Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon

I knew[D1]  a simple[D2]  soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy[D3] ,

Slept soundly[D4]  through the lonesome dark,

And whistled[D5]  early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed[D6]  and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.[D7] 

No one spoke of him again.[D8] 

You[D9]  smug-faced crowds with kindling[D10]  eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak[D11]  home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

"Suicide in the Trenches" was an antiwar poem composed in response to the horrors of WWI by the English trench poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). It was first published on 23 February 1918 in Cambridge Magazine, then in Sassoon's collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and consists of twelve lines in three stanzas. Sassoon uses figurative language, descriptive detail, tone, structure, and sound to create a powerful impression of the horror and the wastage of the WWI in particular and war in general. War, a product of greed and ignorance, is associated with intense suffering and the annihilation of all things animate and inanimate that are beautiful and innocent. Sassoon fought as an officer in the WWI and won the Military Cross for gallantry in action. He meets Wilfred Owen another officer-poet who wrote about the horrors of WWI in July 1917 when he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. By this time Sassoon, like Owen, had been shattered by the terrible firsthand experiences of the war and opposed it with a passion; however, similar to Owen, Sassoon admired the common soldiers who fought it. Sassoon was critical of the greedy shortsighted politicians who sent young men to war to further their own agendas and the civilians who unknowingly cheered them on to a horrible pointless death in battlefields far from home. Copp commenting on the poem states, "It was with poems like these that Sassoon, more than any other trench poet writing in English, brought home to an uninformed public the true reality of the ghastly nature of the war." Most importantly, according to Copp, the poem "avoid sentimentality and self-pity while describing the realities of war".

The tone of the first stanza is quiet upbeat for a poem that is about war and death. The poet uses a simple vocabulary and an uncomplicated sentence structure in the cheerful, pleasant, and appealing opening stanza, which is a long sentence. The bucolic scene word-painted by the poet is a celebration of the spring time. The use of the word “boy” modified by the term “soldier” drives home the extreme youth and vulnerability of the soldier. At a time the issue of the child-soldier is being hotly debated worldwide, this is quite a timely inclusion to the AL literature syllabus. Like the spring time, the boy is “simple”: he is young, innocent, and unsophisticated. His joy is “empty” in the sense that there is no particular reason for his joy; at peace with himself and the rest of the world, he “grin[s] at life”. He sleeps soundly even “through the lonesome dark” because he has no worries in his mind that would trouble his sleep or give him nightmares. All in all, the boy seems to be enviably happy and in tune with nature and his inner self. Therefore, he is happy as a lark.

After this idyllic description of joyous youth, the change introduced in the second stanza would have been unexpected and appalling beyond belief were it not for the title of the poem and the use of the word “soldier” in the first line of the 1^st stanza. The second stanza presents a bleak and horrifying winter scene from the trenches of the WWI. The joyous boy who knew no fear in the first stanza is now “cowed” and “glum”. The onomatopoeic[D12]  term “crumps” stands for the sounds of artillery shells [D13] falling in soft soil on which only seeds and the feet of happy children at play should have fallen. In the end, the boy who would have marched on with visions of heroism in his mind dies and quickly forgotten. In a place hundreds of people fell daily, one suicide would hardly make a ripple. Even if it did, the others would want to push the memory out of their minds consciously because of the fear that they too might give into despair and end their own lives. 

Stanza three opens with the send person “you” and initiates a confrontation with those the poet thinks as responsible for the suicide of the boy. The officer-poet is disturbed and angry and uses forceful and provocative language to drive home the fact that the war is nothing but a scramble for power. The power-hungry hypocrites at the center make use of the ignorance of the impressionable young in order to further their agendas. Sassoon put the people who cheered the young boy to war to shame by telling them to "sneak home".  

---

 [D1]Use of the past tense?

 [D2]Unsophisticated/ guileless/ stupid?

 [D3]He was simply happy to be alive? He was happy for no reason at all

 [D4]He did not have bad dreams because he did not have any worries

 [D5]He and the lark had something in common – both were happy – “happy as a lark”

 [D6]Frightened and sad/downcast

 [D7]Committed suicide

 [D8]Quickly forgotten/ of willfully pushed out of mind because of the fear that they would also give in and kill themselves. In the thick of the war one death would not create ay ripples. 

 [D9]Those who cheer young boys on to the battlefield.

 [D10]burning

 [D11]like coward

 [D12]onomatopoeia

 [D13]Read “Dulce et decorum” “Gas, gas…”