Sassoon's "The Rear-Guard"

Of all the war poets, I personally found Siegfried Sassoon to be a favorite, mostly on account of his imagery; it is gripping and gritty, detailed and dark. Sassoon paints moods and morbid pictures with his words which pull the reader into the real environment of war-torn Europe.

A stellar example of his use of pictorial language is "The Rear-Guard." He opens the poem: "Groping along the tunnel, step by step." Immediately the reader gets a sense of a careful, perhaps frightened following of a tunnel wall, single step by single step. Sassoon uses very specific verbs ("groping") to communicate very specific images of action. He continues, "He winked his prying torch with patching glare / From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air." The speaker's torch is the only source of light; is the speaker looking for something, for someone? Again Sassoon uses a specific adjective, "sniffed," when introducing the "unwholesome air." This seems to imply that the repugnant stench is foreign, unfamiliar to the speaker; it requires further inspection. One can imagine the speaker whispering to himself, "What is that smell?" And this is all within the first three lines of the piece.

The most concrete and emotion-tugging image is that of the dead man whom the speaker trips over, further down the tunnel. Thinking him to be asleep, the speaker tugs on his arm and attempts to ask him how to get to headquarters. The man does not respond:

'Get up and guide me through this stinking place.'
Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed a beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony of dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

The dead figure on the ground seems to undergo several transformations in the speaker's eyes. First a sleeping soldier, then an answering heap, and finally livid face terribly glaring up. This sight causes the speaker to "stagger" further down the trench, "with sweat of horror in his hair." Somehow the "boom of shells" above--which Sasson describes earlier as "The rosy gloom of battle overhead"--becomes a sort of solace to the speaker, an escape from horror. He concludes his stumbling through the Hindenburg Line like so:

"He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, / Unloading hell behind him step by step."