Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
…
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Mr. Sassoon’s verse is also of importance because it paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of the war. He spares us nothing of:
The strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in Barrack-room Ballads, but in Mr. Sassoon’s verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many of them, however, rise to a noble pity—The Prelude, for instance, and Aftermath, the latter of which ends: