Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns ?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, -
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones ?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names ?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Recently in Siegfried Sassoon Category
Siegfried Sassoon 1886 - 1967
Offsite Links:
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Poetry Foundation - bio, links to poetry
Website devoted to Siegfried Sassoon
Recommended Books:
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The War Poems Of Siegfried Sassoon
Collected Poems, 1908-1956
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
Poets of World War I: Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon (Bloom)
The Great War and Modern Memory (Fussell)
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