The bravest and most publicly outspoken of all Britain's anti-war poets, Siegfried Sassoon, was the author of a gung-ho poem exulting in the prospect of death and battle, the Guardian discloses today.
"The agony of wounds shall make us clean," he declared, echoing the most extreme of the patriotic sentiments which encouraged hundreds of thousands to enlist during the first world war.
In a pattern in which his biographer finds haunting parallels with shifts in British opinion today over the Iraq war, Sassoon then began to switch within a year to a stance of rage and disgust at the human cost of the conflict. This led the Military Cross-winning officer to risk his life by making a declaration of "wilful defiance" to the authorities.
The poem, provisionally called Because We Are Going, comes to light 89 years after Sassoon wrote it. It is revealed in today's Review section of the Guardian by Sassoon's biographer, the scholar Jean Moorcroft Wilson, in an article written for Remembrance week.
Yesterday she said she had found it buried among Sassoon's copious papers at a Texas University. "He wrote an enormous amount of letters and prose. Scholars get overwhelmed and some things slip through.
"Nobody had brought it to anyone's attention".
It was hard to believe, she said that this was the same poet who later wrote some of the war's most famously savage verse, including:
Does it matter?- Losing your legs? / For people will always be kind
and, of an army general:
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Almost certainly written before the poet was sent to the front in France in November 1915, and saw the reality of trench life, Because We Are Going bursts with zeal for the prospect of heroism through self-sacrifice:
Since we might not choose / To live where honour gave us life to lose .
But that November Sassoon's younger brother Hamo was killed at Gallipoli. Not long afterwards the poet lost his most beloved friend and foxhunting companion David Thomas to a rifle bullet on the western front. His verse began to grow biting.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson says that the idea of war as somehow purging was definitely present during the first world war. She saw the same attitude being applied to the American and British invasion of Iraq last year, though opinion had since shifted.
"We were going to go into Iraq and clear out all those terrible things, to rid the country of this evil, corrupt regime.
"Now, this Armistice Day, the families of the Black Watch soldiers who were killed were laying wreaths at the door of 10 Downing Street. That was their David Thomas, don't you think? The death of their sons had brought home to them the full implications of war."
For readers of war poetry, the most un canny quality of Because We Are Going is its resemblance to the work of Rupert Brooke, the most celebrated pro-war poet of the day. Brooke - who died of infection before reaching the battlefield - was the author of The Soldier, whose first lines
If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England
which first circulated in 1914, became one of the recruiting anthems of the war.
In another poem, titled Peace, Brooke thanked God for the conflict as a chance for young men to turn
as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
Sassoon had met Brooke in 1914 with their mutual friend Edward Marsh, secretary to the politician Winston Churchill. After Brooke's death in April 1915, Churchill publicly eulogised him: "A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other."
Jean Moorcroft Wilson said: "It is safe to say that Rupert Brooke was an influence on Sassoon in 1915. If Brooke had lived, I am sure his views too would have changed".
Sassoon went on to befriend Wilfred Owen, now regarded as the greatest of British war poets, and help him with the manuscripts of such poems as Dulce Et Decorum Est. Owen was killed in 1918; Sassoon lived until 1967.
Because We Are Going
Because we are going from our wonted places
To be task-ridden by one shattering Aim,
And terror hides in all our laughing faces
That had no will to die, no thirst for fame,
Hear our last word. In Hell we seek for Heaven;
The agony of wounds shall make us clean;
And the failures of our sloth shall be forgiven
When Silence holds the songs that might have been,
And what we served remains, superb, unshaken,
England, our June of blossom that shines above
Disastrous War; for whom we have forsaken
Ways that were rich and gleeful and filled with love.
Thus are we heroes; since we might not choose
To live where Honour gave us life to lose.
Siegfried Sassoon (1915)
