The House is crammed:  tier beyond tier they grin
  And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
  Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
  “We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!”

  I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
  Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, sweet Home,”—­
  And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
  To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man being driven insane by an insane world.  The spectacle of lives being thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then in a hysteria of mirth, as in The General: 

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the Line,
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. 
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * * * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Mr. Sassoon’s verse is also of importance because it paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of the war.  He spares us nothing of: 

The strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches.  His book is in its aim destructive.  It is a great pamphlet against war.  If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in Barrack-room Ballads, but in Mr. Sassoon’s verse.  The best poems in the book are poems of hatred.  This means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry.  His poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of Shelley.  They are utterances of pain rather than of vision.  Many of them, however, rise to a noble pity—­The Prelude, for instance, and Aftermath, the latter of which ends: 

  Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,—­
  The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? 
  Do you remember the rats; and the stench
  Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—­
  And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? 
  Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

  Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—­
  And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
  As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? 
  Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
  With dying eyes and lolling heads,—­those ashen-grey
  Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?