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Remembered Today:

The Man Who Shot Siegfried Sassoon


TEW

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Heard a radio interview yesterday on Radio Devon with author John Hollands.

 

Daily Express 8/7/2018.

 

Quote

Official records show the decorated war poet was injured near the end of the war in a “friendly-fire” incident but as we approach the centenary of the shooting, which took place near Arras on July 13, 1918, John Hollands – Britain’s most decorated national serviceman – is publishing research that reveals Sassoon was actually wounded in an act of attempted murder.

 

 

TEW

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  Up to a point, Lord Copper. I had occasion to read through Sassoon's service file a few months back to help another GWF colleague.  Nothing unusual about Sassoon- bog-standard infantry officer until he got shot. The medical boards showed that he,effectively. had a  traumatic breakdown afterwards. No wonder his platoon disliked him. Gung-ho until he was on the wrong end of a bullet.

    But lets get the John Hollands book in perspective. I have highlighted the most important word in the blurb from his own website about his forthcoming book:

 

John Hollands has just completed what he is confident will soon become his best known novel. It is entitled ‘The Man Who Shot Siegfried Sassoon’. It is an historical novel set in the trenches of the Great War; but it is far from being a conventional war story. Indeed everything about Sassoon was larger than life. Among other things he was one of the greatest poets to come out of the Great War. He was a comrade of Robert Graves and the man who ‘discovered’ that other Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. Sassoon was known throughout the western front as ‘Mad Jack’ and as well as being awarded the newly created Military cross he is thought to have been nominated for a Victoria Cross.

Yet Sassoon caused one of the greatest upsets and mysteries of the Great War. Out of the blue he made a notorious “protest” against the way the war was being conducted and urged British troops to lay down their arms. This caused uproar in parliament but Sassoon had sufficient friends in high places to avoid being court-martialed. Instead he was simply classified as ‘shell shocked’ and sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Scotland.

That’s when the dramatic repercussions set in without Sassoon being aware of what was happening. It also brought to a climax a romance he was having with Lady Ottoline Morrell, one of the leading pacifists of that time and the mistress of Bertrand Russell. But it was the men in his old platoon that suffered the most  and one of them had good cause to seek revenge by shooting Sassoon.

Until now, all this has remained a mystery. Was the shooting of Sassoon and act of a patriotic soldier against a traitorous officer, or was it something personal? Either way, was it justified? And what was Sassoon’s attitude to the danger he knew he faced?

John Hollands sticks as far as possible to known facts but he also draws on new material about Sassoon’s military service. His novel opens with an unexpected meeting he had in 1961 with disabled veterans of Sassoon’s old company who knew exactly what had happened.

So where did it all end? All is revealed in ‘The Man Who Shot Siegfried Sassoon’, Now available on Kindle and to be published by Quill publications to coincide the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War in 2018

 

Edited by Guest
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Not trying to plug it but the Radio Interview implied the book was the based on fact and heavily researched. The Author claiming that at a Xmas do in 1960 was introduced to the CSM.

 

He introduced me to some veterans who, it turned out, had served with Sassoon. There was a man who was mute. 

I asked about him and was told, ‘he was the bloke who shot Sassoon.He did not kill him but he shot him’, before we moved on.

 

Then;

Sassoon sent his Soldier’s Declaration, saying he was finished with the war, to all his friends, including his batman (or personal servant) Davey Jones, who was still in France with the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

 

Davey, an autistic savant who was gifted in remembering rhyming words, had bonded with Sassoon.

 

His protective twin brother, Rhys Jones, was Sassoon’s runner on the front. 

 

Sassoon thought it would be a good idea for Davey to pin his declaration on a noticeboard in the company barracks, which he did. 

It was considered an act of mutiny by Army chiefs.

 

And;

When the authorities found these poems written in Davey’s handwriting, they thought he had written them, so he was court-martialled and executed.

 

“Morgan’s (not his real name) wife told me that when Davey Jones was shot it was not done right and it did not kill him, so the CSM, ended up having to finish him off. 

 

The reaction of Rhys, his twin, was to swear revenge on Sassoon.

 

Not certain here if the other names have been changed, certainly can't find anything on a SAD event for Davey Jones and as the batman's number was given in the interview can't tally that up either, not even to a MIC.

 

The only SAD to a RWF man is 15954 Willam Jones 9th Btn. Desertion

 

TEW

 

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 It is an historical novel set in the trenches of the Great War;

 

Historical and novel in the same sentence

Says it all

 

 

Ray 

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Not knowing much about Sassoon or his declaration, I must say the details outlined in Post 5 all sound a bit hooky to me.

 

Is Grumpy not around to fill us in?

 

(What's Grumpy calling himself these days?)

Edited by Steven Broomfield
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5 hours ago, Steven Broomfield said:

What's Grumpy calling himself these days?

3 hours ago, Stoppage Drill said:

Trumpy

 

 

Fake news!!!!!!!

