THE two English poets and decorated war heroes Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon met 100 years ago yesterday in Edinburgh to where they had been invalided out of the Western Front trenches – Owen with severe shell shock and Sassoon supposedly mentally ill because he had protested against the war.

It is said that the meeting changed the course of literary history mainly because Sassoon encouraged Owen to write poetry replete with realism, poetry that inspired a generation of writers.

The meeting features in the Pat Barker novel Regeneration and the fine film of the same name derived from that book.

WHERE AND WHEN EXACTLY DID THEY MEET?
WILFRED Edward Salter Owen and Siegfried Loraine Sassoon were officers in the British Army, both having volunteered in 1915 and 1914 respectively.

Sassoon was the older man, 29 when they met, and had been published before the war and was already a decorated hero, winning the Military Cross for collecting wounded and dead soldiers under fire in July, 1916.

He had been sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital for writing Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration, which was read out in Parliament and published in The Times. The authorities could hardly call him a coward, so he was labelled “neurasthenic” – shell-shocked – and sent to Craiglockhart to be treated by W H R Rivers, the English proto-psychiatrist, who became a friend.

Owen had taught in France before the war and had almost joined the French army before going home to enlist and be commissioned in the Manchester Regiment.

Throughout the winter of 1916-17, Owen suffered appalling trauma, including being blown up by a trench mortar after which he lay for days amidst the remains of the officers who died in the blast.

On August 17, 1917, we know from Sassoon’s diaries that Owen came to see him to ask about his poetry.

They got on well and Sassoon and Owen’s physician, Captain J A Brock, encouraged the unpublished and unheralded young poet to write more, and perhaps use poetry almost as therapy.

The results were startling. Sassoon took up his pen again to great effect, crafting the extraordinary polemic They, but Owen started to produce some of the most famous war poems of them all, notably Anthem for Dead Youth – Sassoon’s notations can be seen on the original document – Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est.

DID THEY INFLUENCE OTHER POETS?
THE 24-year-old Owen was star-struck by Sassoon, but in the post-war period Owen became by far the more famous of the pair, and is generally reckoned to be the most renowned and inspirational of all the War Poets, largely because he followed Sassoon’s lead and wrote in lyrically unsparing fashion about the reality of warfare.

In doing so he and Sassoon eclipsed the likes of Rupert “The Soldier” Brooke and Julian Grenfell, whose Into Battle summed up the idealism of the pre-Owen, pre-Sassoon school of war poetry.

As we approach the end of the centenary commemorations of the First World War, there is surely a book to be written about all the poets of the War and how so many took such different attitudes – and let’s not forget the German, French and American poets, too, with August Stramm’s Battlefield as strong an anti-war poem as anything written in English.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DUO AFTER CRAIGLOCKHART?
Sassoon “recovered” from his non-existent illness and was posted to Palestine before returning to the Western Front, where he survived being shot in the head in a “friendly fire” incident. He lived to be recognised for the genius of his war poetry long before he died of cancer at the age of 80.

Owen went back to the trenches and won a Military Cross in October, 1918 by seizing a German machine gun and killing a number of the enemy. He was shot and killed near the village of Ors one week before the Armistice on November 11, 1918. His poems were published posthumously and gained him literary immortality.

A FEW LINES FROM EACH PERHAPS?
Sassoon’s Suicide in the Trenches:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

From Owen’s most famous poem, Dulce et Decorum Est:

…If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud,
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent, for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.