This is one of the best essays I’ve ever written, and I’m immensely proud of it.

Woodrow Wilson is often associated with bestowing World War I with the title of “the war to end all wars.” Fought from 1914 to 1918, WWI is the sixth deadliest conflict in history, resulting in over 9 million combatant deaths. Nearly all of the men who served during this conflict came back with some sort of injury, be it physical or mental. The horrifying events that took place during the war are the stuff of nightmares for civilians, and we are both blessed and cursed to be unable to fully understand what the soldiers went through. However, thanks to a collection of WWI veteran Siegfried Sassoon’s poems entitled The War Poems, namely the poems “They” and “Survivors”, we are granted a glimpse into the lives of the soldiers and how World War I left its mark on the bodies, minds, and lives of the men who were fortunate enough to come home alive.

Siegfried Sassoon was a captain in the British Army over the course of World War I. Known by his comrades as “Mad Jack” for his feats of gallantry, Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross in June 1916 (Hart-Davis, 16). After being wounded in the shoulder on April 16, 1917, Sassoon was put on convalescent leave for the next three months. When he was deemed fit for active duty again in July, Sassoon declined to return to the battlefield and took up an anti-war stance. Sassoon wrote a letter to his commanding officer, which was read to Parliament, entitled Finished With The War: A Soldier’s Declaration. Seen as an act of treason, it was suggested that Sassoon be court-marshaled; instead, Sassoon was admitted to the Craiglockheart War Hospital to be treated for shell shock. Siegfried Sassoon kept his anti-war stance for the remainder of the war, going so far as to throw his Military Cross into the River Mersey, although he returned to duty in late 1917. On July 13, 1918, Sassoon was wounded in the head by friendly fire and spent the remainder of the war on convalescent leave. He later retired from the service in March 1919.

            A soldier being sent to the trenches in World War I was essentially guaranteed to return to his barracks with some sort of injury. The armies participating were still using 19^th century frontal attacks, despite having 20^th century weaponry. The results of this ineptitude were the deaths of roughly 1 million men in the first year of the conflict (Baggett and Winter, 236). The most constant threat a soldier faced from his enemy was that of artillery bombardment. Over the course of the war, British General Headquarters reported that the British army fired over 170 million artillery rounds. Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front describes the effects of an enemy artillery bombardment: “The dark goes mad…there is no escape anywhere. By the light of the shells I try to get a view of the fields. They are a surging sea, daggers of flame from the explosions leap up like fountains. It is impossible for anyone to break through it” (66). After an intense shelling, it was not uncommon for soldiers pushing forward to find their enemies in their trenches in a comatose state, exhausted by the strain that was put on by the artillery fire. Sassoon’s poem “They” explores the extent of the injuries sustained by soldiers unfortunate enough to be hit by artillery fire: “’For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind/Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die” (57). These men are destined to live out the remainder of their lives crippled, granted that they survive long enough to heal from their wounds. While George and Bill’s injuries were most likely caused by explosive and shrapnel shells, Jim’s injury was possibly caused by a new kind of weapon: poison gas. First used in the Second Battle of Ypres, gas attacks were instruments of both death and panic. The first gas used was chlorine gas, which slowly killed soldiers via asphyxiation over several agonizing days. Chlorine was later replaced by mustard gas, which took four to five weeks to kill its victims. The following weeks would be excruciating for the victim, his body being covered in blisters, and the overwhelming nausea would cause constant vomiting. What’s worse is that mustard gas attacked the bronchial tubes of the lungs, making breathing a horribly painful and labored task. Of the 58,000 gas casualties in the US Army, 26,828 came via mustard gas (Ellis, 116). It was uncommon for a man to come home from the war without a physical reminder of his time huddled in the trenches.

The scars left by WWI were not always visible to the human eye. Most soldiers, along with their physical injuries, came home with mental distress that would plague them for the rest of their lives. In Sassoon’s poem “Survivors”, the damaged psyche of returning soldiers are brought to light: “The shock and strain/Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk…They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed/Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,–/Their dreams that drip with murder…Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad” (97). These men were victims of shell shock, now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But because treating these mental ills with psychological remedies was not accepted and often frowned upon, the soldier’s mental instabilities were greatly exacerbated to the point where he had to be kept under constant supervision, lest he attempted suicide to ease his pain. The setting of the war was also psychologically straining. The lifeless appearance of No Man’s Land, the moaning of injured and dying men, the buzzing of flies, and the constant threat of death constantly accosted the soldiers, many of whom employed desensitization as a defense mechanism, turning themselves into shells of the men they used to be. The mental agony experienced by soldiers who served in WWI added another handicap to their every day lives.

The soldiers not only combated the enemy on the front lines, but also the ignorance and naiveté of the citizens at home. In the first half of “They”, a bishop is addressing the public, reassuring them that their soldiers are fighting for a just cause, and will return as men changed for the better: “The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back/ they will not be the same; for they’ll have fought in a just cause…They have challenged Death and dared him face to face” (57). The soldiers have indeed changed, except not in the way they were expected, and the bishop tries to brush it off, claiming, “The ways of God are strange!” The bishop is trying to assuage the pain of the soldiers by telling them their injuries were caused by God to try and make them better. The poem “Survivors” also illustrated how the public brushed off the mental grief experienced by the soldiers, toting it as something they’d grow out of eventually: “No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain/Have caused their stammering disconnected talk…They’ll soon forget their haunted nights…and they’ll be proud/Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…” (97). This simple view embraced by the general populace made a soldier’s transition back to everyday life an excessively arduous undertaking.

World War I is one of the bloodiest and most ugly wars in human history, continuing to ruin the lives of its combatants long after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. WWI destroyed the lives, bodies and minds of those who served, making it near impossible for the unlucky soldiers to lead normal lives.