Analysis Of World War I By Siegfried Sassoon

Since its beginning, World War I has been a topic of major controversy. Not only were millions of lives lost, but the war led to new laws against specific types of unethical warfare. During the war, Siegfried Sassoon was one of many that wrote with hopes to bring an end to the entire conflict. In his poem “’They,’” Sassoon uses satire to effectively express his frustrations with the aimless deaths in the war. It is important to first look back at Sassoon’s life in order to get a better sense of what motivated him to write this piece. He was born to a “wealthy Jewish family” where “he lived a life of ease before the war” (Damrosch 1166). He wrote regularly, howevever, these writings are only really known due to the recognition of his war

He saw hundreds of troops mowed down by the incessant fire of machine guns, countless explosions of artillery, leaving those around him maimed and dismembered. At one point, Sassoon became very ill, and upon returning to home to recover, “grew furious at the willingness of press and politicians to mask the slaughter as ‘willing sacrifice’ by soldiers who’d been little more than ‘compressed cannon fodder’” (Quinn 24). Which, along with countless other gruesome experiences on the battlefront, left him burning with animosity toward the war. In his biography, it was stated that though these experiences were traumatizing, they “gave him a genuine subject for his poetry” (23). He returned to combat only to be shot just shy of his jugular, which once again brought him back home to

It is clear then that the soldiers have in fact changed, but not at all in the way the Bishop had intended. Instead of strong, noble individuals, men return home with terrible injuries that they would likely never have received if they were not forced to fight in the war. This ironic difference makes the Bishop look both foolish and insincere, further satirizing his character.

Lastly in regards to the Bishop, his statement in the final line of the poem continues the trend of the insincerity while picking back up on his contradiction in religious statements. The Bishop makes the remark “The ways of God are strange” in response to the soldiers listing out the various physical injuries that have changed them (12). If he were to actually care about the individual persons, then he would open his eyes to realize the fact that the war is truly taking its toll on men for the worse. And rather than deciding to deal with the issues at hand, the Bishop continues blindly assuming God’s will is to continue the destruction of human lives despite the losses on both