_A Soldier’s Declaration_
(This statement was made to his commanding officer by
Second-Lieutenant S. L. Sassoon, Military Cross, recommended for
D.S.O., Third Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, as
explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army. He
enlisted on 3rd August 1914, showed distinguished valour in France,
was badly wounded and would have been kept on home service if he had
stayed in the army.)
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military
authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately
prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence
and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I
believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered
upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it
impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects
which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can
no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I
believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the
political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are
being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest aganst
the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I
may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority
of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not
share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
_July_ 1917. S. Sassoon.
This filled me with anxiety and unhappiness. I entirely agreed
with Siegfried about the ‘political errors and insincerities’; I
thought his action magnificently courageous. But there were more
things to be considered than the strength of our case against the
politicians. In the first place, he was not in a proper physical
condition to suffer the penalty which he was inviting, which was to
be court-martialled, cashiered and imprisoned. I found myself most
bitter with the pacifists who had encouraged him to make this gesture.
I felt that, not being soldiers, they could not understand what it
would cost Siegfried emotionally. It was wicked that he should attempt
to face the consequences of his letter on top of his Quadrangle and
Fontaine-les-Croiselles experiences. I knew, too, that as a gesture it
was inadequate. Nobody would follow his example either in England or in
Germany. The war would obviously go on, and go on until one side or the
other cracked.
I decided to intervene. I applied to appear before the medical board
that was sitting next day; and I asked the board to pass me fit for
home service. I was not fit and they knew it, but I asked it as a
favour. I had to get out of Osborne and attend to things. Next I
wrote to the Hon. Evan Morgan, with whom I had canoed at Oxford a
month or two previously. He was private secretary to one of the
Coalition Ministers. I asked him to do everything he could to prevent
republication of or comment on the letter in the newspapers, and to
arrange that a suitable answer should be given to Mr. Lees Smith,
then the leading pacifist M.P. and now Postmaster-General in the
Labour Cabinet, when he brought up a question in the House about it.
I explained to Morgan that I was on Siegfried’s side really, but
that he should not be allowed to become a martyr in his present
physical condition. Next I wrote to the Third Battalion. I knew that
the colonel, a South Welshman, was narrowly patriotic, had never been
to France, and could not possibly be expected to take a sympathetic
view. But the senior major, an Irishman, was humane, so I wrote to him
explaining the whole business, asking him to make the colonel see it
in a reasonable light. I told him of Siegfried’s recent experiences
in France. I suggested that he should be medically boarded and given
indefinite leave.
[Illustration: VARIOUS RECORDS