Sweat your guts out writing poetry Soldiers Don’t Go Mad
Charles Glass Bedford Square €27.50 Little did Siegfried Sassoon know when he gave that advice to fellow soldier Wilfred Owen at a hospital dubbed Dottyville that his protege would go on to write some of the most searing works of the First World War
When Wilfred Owen walked nervously along the corridor of Craiglockhart Hospital for shellshocked officers in Edinburgh on the morning of August 18, 1917, and tapped on the door of Siegfried Sassoon’s bedroom, daring to introduce himself to the poet he deeply admired, Sassoon was so busy polishing his golf clubs that he barely looked up.
‘Short, dark-haired and shyly hesitant… I took an instinctive liking to him,’ Sassoon later recalled. Owen, aged 24, the son of an English railway worker, was dazzled by the handsome, high-born published poet six years his senior who’d been to Cambridge and been awarded a Military Cross for gallantry. ‘He is very tall and stately with a fine firm chiselled head,’ he gushed in a letter.
The two men chatted about Sassoon’s poems, until Owen dared to mention that he too was a poet, though not yet a published one.
That brief meeting would turn out to be the beginning of a deep and all-too-brief friendship between them: a friendship Charles Glass celebrates in this deeply moving book, which switches back and forth between the hell of the trenches and the healing paradise of Craiglockhart.
Founded in 1916, it was the institution to which officers in a state of nervous collapse – stammering, gibbering, mute, shaking from their traumatic experiences – were sent to be rehabilitated, in order to be returned to the very hell of mud, blood and decaying corpses that had got them into that state in the first place.
With hindsight, we know that on the day of that meeting Owen had just under 15 more months to live. The knowledge that his mother would receive the telegram announcing her son’s death on Armistice Day – November 11, 1918 – haunts the pages of this devastating and fascinating story.
A few days after that first meeting, Owen showed Sassoon one of his poems. Sassoon was impressed and advised him to ‘Sweat your guts out writing poetry’. Which was exactly what Owen proceeded to do, giving us some of the most heartbreaking, searing poetry of the First World War.
Sassoon became Owen’s mentor, suggesting small tweaks to (for example) his masterpiece Anthem For Doomed Youth, introducing him to the literary set and helping him to get his poems published in magazines. Both men cared deeply about poetry, and were both closet homosexuals. We do not know whether their friendship spilled over into love, but Glass doesn’t suggest that it did.
One important fact to bear in mind here: Sassoon was not, in fact, suffering from shellshock. While all the other 170 or so patients in Craiglockhart, including Owen, were there because they’d been reduced to nervous wrecks by the unimaginable horrors they’d encountered in the deafening and unending nightmare of the trenches, Sassoon was there for quite a different reason.
He had dared to question the war itself. He wrote and circulated a protest statement on July 6, 1917, declaring, ‘I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust’.
His statement was read out in the House of Commons. To make such a statement was heresy, risking imprisonment with hard labour. Britain’s War Office knew Sassoon was inviting them to court-martial him, which would have meant putting the whole war on trial. Instead, they came up with a crafty alternative to spare themselves the embarrassment of prosecuting a war hero and prominent poet. The Medical Board declared him ‘not responsible for his actions as he was suffering from a nervous breakdown’ and sent him to Craiglockhart. Or ‘Dottyville’, as Sassoon nicknamed the institution. He kept himself in proud isolation there, having as little as possible to do with ‘the failures at dinner’, as he called them, shunning everyone except Owen. At night, he heard the screams of the patients as they suffered from their nightmares. ‘By night,’ Sassoon wrote, ‘each man was back in his doomed sector of a horrorstricken Front Line.’
Owen came under the care of the psychiatrist Dr Arthur Brock, an advocate of ‘ergotherapy’ – work therapy, or ‘keep them busy every waking hour’.
He submitted willingly to the frenetic programme: a cold swim before breakfast, followed by endless activities from debating to sports to gardening, and he became the editor of The Hydra, the hospital’s in-house magazine, in which he published Sassoon’s poems (but not his own).
Glass paints a touching portrait of this extraordinary institution, supervised by the marvellously useless matron, Miss Margaret MacBean, whose food was pretty filthy and hygiene standards lax.
Sassoon felt increasingly guilty for having abandoned his regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and decided to go back to France and fight. Owen was discharged on October 30, after 126 days in the hospital. The two friends met twice more: first over dinner during which Owen said to Sassoon, ‘You have fixed my life – however short’, and then in London for a harpsichord concert.
‘I parted from him,’ Sassoon later wrote, ‘in deluded ignorance that he was on final leave before returning to the Front.’
Sassoon was shot in the head by a British soldier thinking he was a German, and was sent back to another hospital in Scotland. Owen was shot and killed on November 3, 1918, as he was leading his men across a canal. As Glass writes, ‘Owen was a success for Craiglockhart, and for ergotherapy, but for him the outcome was death.’
It was as simple, and as horrifying, as that.
‘They were sent to be rehabilitated, in order to return to the very hell that got them into that state’