feeling. You can't even think of paradise when you're
in hell. For Sassoon was now well along the way of
thorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparently
to no purpose? Did not the fact of war arch
him in like a dirty blood-red sky? He breaks out,
almost like a mad man, into imprecations, into
vehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellish
laughters that arise from a heart that is not broken
once for all but that is newly broken every day while
the Monster that devours the lives of the young
continues its ravages. Take, for instance, the magnificent
'To Any Dead Officer', written just before America
entered the war. Many reading this poem would think
Great Britain was going to cease fighting. But nothing
of the sort. One must always remember that bitter
as these imprecations are against those who mismanaged
certain episodes in the war, the ultimate foe
is not they but the German Junkers who planned this
war for forty years, who have given the lovely earth
over to hideous defilement and the youths of all nations
to carnage...

Sometimes in this book Sassoon fails to express himself
properly. This fact is, I think, a tribute to his
sincerity. For his earlier work very clearly displays
his technical proficiency. But here what can he do?
Indignation chokes and strangles him. He claws often
enough at unsatisfactory words, dislocates his
sentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp the
makers of war beneath them. Very rarely does he