Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon won the Military Cross, threw it in the Mersey, and published a public refusal to continue fighting. Born in Kent in 1886 into a family of wealthy Jewish merchants on his father's side and English gentry on his mother's, he lived on a private income before the war, hunting, playing cricket and writing pastoral verse. He enlisted the day before Britain declared war. His brother was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. He was decorated for bringing wounded men in under fire, and acquired a reputation for suicidal aggression that earned him the nickname Mad Jack — on one occasion capturing a German trench single-handed and then sitting down in it to read poetry. In July 1917, convalescing from a wound, he wrote A Soldier's Declaration, stating that the war was being deliberately prolonged by those with the power to end it, and that he was acting on behalf of soldiers being sacrificed. It was read out in the House of Commons and printed in The Times. He expected court martial. Robert Graves intervened and persuaded a board that he was suffering from shell shock. He was sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh, where he met Wilfred Owen and edited his drafts, including Anthem for Doomed Youth. Owen was killed a week before the armistice. Sassoon returned to the front, was shot in the head by one of his own men who mistook him for a German, and survived. His war poems are short, bitter and satirical, aimed at generals, politicians and complacent civilians. He later wrote a fictionalised memoir trilogy, converted to Catholicism in 1957, and died in 1967.

• Lived: 1886 CE – 1967 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: poet, soldier, writer