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        New Message Board Archives >> 2005 General Board Posts >> Gagged? (Remembrance Day)
        
(Message started by: pubgirl on Nov 12^th, 2005, 10:26pm)

Title: Gagged? (Remembrance Day)
Post by pubgirl on Nov 12^th, 2005, 10:26pm

"A Soldier's Declaration"

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 how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe 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 for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has 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 prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military 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 against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficienct imagination to realise.

There are so many parallels with modern day here that it may surprise you to see the date and who wrote it and when! He was put in a mental hospital afterwards as it was claimed he was suffering from "neurasthenia" as he wouldn't retract it. (Great film and book made about this called "Regeneration" if you are interested)
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It was written by Siegfried Sassoon on June 15th 1917

Read before the House of Commons, July 30, 1917, printed in The London Times, on July 31, 1917.

Wendy

Also "Lest We Forget" below, one of the greatest poems of that War by him called Aftermath.

Title: Re: Gagged? (Remembrance Day)
Post by pubgirl on Nov 12^th, 2005, 10:27pm

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same—and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-gray
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget!

March 1919.

He went back into the trenches and was killed after this.

Wendy