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I find this all very depressing. I presume we are talking about Sassoon's wounding in  July 1918, which I suspect was partially his fault in that he went crawling about No Man's Land without ensuring that all in his company knew that he was going 'patrolling in the dark'. With regard to his MC, it was only the riband that he threw into the sea.

As for being unpopular with his platoon,,it was not their lives he risked, but mainly his own through his penchant for carrying out reconnaissance patrols. Indeed, much of the reason why Sassoon went back to the war, serving in both Palestine and France in 1918, was because he felt that he had been deserting his men..

 

Hollands has done a grave disservice to a complex but very brave man, who was a remarkable poet.

 

Charles M

 

 

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Very similar to the damage done to Captain John Lauder's reputation by “Empty Footsteps”, a novel by Lorn McIntyre.

 

Mike

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5 minutes ago, charlesmessenger said:

Hollands has done a grave disservice to a complex but very brave man, who was a remarkable poet.

 

Hear! Hear!

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15 minutes ago, charlesmessenger said:

 

 

Hollands has done a grave disservice to a complex but very brave man, who was a remarkable poet.

 

Charles M

 

 

 

But he will make money out of it.

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8 hours ago, Steven Broomfield said:

 

(What's Grumpy calling himself these days?)

 

 

Muerrisch - i.e. mürrisch

 

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Hmmmm,

 

Historical novel and contentious from the Amazon blurb, does not bode well. Hope that he can back up his claims with documentation, however as it is a novel???

 

Andy

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3 hours ago, charlesmessenger said:

As for being unpopular with his platoon,,it was not their lives he risked, but mainly his own through his penchant for carrying out reconnaissance patrols. Indeed, much of the reason why Sassoon went back to the war, serving in both Palestine and France in 1918, was because he felt that he had been deserting his men

 

     Charles, I did not mean to denigrate the memory of Sassoon. As you say, a very complex character (and quite an old junior officer).  There is some literature about what a "successful" officer-esp. commanders- constituted. Of course, a battalion commander  might be popular upwards in the hierarchy for "offensive spirit" but disliked by the OR as "offensive" equated to casualties. 

    Sassoon's  exploits, both before his traumatic wounding and subsequently,show that on balance he had more battles within his mind that being physically in the front line. I am old enough to remember the excellent portrayal of him by Michael  Jayston in "Mad Jack" which IMDB tells me was in 1970.  It introduced me to a very complex real character over and above the war poetry learned at school.  I had the privilege of hearing a first-hand account of Sassoon  in later years from one of my customers as a bookseller- he had been billeted at Sassoon's house in Wiltshire as a WW2 OR- and the complexities continued. He was quickly perceived as gay but tolerant of his guests, even as a former officer.

    I wish Mr. Husbands well in his publication but previous experience shows that "Metahistory" (fitting real characters into imagined events or fake characters into real history- ie total b*lls)  takes on a life of it's own and soon becomes "accepted" as true. We have had the little Lewis -Stempel episode,with an invented officer uncovered by M.A.R.T.I.N., late of this parish which shows what damage this sort of stuff can do.

     Personally, I think Sassoon a character of infinite investigation. His gay history has been well-documented-the war poetry and protest stuff  ad nauseam. What I think is underrated with Sassoon-as with many men of the Great War- is their immersion in a  savage and disgusting world of which they had no knowledge or anticipation. Sassoon was,of course, from a very wealthy family. and I suspect that part of his breakdown- as with others-was , after the assessment about "courage" by Moran, that Sassoon's stocks of endurance of this world just ran out. Too much concentrates on his "Mad Jack" activities and not enough to set his experience against others who simply were worn down in a similar way but had not the literary trail for scholars to follow.

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Assuming that the veterans were not shooting a line and genuinely did think all this had happened (and were not winding Hollands up), it just shows how totally unreliable personal/collective memories are after a period of time. John Lucy, in There's a Devil in the Drum, p.199, has this to say: 'I found it hard to believe many of the stories [soldiers] bandied about. The troops, I am sure, did not lie deliberately, but their imagination, in the stress of battle, often played strange tricks on them'. Over time, the distortions just proliferate. 

 

Remind me sometime to tell you how I caught a 172lb pike in Dartford gravel pits in 1962.

 

Mike

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Unfortunately this kind of stuff ends up in school text books.

 

Edwin

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We're all trying to bury Great War myths and here's another one being created in front of our eyes. It'll be a film next and then it's fact.

 

Mike

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I understand the previous comments, but want to add that there is a spark of genius here: The author has identified a sure-fire winner, by providing the public with a story that they will want to believe is true, even if in all probability it is not.

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5 minutes ago, Wexflyer said:

a spark of genius here: The author has identified a sure-fire winner, by providing the public with a story that they will want to believe is true, even if in all probability it is not.

 

More disingenuous than genius. It has to be made more clear that this is fiction.

 

Mike

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4 minutes ago, Skipman said:

 

More disingenuous than genius. It has to be made more clear that this is fiction.

 

Mike

 

True!

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