester's House in Le Pommereuil, where he wrote his last letter to his mother, is a tourist attraction.  Both Owen and Sassoon seem to have felt that France was a land worth fighting to save, and I have no doubt that both would at this moment be experiencing a deep sadness about recent events in Paris.  Whether either of them would have believed that bombing Syria was an answer, I am less certain.