Sassoon, a half-jew (his jewish father was disinherited from his ultra-rich family for marrying a Christian Englishwoman) was a typical strange poet, a sometime homosexual, and a perfect example of the Coudenhove-Kalergi description of racially mixed people as being unstable. But his Aryan side certainly came out in his disgust at the idiotic slaughter of WWI, and in atrocities he witnessed.
Of course, he could not fathom how the war, which killed 11 million people, ACTUALLY made a lot of sense for the Big Jews.
1) It wiped out three powerful, ancient, Christian, white, gentile, and (either somewhat or very) antisemitic ruling dynasties (in Germany, the Hohenzollerns, in Austria the Habsburgs, and in Russia the Romanovs) so that jew-run “democracies” or jew-financed bolshevism could take over:
2) It wiped out the best Aryan blood
the Ossuary at Verdun; 600,000 Germans and French perished here
3) It gave Palestine to Britain, which then gave it to the jews to found Israel
So “it was worth it.”
For the jews.
But until my religion starts, Whites (and Sassoon’s own poems) will keep on maintaining that WWI was “madness.”
No, it made perfect sense, and it was GREAT — for the jews.
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The War Poets: Siegfried Sassoon
Poetry
During his formative years, Siegfried Sassoon lived the life of an affluent young Englishman. Despite his Germanic-Iraqi name (his mother loved Wagnerian operas, his father was a descendant of the famous [I wuld saya infamous, since they ran the opium trade that crucified China for a century and still causes the Chinese to hate Britain!] Jewish Baghdad dynasty), Sassoon enjoyed a typical upper-class education at Marlborough and Cambridge. He then spent seven years playing cricket, hunting and writing poetry.
Motivated by patriotism and a desire to end this long state of ennui, he joined the army the day before the war broke out, in August 1914. As one of his biographers, Rupert Hart-Davis, wrote, ‘It was the terrible impact of the Western Front that turned him from a versifier into a poet.’
Almost immediately after joining up, he broke his arm badly in a riding accident, which postponed him taking up of his commission in the Royal Welch (sic) Fusiliers until May 1915. He first saw action on the Western Front six months later, becoming known as a brave if somewhat risk-taking officer. Refused the VC, he was nevertheless awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ in June 1916.
He started writing war poetry immediately on arriving at the Front and these opening lines from ‘The Prince of Wounds’ were typical of his early literary efforts.
The Prince of wounds is with us here;
Wearing his crown he gazes down,
Sad and forgiving and austere.
He showed these lyrical poems to his battle-weary friend, Robert Graves, who told him that the war would make him change his style. Graves was right. From mid-July 1916, after having served several months in the trenches, the now bitter and mocking tone which we associate with Sassoon’s poetry today became his forte. No longer did he write about the ‘woeful crimson of men slain’ (To Victory) but about ‘dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight’ (The Road). Nor would he describe Christ as ‘guarding immitigable loss’, which he had written in ‘The Prince of Wounds’. Now in ‘Christ and the Soldier’, Christ was held responsible for the pain and the death: ‘O Christ Almighty, stop this bleeding fight!’
Even though Sassoon spent several long periods away from the Front, due to wounds, being invalided home with trench fever and being sent to Ireland and Palestine, this did not prevent him from attacking the political establishment. He saw this as responsible for prolonging the war, and therefore the suffering of his fellow soldiers.
While on leave in summer 1917, Sassoon protested twice against the war: publicly throwing his medal ribbon into the Mersey and writing his famous anti-war declaration.
‘I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it… I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to those sufferings which I believe to be evil and unjust.’
This appeared in The Times and was read out in Parliament. As a result, Sassoon was considered unfit for service and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh to recover from ‘shell shock’. There, he met Wilfred Owen and exercised a great influence over the latter’s later war poems.
In November 1917, Sassoon was passed fit for service. He was sent to Ireland where he served until February 1918 and was then transferred to Palestine as part of General Allenby’s army. He hated it there and described Jerusalem as ‘not a very holy-looking place’ and referred to the natives as ‘Hebrews’. His vague Jewish connections through his father meant nothing to him.
