War's Hell!

In order to describe the realities of the violence and suffering of the Great War to the population which had stayed behind in England, the soldier poets often turned to the image of Hell. Indeed, in his poem about a dead German (“A Dead Boche”), Robert Graves quite simply proclaims that “War’s Hell!” Similarly, Siegfried Sassoon uses the notion of Hell to deal with a sensitive subject in his poem “Suicide in the Trenches”: that of soldiers who preferred to end their own life rather than fight in such atrocious conditions.

This poem tells the story of a young man from a modest background who loved life to the extent that he was always laughing:

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy

But once he had joined the army his happy-go-lucky nature quickly disappeared and, in the midst of the fighting, he put a bullet through his own brain: “No one spoke of him again”. Further on in the poem, the writer hopes that this bleak story will serve as a useful lesson to the crowds of people who blindly cheer the soldiers as they march off to war, and without a care for the fate that awaits many of them:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by

Carried away by an overbearing patriotism, these crowds thus rejoice at the departing troops to the extent that they even appear “smug-faced”. It is as if they feel that by cheering them on they have done their civic duty towards these soldiers. As for Sassoon, he has nothing but scorn for these people and feels that they would be better off going quietly back to their homes and considering themselves fortunate that they are not the ones who have to march off to the trenches:

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go

On a personal note, this was one of the poems which had a profound effect on me when I was doing research for my work on World War One poetry, and I took inspiration from the last line for the title of my book.