(4 of 5)
All this happened on Sept. 1 and we have been here a month on Friday. It seems like years, & that other life of privacy belongs to the past, but it will come again. . . .
DOT
Taplow Lodge
Cliveden
Taplow
Bucks, England
Silent
Sirs:
Thank you for telling us (TIME, Oct. 30) what the English poets who were the youth of 1914 are doing under the impact of the new war. Would it be possible to elicit a statement of their present mental attitudes from Sassoon and Graves? They are of the tried troops of both action and thought, at once brave soldiers and honest men. It is appropriate to recall that Sassoon in 1917 made a public protest against the prolongation of the war in the following words:
"I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation."
After making this protest Sassoon continued in the ranks. What either of these poets have to say should be of moment to all intellectually honest people of whatever nationality. Sassoon is the man to whom Wilfred Owen addressed his poem, The Next War:
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death—for Life; not men—for flags. . . .
CATHERINE LILLIS-NEVINS
New York City
> If and when Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves et al. make a public statement, TIME will report it.—ED.
Stopgap
Sirs:
In this part of the country, when someone jumps into a gap in the conversation with this remark: "I heard a most extraordinary story the other day"—anyone may interrupt with "Stop right there! I know what you are going to tell us. A friend of yours, or someone's sister, or your aunt's cousin, picked up in her car a woman who was walking wearily along the street. She got into the back seat and after a silence announced 'Someone will die in this car today.' After the driver had recovered a little, she went on 'Hitler will die on . . . (varying dates according to the version of the story).' The driver, now thoroughly scared, put her uncomfortable passenger out at the next corner and drove on. She was stopped at the next crossroads by a policeman who asked her to take a badly injured man to the hospital. She could not well refuse and the policeman and casualty got into the back seat. On the way to the hospital the man died."