After three months in Palestine, Sassoon returned to the Western Front. Soon afterwards he was accidentally shot in the head one night by one of his own sentries and spent the remainder of the war in hospital in London. He thus survived the war and spent much of the rest of his life writing about his wartime experiences in poems and bestselling autobiographical novels.
Today, Sassoon is best remembered for his biting poetical attacks on the officers and generals who sped ‘glum heroes up the line to death’ and ‘told the poor dear [mother of fallen soldier] some gallant lies.’ At the same time, he attacked the civilians who could not understand the depth of the soldiers’ suffering, ‘You smug-faced crowds…you’ll never know/ The Hell where youth and laughter go.’ But Sassoon not only attacked, he also empathized with the agony of his fellow-soldier as he ‘died,/Blown to small bits. And no-one seemed to care.’
*** Wiki:
Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named “Weirleigh” (after its builder, Harrison Weir), in Matfield, Kent.[3] His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895), son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family. For marrying outside the faith, Alfred was disinherited. Siegfried’s mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Sassoon’s family; his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Wagner‘s operas. His middle name, Loraine, was the surname of a clergyman with whom she was friendly.
Siegfried was the second of three sons, the others being Michael and Hamo. When he was four years old his parents separated. During his father’s weekly visits to the boys, Theresa locked herself in the drawing-room. In 1895 Alfred Sassoon died of tuberculosis.
Affairs[edit]
Sassoon, having matured greatly as a result of his military service, continued to seek emotional fulfilment, initially in a succession of love affairs with men, including:
- William Park “Gabriel” Atkin, the landscape architectural and figure painter, draftsman and illustrator[19]
- Ivor Novello, actor[20]
- Glen Byam Shaw, actor and Novello’s former lover[21]
- Prince Philipp of Hesse, German aristocrat[20]
- Beverley Nichols, writer[20]
- the Hon. Stephen Tennant, an aristocrat[20]
Only the last of these made a permanent impression, though Shaw remained Sassoon’s close friend throughout his life.[21]
Marriage[edit]
In September 1931, Sassoon rented Fitz House, Teffont Magna, Wiltshire, and began to live there.[22] In December 1933, he married Hester Gatty (daughter of Stephen Herbert Gatty), who was twenty years his junior. The marriage led to the birth of a child, something Sassoon had purportedly craved for a long time.
Siegfried’s son, George Sassoon (1936–2006), became a scientist, linguist, and author, and was adored by Siegfried, who wrote several poems addressed to him.
*** His poem condemning a fellow British soldier for massacring German prisoners
This was the version as actually published, and toned down
You told me, in your drunken-boasting mood,
How once you butchered prisoners. That was good!
I’m sure you felt no pity while they stood
Patient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should.
How did you do them in? Come, don’t be shy:
You know I love to hear how Germans die,
Downstairs in dug-outs. ‘Kamerad!’ they cry;
Then squeal like stoats [ermines/weasles] when bombs begin to fly.
And you? I know your record. You went sick
When orders looked unwholesome: then, with trick
And lie, you wangled home. And here you are,
Still talking big and boozing in a bar.
A draft of one of Siegfried Sassoon’s most famous anti-war poems has come to light, revealing that the most controversial lines were cut and others were toned down before publication.
The manuscript of Atrocities – which is about the brutal killing of German prisoners by British soldiers – is accompanied by an unpublished letter in which Sassoon describes the horror of discovering that soldiers from his own side had committed such barbarities.
The original version of the poem includes the phrases “you’re great at murder” and “gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams”, which were later deleted.
After his first stanza’s description of “butchered” prisoners, the printed second stanza reads: “How did you do them in? …” But in the draft, Sassoon wrote: “How did you kill them? …”
Sassoon’s publisher was nervous about including Atrocities in the 1918 volume of war poems, Counter-Attack, and it was published the following year in a revised version.
