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Unwilling to risk the adverse publicity that would accompany the court martial of a man who had been decorated for undoubted acts of bravery, the under-secretary for war declared that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock and had him sent to a military psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. It was during his incarceration at the hospital that Sassoon wrote "Survivors," a poem that displayed his contempt for the authorities who patched-up shattered men only to return them to combat. It also reveals much about the tortured state of his own mind:
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk. Of course they're 'longing to go out again,' — These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk. They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, — Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride ... Men who went out to battle, grim and glad; Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad. Without changing his views, Sassoon finally accepted the futility of continuing his protest and persuaded the Review Board at Craiglockhart that he should be passed for General Service and returned to the "sausage machine" that was the Western Front.
After a train journey to Holyhead, in north Wales, Sassoon sailed the Irish Sea to Dublin and arrived in Limerick on January 7, 1918. He was stationed in the "New Barracks" (now Sarsfield Barracks) and his first impressions of the city, as noted in his diary, appear quite favorable. He wrote: "Bells tolling from Limerick Cathedral; much nicer than sirens from Bryant and May's factory (in Litherland)." Almost immediately, Sassoon began to fall under the hypnotic spell of the Irish countryside and forget the horrors he had witnessed in France, writing, "By the time I had been at Limerick a week I had found something closely resembling peace of mind." On one occasion, he "... walked out to Adare this afternoon. At the end of the journey I suddenly came upon the wide, shallow, washing, hastening, grey river; the ivy-clad stones of a castle-ruin planted on the banks, amid trees. Very romantic scene, on a grey evening. ..." With few duties to detain him at the barracks, Sassoon saw the opportunity to indulge in his favorite pre-war pastime of fox-hunting, and he began to make inquiries with the local hunts. During the following month Sassoon ranged far and wide across some of the finest horse riding country in Ireland, losing himself in the fields and hedgerows around Croom, Fedamore, Friarstown and Castle Hewson, and being wined and dined in the grand houses of the fox-hunting gentry. Sassoon even went Absent Without Leave from an anti-gas training course in Cork so that he could ride with the Muskerry Hounds, an event he describes thus in his diary: "Fine country — along the River Lee— a wide, rain-swollen, stream, flowing down long glens and reaches. The whole land-scape grey-green and sad and lonely. Ireland is indeed a haunted, ancient sort of land. It goes deep into one's heart."
It is possible that as Sassoon rode out that February morning he was accompanied by the famous hounds of Limerick's Scarteen Hunt, nicknamed "The Black and Tans" on account of their distinctive coloring. Only two years later, the world of the fox-hunting, Irish country squire that Sassoon experienced would be swept away in a war more fully brutalised by an undisciplined paramilitary police force nicknamed "The Black and Tans," on account of their distinctive uniforms. By then, however, Sassoon's military career was over — after being shot in the head in France by friendly fire, he was invalided home. After the Great War, Sassoon's social conscience pushed him toward involvement with labour politics. He became literary editor for Britain's first socialist daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, and played an active role in the 1921 Miners' Strike and the 1926 General Strike. After the success of his "War Poems," Sassoon received critical acclaim for his slightly fictional autobiography "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man," for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1929. Despite a succession of homosexual relationships, Sassoon married Hester Gatty in 1933 and fathered a son, George. By late 1944, however, the marriage had failed and Sassoon began to live a reclusive life at his Heytesbury House home in Wiltshire. Much of Sassoon's literary work continued to display a deep spirituality and search for inner peace; a search which was satisfied by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1957. Sassoon died Sept. 1, 1967, at the age of 80. WGT AUTHOR'S NOTE: Those wishing to read more about Sassoon's life can purchase Max Egremont's new book, "Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography." Those who are interested specifically in Sassoon's wartime career, and incarceration at Craiglockhart Hospital, could do no better than to purchase the film "Regeneration" (available in the United States with the title "Behind the Lines"), based upon Pat Barker's novel of the same name, and featuring Jonathan Pryce as Dr. Rivers and James Wilby as Sassoon.
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