KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: WW1 poetry, shell shock and Siegfried Sassoon

In 1917 the situation on the Western Front had become bleaker than ever.

Britain’s allies were tottering.

There was mutiny in the French army while Russia, torn apart by revolution, was about to pull out of the War.

And the death toll went on rising, already more than half a million British dead since the start of the War. Even decorated war heroes were now wondering what they’d risked their lives for.

In 1917 one of them, the poet Siegfried Sassoon went public with his doubts about the war.

In the trenches his men had known Lieutenant Sassoon as Mad Jack for his astonishing fearlessness and he’d won a Military Cross for bravery, but now he was denouncing the whole thing.

“The war upon which I embarked as one of defence and liberation” he wrote “has become a war of aggression and conquest. I am protesting against the political errors for which the lives of fighting men are being sacrificed and against the callous complacency with which those at home regard agonies they do not share.”

From a decorated war hero this was incendiary stuff.

Sassoon risked court-martial, imprisonment, even execution, but the Generals were cleverer than that, they pronounced him mad and sent him here to a military hospital called Craiglockhart.

Sassoon was surrounded by men suffering from the condition called Shell Shock. This War of endless artillery bombardment wasn’t only killing and maiming soldiers, it was sending them mad.

At first doctors thought it was a physical condition, concussion caused by exploding shells.

Treatment was often brutal; some doctors used solitary confinement and electric shock treatment to try to snap their patients out of it.

But then they began to understand something of the stress of life in the trenches, the lack of sleep, the shattering noise, the sight of so much death and mutilation.

As one lieutenant put it, “quite apart from the number of people blown to bits, the explosions were so terrible that anyone within a hundred yards was liable to lose their reason”.

At Craiglockhart doctors were pioneering a radical new approach to shell shock.

Dr William Rivers believed that patients were repressing the terrifying experiences they’d had and that in order to get better they needed to talk about them.

In 1917 Rivers’ work was ground breaking. But Craiglockhart’s most famous patient, the anti-war Lieutenant Sassoon, wasn’t suffering from shell shock and he realised that unless he gave up his protest and returned to the Front he’d be stuck here forever.

After three months Sassoon was restless. He hadn’t changed his anti-war views, but he chose solidarity with his soldiers over private principles. As he wrote when he returned to the Western Front “I’m only here to look after some men”.

Siegfried Sassoon’s protesting voice had been silenced, but his poetry remained clear and forceful.

In 1918 he wrote, “You smug faced crowds with kindling eye, who cheer when soldier lads march by, sneak home and pray you’ll never know the hell where youth and laughter go.” Unlike many of his friends, including fellow writer Wilfred Owen, whom he’d met at Craiglockhart, Sassoon survived the War and died in 1967.