In the letter accompanying the draft poem, Sassoon voices despair at “Canadians & Australians airing their exploits in the murder line”, adding: “I know of very atrocious cases. Only the other day an officer of a Scotch regiment … was regaling me with stories of how his chaps put bombs in prisoners’ pockets & then shoved them into shell-holes full of water. But of course these things aren’t atrocities when we do them. Nevertheless, they are an indictment of war – some people can’t help being like that when they are out there.”
The discoveries are among more than 520 poetry manuscripts and portraits of poets collected over 40 years by a literary scholar, Roy Davids, and being sold through Bonhams in what is being described as the finest poetry collection ever auctioned.
Among the Sassoon material is a notebook with almost 50 previously unpublished poems.
Dating primarily from the 1920s, they include Companions (“Silence and Solitude are my companions;/ But I am self-instructed in aloneness…”), The Fear of Death (“Run like the wind to meet him with your mind –/ And you will find yourself no more dismayed/ By death whom life outbraves with every breath…”) and Max Gate, mourning the death of Thomas Hardy, his friend.
Sassoon, who died in 1967, received the Military Cross but the horrors he experienced drove him to throw his medal into the Mersey and refuse further duties. He avoided a court martial with a diagnosis of shell-shock and was sent for psychiatric treatment to Craiglockhart Wwar hospital in Edinburgh, from where he sent the unpublished letter in 1917 to CK Ogden, a psychologist friend and editor of the Cambridge Magazine, which published dissenting opinions on the war.
Sassoon’s biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson said: “This is very exciting material. I want to rewrite my biography and I probably shall be able to get some of it in. It’s a treasure trove.”
Commenting on the Atrocities draft, she said: “The publisher, Heinemann, wouldn’t let him publish it. I now understand even more clearly [why]. Ogden was one of the few editors who dared to publish anti-war poems. The offices of his magazine were smashed by people who felt that he wasn’t patriotic. Also there was censorship of a kind. The editor probably realised this wouldn’t have been acceptable. Heinemann would have realised he had to be careful.”
Sassoon’s notebook is “evidence of his terrible search for a subject”, she said. “In the first world war, he’d had a marvellous subject. Once the war was over, he was a poet in search of a subject.”
She described the poem on Hardy’s death as “very moving” and added: “Sassoon went to help Florence Hardy, the wife, when Hardy died because he was terribly close to Hardy. I thought he must have written something on his death – and here it is.”
Davids, 70, is a former auctioneer and dealer who headed the manuscripts department of Sotheby’s for many years. Commenting on the Atrocities draft, he said: “I couldn’t believe this poem when I first got it, that here was an English officer saying these things about his own side. No wonder they didn’t want to publish it. Of course, it was part of that whole business of standing up against the generals. They knew they couldn’t execute him, so they sent him off to a madhouse.”
Davids’s collection reads like an A to Z of English literature, including Tennyson, Ted Hughes and TS Eliot. Such is its size that the Bonhams sale will take place across two days, 10 April and 8 May.
Desmond Clarke, chairman of the Poetry Book Society, said there would be much excitement about the material in the sale, adding: “Atrocities is a terrible indictment of his fellow soldiers and should be required reading for every Sandhurst cadet.”
Wasn’t the Sassoon family responsible for the Chinese opium trade and wars? Or am I being antisemitic or just historically correct?
One Sassoon speaks out against the war, other Sassoons start wars for their trade.
Big jew/little jew scenario…..
Yes, the Sassoons were behind the wicked opium tade, to but to his credit, his father had left Judaism to marry a Christian, lost his vast inheritance (AND I KNOW WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE DISINHERITED), and his son Siegfried, who was, btw, a very brave British infantry officer, decried the whole war as sickening madness and got in serious trouble for so doing.
Had he not been put in an army psychiatric hospital he might have been imprisoned or shot for sedition. In time of war, especially when the war is dragging on, for a frontline officer to openly state that a war is pointless is considered as harming the morale of the troops and thus contributing to defeat and even “aiding the enemy.”