Fraternity on the Front Lines: Siegfried Sassoon, Fictive Kinship, and the First World War

Fraternity on the Front Lines examines the relationship between kinship and commemoration in the Great War diaries, poetry, and autobiographical prose that Siegfried Sassoon composed between 1915 and 1945. I contend that Sassoon’s account of his front-line service first developed as a direct consequence of the fictive kinship bonds that united fighting men together in France, to the exclusion of the Homefront civilians from whom these soldiers felt themselves irreparably exiled. These men perceived their shared combat experience as forming the foundation of their interdependent relationships, and of the war narrative that they soon produced. That narrative’s publication in their war-poetry and memoirs in turn supplied vivid details of the war that had remained otherwise inaccessible to most civilians even after 1918. Whatever its hostility to non-combatants, then, Britons began to adopt much of the combatant- writer’s seemingly unimpeachable account nearly verbatim: soldiers’ writings retroactively redefined the nation’s larger relationship to the war so that the collective British war narrative after 1930 came to over-emphasise the figure of the soldier-poet, around whom it began to build a canon of war-books. While recent scholarship has worked to rediscover writings by the very groups that soldier-kin sought to exclude—women, conscientious objectors, colonial subjects, and others still—it has so far missed how the once-dismissive Sassoon was himself forced to radically reconsider his earlier ideas of what “qualifies” one to testify to wartime sufferings. As I show in my last chapter, Sassoon experienced another great war, this time as a superannuated non-combatant at home in England. My reading of the long-ignored autobiographies that he began as this Second War approached (and only finished in August 1945) will update the reputation of one of the First World War’s best-known writers, now beginning to suffer from the success of his earlier, exclusionary writings. By showing how the older Sassoon finally expanded his conception of valid, experience-informed testimony well beyond his combatant kinship group, therefore, Fraternity on the Front Lines supports scholarship working to extend the Great War library beyond the received handful of soldier-poets that includes the young Sassoon and his closest comrades.

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