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Friends Among the Soldier Poets

KENNETH A. LOHF
 

NL morning at the beginning of August, when 1 had
been at Craiglockhart War Hospital about a fortnight,
there was a gentle knock on the door of my room and
a young officer entered. Short, dark-haired, and shyly hesitant,
he stood for a moment before coming across to the window,
where I was sitting on my bed cleaning my golf clubs." Siegfried
Sassoon, the writer of this reminiscence published in Siegfried's
Journey, ipi6-if20 nearly thirty years after the event, was recall¬
ing his first meeting in 1917 with Wilfred Owen, an aspiring poet
who had been on active service at the Front in the St. Quentin
sector and who had been invalided home with shell-shock. Owen
brought with him on this sunny morning several copies of The
Old Hiintsvmn and Other Poei/is, Sassoon's first major book and
his first collection of realistic war poems, and asked the older poet,
now standing in the sun in his purple dressing gown, if he would
inscribe them for himself and some of his friends. Sassoon's renii-
scence continues: "He spoke with a slight stammer, which was
no unusual thing in that neurosis-pervaded hospital. My leisurely,
commentative method in inscribing the books enabled him to feel
more at home with me. He had a charming smile, and his manners
—he stood at my elbow rather as though conferring with a su¬
perior officer—were modest and ingratiating." Owen's copy of