a war of friendship ‘free form...spontaneous,and unlike any other poem I have written’.^32 It may be
seen as the culmination of a belief sustained through the war years in the return of
poetry as beauty, and Sassoon’s more traditional forms and images as a stay against
the violence being wrought on the lyric mode.
Yet, ironically enough, and whatever the merits of these lyrical poems, a different,
and more powerful ‘music’ is found instead in those poems which are discordant,
not only in sentiment, but in rhythm. In that sense, the poems which register the
shock of lyric disruption simultaneously affirm lyric survival. ‘Base Details’, for
instance, opens in an iambic pentameter whose disturbing jauntiness is achieved
through its monosyllabic regularity:
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.^33In contrast to this rhythmical speeding up (of) the line are the ponderous dactyls
which are the hallmark (cue pantomime entrance) of the Base Major ‘Guzzling
and gulping...Reading the Roll of Honour’. In the poem’s rhythmic shifts are
embedded its mockery. Similarly, the triple rhythm of ‘The General’—‘ ‘‘Good-
morning; good morning!’’ the General said|When we met him last week on our way
to the line’^34 —is evocative of advertising jingles or nursery rhymes. (During the
‘cannonading cataclysm’ of the 1916 June bombardment on the Somme, Sassoon
describes ‘the following refrain...running in my head:They come as a boon and a
blessing to men,|The Something, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen...an advertisement
which I’d often seen in smoky railway stations’.^35 The nursery rhyme element in his
satires also owes a debt to Graves, whose interest in nursery rhymes—which often
contain within them surreal images of violence—is evident through his poems of
the 1910s and 1920s, and who argued that the best of them are ‘nearer to poetry
than the greater part ofThe Oxford Book of English Verse’.^36 ) The poem’s mnemonic
rhythmical qualities encourage a kind of complacency in the reader which renders
all the more shocking the reversal in the final lines of the expectations set up by
rhythm and tone: ‘But he did for them both by his plan of attack’. In a sense, the
poem’s own stylistic ‘plan of attack’, with its triple feet, its brevity, and its form (it
comprises one six-line stanza, followed by a single line) puts paid to the reader’s
own forward march.
(^32) Sassoon,Siegfried’s Journey, 1916–1920(London: Faber, 1945), 140–1. He also notes that ‘No
one has ever said a word against it’, though Robert Graves was less than generous a few years later
when he introduced the following comment into the 2nd edn. ofGoodbye to All That(228): ‘Siegfried’s
famous poem celebrating the Armistice began:Everybody suddenly burst out singing...[sic]. But
‘‘everybody’’ did not include me.’ (The correct line is ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing’.)
(^33) Sassoon, ‘Base Details’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 68.
(^34) Sassoon, ‘The General’, ibid. 69. (^35) Sassoon,Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 331.
(^36) Graves, quoted in Iona and Peter Opie (eds.),The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1952), 2.