Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon, 1928, Penguin Classics, paper, available at Amazon and bookstoresEarly July exactly one hundred years ago, British, French, and German troops engaged in battle near the River Somme that left a million men dead or wounded on the fields in just four months of butchery. Known to history as the Battle of the Somme, it was arguably the bloodiest in all of human history. All for a gain of just six miles into enemy-occupied territory.
Author and poet Siegfried Sassoon was at the Somme. His lovingly-written classic, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, ends with his wartime service, his loss of dear friends, and the beginnings of his ruminations on the madness of war.
For just the foxhunting content, the book is a classic to be recommended to any literate foxhunter. But Sassoon wrote a sequel, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, which is the most moving anti-war book this reporter has ever read.
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Siegfried Sassoon, 1930, Penguin Classics, paper, avaiable at Amazon and bookstores“Taken in tandem,” says Alan Taylor, writing for the Herald (Scotland), “the two books articulate more powerfully than any others the chasm that lies between peace and war, normality and chaos, sanity and insanity. Even when in the rat-ridden trenches and gagging on the stench of death, Sassoon tried to recreate that lost Eden, listening to larks, visualising the Sussex downs and ‘all the casual tappings and twinklings of countryside….’”
One can readily believe that, but for those memories of himself and his horse in the dew-drenched fields of early morning, Sassoon might easily have gone mad. (Indeed, like most of the men who endured that horror, Sassoon did suffer from what we now know as PTSD.) For each of those countries, a generation of men, many highly gifted with so much yet to give to the world, was obliterated. And, for so little reason.
Here are two books by one gifted writer that recount personally first the makings of a foxhunting man and lastly the makings of a passionate anti-war survivor.
Posted July 8, 2016