Although Siegfried Sassoon lived almost to the age of eighty-one and published poetry, fiction, and criticism over a period of sixty years, it was his experience in the years 1916 to 1918 that stoked his genius and informed almost all of his subsequent writing--a corpus that places Sassoon in the first rank of twentieth-century British writers. He won his muse the hard way: as a combat infantry officer at the Somme and in a half-dozen subsequent battles.

Sassoon's unique literary achievements are threefold. First, through the authentic voice of a fighting soldier and a genuine poet he created a new language of war, breaking with the romanticized, distanced pictorialization of soldiering and battle exemplified by Alfred Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) and the poetry and fiction of Rudyard Kipling and Kipling's imitators. By portraying the soldier's pain, misery, disgust, and horror, he shocked much of the British public...