Siegfried Sassoon

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

“All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.”

“I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.”

“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems”

“Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.”

“I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”

“I believe that the purpose 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 which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.”

“I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.”

“Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.”

“The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.”

“Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.”

“I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.”

“I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.”

“In me the tiger sniffs the rose.”

“But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.”

“The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.”

“Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.”

“Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.”

“I have seen and endured the sufferings 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.”