SOURCE: "Realism and Satire: Siegfried Sassoon," in English Poetry of the First World War, Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. 71-112.

In the following essay, Johnston analyzes the war poetry in The Old Huntsman and Counter-Attack. He argues that brief satirical verse of this kind renders the experience of battle "too directly and too grossly" and lacks the fuller perspective that other poets later brought to the war.

Sassoon's development as an antiwar poet:

To achieve his object he made use of a colloquial style owing much to the experiments of John Masefield, and was at first inclined to allow his anger to rise unchecked so that his verse became the vehicle for emotional outbursts. After he had recovered from the initial shock of his experience of front-line conditions, however, his lyrical impulse began to assert itself in a new way and this, combined with his talent for ironic statement...