Pure Cynicism: The Corrupting War of Siegfried Sassoon

If Rupert Brooke writes to show the good of war, then Siegfried Sassoon has got the bad and ugly combined. His poem “Glory of Women” clearly aims to depict the war as hideous, self-defeating, and futile. The war is to him so repugnant that he must use women—traditionally symbols of virtuousness and goodness—to convey the war’s ultimately corrupting influence.

The women “love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, / Or wounded in a mentionable place” (lines 1-2), writes Sassoon, sneeringly insinuating that the women (and, by extension, all living in countries at war who are not a part of the war), though claiming to dread and fear the war, really relish in it. These naïve women “worship decorations . . . believe / That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace” (lines 3-4). What is worse, however, they “listen with delight, / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled” as told by their soldiers (lines 5-6). These bloodthirsty women are not the fair prim conservative lasses of yesteryear; they believe at least as much in the glory of a bloody war as their sons and husbands. However, this poem is intended to be about war, not women. I believe that Sassoon uses women as his symbol because they have historically been viewed as morally above men, incorruptible and pure. If a war can turn a woman into a cruel glorifier of death, then its effect on men must be immeasurable, in other words.

The poem’s ending lines provide an interesting twist to the poem, as Sassoon speaks suddenly to another woman affected by the war: “O German mother dreaming by the fire, / While you are knitting socks to send your son / His face is trodden deeper in the mud” (lines 12-15). The German mother, like the women who “make us shells” (line 5), uses her creative and productive energy to fuel a war that she does not know anything about. Her efforts are futile, since her son is “trodden deeper in the mud,” and already dead. This ending suggests that the similar earlier line about women making shells is equally futile an enterprise: they produce shells because they think that they will help, when truly this conflict and the men involved in it are beyond help.

Like Brooke’s “The Soldier,” Sassoon’s poem is addressed to the loved ones: the mothers, sisters, and wives of soldiers. In both poems, the mention of the women is nothing more than a vehicle to get across the poet’s idea of war. Sassoon would have been familiar with Brooke’s poetry, since by 1917 it was already quite famous. Knowing the convention of addressing reassuring epistles to unknowing women, he may have decided to address his more realistic ideas of war to the women as well. Sassoon clearly uses some shocking imagery: he depicts women listening in glee as they hear how “British troops ‘retire’ / When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, / Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood” (lines 9-11). These women love the stories of war not because they are inherently vicious or murderous, but because society has made them that way: a war-glorifying country has corrupted its every vestige of purity, even its mothers and daughters, to become like men: morally formless, increasingly disillusioned, and worshipful of a war that does no-one any good.