In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
Unable to bear the conditions in the trenches, a young soldier takes his own life. That he did so with his own gun is ironic considering that the gun was meant to protect him and inflict violence on the enemy. Placed in conversation with other Sassoon poems such as "Base Details," this soldier's suicide is made even more tragic. According to the speakers in Sassoon's war poems, the military officials whose decisions dictate the lives of the soldiers remain safely removed from these conditions as described in "Suicide in the Trenches." The soldiers suffer from the cold, the sound of explosions, lice and sickness, and a lack of resources. But they are told they must persevere through these conditions for the sake of the war effort. The line "No one spoke of him again" is indicative of the public shaming and erasure that will occur to anyone who disobeys. This line also disrupts the regular iambic pentameter of the stanza, which contributes to a sense of disorder.
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
The rosy gloom of battle overhead.
This quotation is a brief window into the domestic side of the soldiers' lives. Many of Sassoon's poems take place in the immediacy of battle, but in reality there could be large spans of time between battles. Away from home, the soldiers had to do their best to create a life despite difficult living conditions and extreme boredom. The placement of these ordinary objects in the darkness of an abandoned tunnel suggests the unnaturalness of wartime conditions in general. The soldier in the poem is so affected by the eerie isolation of the tunnel that he would prefer to be in the battle taking place in the world above. The battle is romanticized with its "rosy gloom," which is an oxymoron.
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glowering sun
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
Sassoon's pre-war obsession with nature imagery shines through in "Attack." These particular lines demonstrate the way that war has impacted the environment. There is something unsettling and violent in the description of "the wild purple of the glowering sun" and the "menacing scarred slope." Both the sun and the slope are ascribed threatening qualities: rather than shine or gently rise, the sun and slope respectively "[glower]" and appear "menacing." The body of the landscape has become scarred as a result of the war, and this violence continues with no end in sight as tanks make their way toward barbed wire.
"For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
A chap who's served that hasn't found some change."
And the Bishop said; "The ways of God are strange!"
Though Sassoon later converted to Catholicism and led a life of faith, in his war poetry he does not hold back from criticizing powerful religious figures (or anyone) who blindly supported the war effort. Here, the Bishop justifies the war effort by placing it in a religious context, but his response to the soldiers' stories about disfigurement is vague and unsatisfactory ("The ways of God are strange!"). In the stories that the soldiers tell, they refer to war victims by their names, which personalizes the issue. But these are not the stories of glory and honor put forth by propaganda. Many people don't want to know about the horrendous sacrifices, suffering, and disfigurement that the soldiers experience.
Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?…
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know that you've fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.
The refrain "Does it matter?" appears at the beginning of each of this poem's stanzas. Beneath the dry sarcasm of this line is the bitter anger that characterized many of Sassoon's war poems. While people who did not actively fight in the war continue to go about their normal lives, the soldiers cannot. In the poem, these veterans have lost their legs and eyesight, and suffer recurring nightmares. But it is implied that the public does not care: "no one will worry a bit" because they prefer to believe in the propagandistic narrative about honor and glory.
