“Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.”
Siegfried Sassoon“Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.”
Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems“Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.”
Siegfried Sassoon“I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”
Siegfried Sassoon“All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.”
Siegfried Sassoon“But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.”
Siegfried Sassoon“The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.”
Siegfried Sassoon“I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.”
Siegfried Sassoon“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." "The War Poems”
Siegfried Sassoon“I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.”
George Packer“Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.”
Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems