” A Soldier’s Declaration

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects witch actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

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. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerity’s for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.

S. Sassoon,

(Open Letter, published in The Times newspaper, 31 July 1917)

Siegfried Sassoon was a decorated and daring British combat officer in WW I, referred to as “Mad Jack” for his assaults on German positions. Returned to England in March of 1917 with a shoulder wound, after several years of being in the front lines, he was befriended by anti-war activists John Middleton Murray and Bertrand Russell. Soon after his Declaration of Wilful Defiance was published. Threatened with a court martial his friend, fellow officer and poet, Robert Graves, persuaded the Army to institutionalize Sassoon at a Military Hospital with a case of “neurasthenia,” or “shell-shock,” now referred to as post traumatic stress disorder. While there he met Wilfred Owens, the other young poet most associated with anti- war poetry in WW I.

Pat Barker’s prize winning novel, Regeneration, gives a compelling, fictionalized account of Sassoon, Graves and the hospital stay. A film, Behind the Lines, based on the novel was released in 1997.