Veteran

VIGILS -- Siegfried Sassoon -- Viking ($1.50). Of the British poets whom the War sent over the top, Siegfried Sassoon is one of the few survivors. As an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers he served with such absent-minded gallantry that he was awarded the Military Cross, was recommended for the D. S. O. Then in 1917, because he considered that the War had degenerated into a senseless slaughter, he published a public protest, "in wilful defiance of military authority." Because he was a war-hero he was not court-martialed but hushed away into a mental hospital. The front line had changed his oldfashioned, literary poems into the brutal realism of Counter-Attack, whose taste was too strong for many a stay-at-home. His autobiography (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer) was a quiet masterpiece of emotion recollected in post-War tranquillity. Now, even for Veteran Sassoon, the War is long over. In middle-age (he is 49), he lives in retirement near Stonehenge, writes gently minor poems that will seem old-fashioned to most readers of 1936. Of the 35 poems in Vigils, not one will taste bitter, few will have much taste at all to literary palates accustomed to present-day poetic diet. To ageing Poet Sassoon, even the War is now hardly more than a misty memory

: . . . somewhat softly booms A Somme bombardment: almost unbelieved-in looms

The daybreak sentry staring over Kiel

Trench crater.

Readers close this book of meditative, resigned verse wondering whether Siegfried Sassoon had once been shell-shocked into poetry.

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