WW1 Diaries of Siegfried Sassoon

The following acticle was taken from yesterdays Times (260609) - on saving Siegfried (mad Jack) Sassoon's RWF - personal war diaries from being sold abroard

The normally immaculate handwriting is ragged and rushed, describing the corpses of “mangled . . . shell-twisted Germans . . . that will haunt me till I die” and British soldiers in “various states of dismemberment”.

Siegfried Sassoon scrawled the words huddled in a tunnel in northern France one Sunday night in April 1917, “fully expecting to get killed on Monday morning”.

Instead he was wounded (“I got a sniper’s bullet through the shoulder and was no good for about a quarter of an hour”) and shipped home. There, with the support of the philosopher and conscientious objector Bertrand Russell, he wrote a devastating indictment of the war that, read out in the House of Commons and recorded in The Times, triggered a public uproar.

The diary entry and a draft of his anti-war statement are a small but indicative part of a unique body of Sassoon’s personal notes, unpublished poems, sketches and correspondence written over nearly half a century and at risk of being lost to the country.

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Cambridge University Library has begun a campaign to raise £1.25 million to buy Sassoon’s personal papers from his family and to save the archive from being sold to one of the wealthier American universities that have already bought up much of Britain’s literary heritage.

If it is successful, the library plans to put the archive on public display, providing a fresh insight into the mind of a man who did more than most to shape our understanding of the experience of modern warfare.

Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, described the archive as “nothing less than a part of our national identity”, with “tremendous significance for everyone who cares about poetry, everyone who cares about autobiography and everyone who cares about history”.

The archive was in filing cabinets and an attic at the Sassoon family home, barely organised, even though extracts have previously been published.

The half-Jewish Sassoon was one of the great 20th-century English originals. Born in Kent on September 8, 1886, he studied at Cambridge but proved too lazy to obtain a degree.

He then lived the life of a country gentleman — hunting, golfing and playing cricket — while publishing small and largely unheralded volumes of poetry.

A member of the officer class, he was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915 and sent to France, where he soon earned the nickname “Mad Jack” for his near-suicidal bravery.

He won the Military Cross, which may have saved him from a court martial or even the firing squad when his Soldier’s Declaration appeared in The Times in July 1917.

He had a number of homosexual affairs but in 1933 married Hester Gatty and they had a son, George, whose death in 2006 precipitated the sale.

The archive includes 45 notebooks, many from Sassoon’s time in the trenches, flecked with candlewax and mud, together with a host of letters. Those to Hester reveal a simple, awkward tenderness at odds with his often brutal war poetry. The marriage broke down after the Second World War.

Sassoon died in 1967, aged 80. He endured nightmares about the trenches until the end of his life.