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Wirers
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Background
Authorial Context
When he wrote “Wirers” in 1917, Sassoon knew about his subject. He fought on the Western Front and experienced its horrors. His diary gives a vivid picture of life in the trenches and the action of the war. In a diary entry for March 31, 1916, for example, he writes that he was fascinated by no-man’s-land, “with its jumble of wire-tangles and snaky seams in the earth winding along the landscape. The mine craters are rather fearsome, with snipers hidden away on the lips, and pools of dead-looking water” (Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915–1918. Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 51).
On June 9, 1916, Sassoon records that he was part of a wiring party the previous night:
out with the wirers from 10 to 1.15. I can’t imagine anything much more unpleasant than lugging coils of “concertina” wire along a narrow trench and stumbling with it over shell-holes and trip-wires in inky gloom and pouring rain. However, we got a lot out (p. 76).
On June 30 he was again a member of a wiring party from midnight until 3:30 a.m.; at one point during that night, they were driven back by German shelling. The previous month, on May 23, Sassoon had written of a raiding party on enemy lines that was turned back by the German barbed wire. The raiders thought the wire had been cut by their artillery bombardment, but this turned out not to be so. In June, he characterized a British raiding party as
men with blackened faces and grim clubs and axes and bombs—men with knocking hearts, stifling the yawns of nervousness—wondering if our shells have cut the German wire—knowing that the enemy are ready for them—knowing they will probably be killed or wounded or caught like rats. O this bloody war (p. 73)!
The exclamatory last sentence gives a clue as to how Sassoon’s poetry was to develop, with what he characterized—likening himself to a boxer—as the knockout blow of the final line delivering the antiwar theme (as in “Wirers,” for example.) It was in 1917 that Sassoon became profoundly disillusioned with the war and made his famous protest, “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which he sent to his commanding officer and influential politicians and writers. His disgust with the way the war was managed is clear from his diary entry for June 19, written just four days after the declaration, in which he bemoans the “useless suffering the war inflicts” (p. 175). Ordinary people, Sassoon writes, are the dupes of the ruling classes and refuse to acknowledge “the whole torment of waste and despair” (p. 175).
The following month Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a convalescent hospital in Edinburgh, where he met fellow soldier and poet Wilfred Owen. Many of Sassoon’s fiercest antiwar poems date from this period. With irony and satire and also very effective use of direct speech (such as “Wirers”), he attacked the British establishment promoting the war: church, government, state, military leaders, the press, and also the passivity and stupidity of the average person who unthinkingly accepted war propaganda and still believed the war was a glorious enterprise. Sassoon thought such people had no idea of what they were saying.
Many of the poems from this period, published in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) feature the technique of the knockout final line, which is preceded by a couple of what Sassoon called harsh, peremptory, and colloquial stanzas. An example is “The One-Legged Man,” in which a former soldier who lost a leg in the war is back in England. He views the countryside and counts his blessings, looking forward to many years of life. His conclusion—the knockout blow delivered in the final line—is “Thank God they had to amputate!” He means that it was the amputation that saved him from being sent back to the front where he would likely have met a much worse fate. The force of the line lies in the revelation of just how appalling the alternative must have been that he feels the loss of a leg to be a blessing from God.
“Attack” is another poem with a powerful final line. British soldiers go “over the top”; that is, they climb out of the trenches and launch an attack. They are met by enemy fire and soon lose hope. The poem ends, “O Jesus, make it stop!”
Literary Context
Siegfried Sassoon was not the only British World War I poet. His friend Robert Graves (1895-1985), with whom he served at the front, also survived the war and went on to become a well-known poet. Graves published a pamphlet, Over the Brazier (1916), which contained several youthful war poems, all of which were written by the time he was 20 years old. “It's hard to know if you’re alive or dead / When steel and fire go roaring through your head,” he wrote in “It’s a Queer Time” (Graves, Robert. “It’s a Queer Time.” The First World War Poetry Digital Archive).
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was commissioned as an officer when the war broke out and he took part in a brief expedition to Antwerp. He became famous for his poem “The Soldier,” written in December 1914. The poem begins “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” Brooke died of dysentery and blood poisoning on a troopship in April 1915. He never experienced the carnage of trench warfare, which is likely why his poetry expresses such idealism and patriotism, as if he belongs to another era.
The war poet who ranks alongside Sassoon in eminence is Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen was a British army officer who fought in France in 1916-17. He survived a poison gas attack and suffered from shell shock. As a result of the latter, he was sent to Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart hospital where he met and befriended Sassoon. Owen returned to the front and was killed in action just one week before the war ended in November 1918. One of his most memorable poems is “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” with its lament for the soldiers who “die as cattle” and its somber examination of what is the most fitting form of remembrance for them (Owen, Wilfred. “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Poetry Foundation). In other poems, such as “Strange Meeting,” “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” and “Disabled,” Owen expressed the cruelty and the folly of the war.
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was another WWI era poet who enlisted in 1914 and fought on the Western Front. He was wounded in April 1917 but returned to take part in the brutal Passchendaele offensive that summer. Like Owen and Sassoon, Gurney did not shrink from presenting the reality of trench warfare. In “Pain,” a sonnet written in February 1917, Gurney wrote about the “pain continual; pain unending” of the war experience:
Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone,
Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir,
Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud.
Men broken, shrieking even to hear a gun (Gurney, Ivor. “Pain.” War Poetry. 1917.)
In the end, the heart can only cry out in anger, not “to” God but “on” God, which is not an appeal or prayer to God but stops just short of condemning him for not stopping the war.
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) enlisted in 1915 and was killed in action on the Western Front on April 1, 1918. Like Sassoon, Owen, and Gurney, he wrote poetry presenting the ugliness and physical realities of the war. “Dead Man’s Dump,” for example, is a grim meditation on the deaths of war. A soldier rides in a mule-drawn carriage to set up barbed wire entanglements on the battlefield. The carriage rides past and over many of the dead, who are yet unburied: “Burnt black by strange decay / Their sinister faces lie” (Rosenberg, Isaac. “Dead Man’s Dump.” Poetry Foundation).
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