Sassoon's line, "It's bad to think of war, / When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you," is especially powerful, and it made me want to explore some of his "inspirations."
Soldiers blinded from tear gas.
Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks.
This image, taken after the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium, reminded me also of last week's poem that was partially a response to World War I: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It's no wonder that this war produced such a negative response afterwords. The pictures are so depressingly haunting - I can't imagine what it would have been like to actually experience. These war poets are essential parts and compressors of this history.
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