a war of friendship cold and fair’^48 ).Graves argues that ‘it comes off whichever way you read it’—as
intended seriously or as satire.^49 The poem, read as both simultaneously, becomes
a measure of Sassoon’s ambiguity towards war (and an oblique study of his own
ambiguous sexuality).
Their different perceptions of war—and implicitly therein of poetry—also help
to illuminate the famous episode of 1917 when Sassoon issued his ‘Declaration
against the War’ with the intention of provoking a court martial. The story is
told differently by Sassoon and Graves in their memoirs, and the differences of
perspective were never resolved. Both agree about the justice of Sassoon’s complaint
against ‘the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being
sacrificed’, although Sassoon, in retrospect, questions how qualified they were to
make that judgement. Yet, while Graves agreed in theory with Sassoon’s comments,
he never approved of the protest (‘he’s quite right in his views but absolutely wrong
in his action’^50 ), and in a letter to Sassoon in October 1917, written shortly before
Sassoon requested a return to active service, his arguments point up key differences
between the two:
You can only command their [the soldiers’] respect by sharing all their miseries as far as
you possibly can, being ready for pride’s sake to finish your contract whatever it costs you,
yet all the time denouncing the principles you are being compelled to further....I believe
in keeping to agreements when everybody else keeps them and if I find myself part to
principles I don’t quite like, in biding my time till I have a sporting chance of rearranging
things. One must bow in the house of Rimmon occasionally. Your conscience is too nice in
its discernment between conflicting forces.^51
Perhaps there may be some ironynow in reading such a comment by Graves, from
whose vocabulary, it is tempting to suggest, the word ‘compromise’ seemed in later
life to be expunged. Yet unconsciously, and in what sounds like the viewpoint of the
stereotypical upper-class English gentleman, he also outlines two different modes
of writing. Sassoon, caught between, and acutely conscious of, conflicting forces in
himself, and in his situation as poet and soldier simultaneously, produces out of
such conflicts some of his best work. But we might also remember Graves’s intense
dislike of the later Yeats, and of Yeatsian rhetoric. Uncannily paralleling his 1917
arguments, Graves’s own poetic principles as formulated thirty years later rest on a
contradiction—‘I am’, he writes inThe White Goddess, ‘nobody’s servant’; and yet
the Goddess ‘demands either whole-time service or none at all’^52 —but they do not
rely on the outward expression of a quarrel with oneself.
In the years that followed, their different attitudes here became less important
than, though not unrelated to, a bitter debate about ‘truth’. According to Sassoon,
‘David’ [Graves] ‘swore on an imaginary Bible that nothing would induce them
(^48) Sassoon, ‘The Kiss’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 14. (^49) Graves,Goodbye to All That, 339.
(^50) Graves to Edward Marsh, 12 July 1917, inIn Broken Images, 77.
(^51) Graves to Sassoon, 27 Oct. 1917, ibid. 85–6. (^52) Graves,White Goddess, 10–11.