"I ain't marchin' anymore": The British poet Siegfried Sasoon throws down his rifle in 1917

By Jack Brummet, Poetry Editor

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was a soldier and one of the best known poets of World War I.  He won medals for bravery on the Western Front, and wrote poetry about the horrors in the trenches, and the patriotic hypocrisy of those who wages what he believed was a pointless war.  After he wrote this letter, echoing what the singer Phiil Ochs wrote fifty years later "(I ain't marchin' anymore") in 1917, the British army, which considered the letter treasonous, rather than fight his protest, or try him, or give him a platform, declared him to have shell-shock (what we call Post Traumatic Stresst Disorder today) and tossed him out of the army.

Click to enlarge - This image, and the photograph of Sassoon,

is in the  public domain because its copyright has expired.

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