Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (1886 – 1967)

THE TOMBSTONE-MAKER

HE primmed his loose red mouth and leaned his head
Against a sorrowing angel’s breast, and said:
‘You’d think so much bereavement would have made
‘Unusual big demands upon my trade.
‘The War comes cruel hard on some poor folk;
‘Unless the fighting stops I’ll soon be broke.’

He eyed the Cemetery across the road.
‘There’s scores of bodies out abroad, this while,
‘That should be here by rights. They little know’d
‘How they’d get buried in such wretched style.’

I told him with a sympathetic grin,
That Germans boil dead soldiers down for fat;
And he was horrified. ‘What shameful sin!
‘O sir, that Christian souls should come to that!’

UK Buyers Purchase the Book Siegfried Sassoon by Max Egremont (Author) SIEGFRIED SASSOON DENIED that he was 'a typical Jew' and disliked to be thought rich, but at the end of the nineteenth century, when he was born, the name of Sassoon meant great riches: a 'gilded' Jewish family linked to the raffish Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and to an exotic, slightly mysterious past... US Buyers

Other War Poets

John Mcrae		Wilfred Owen		Edward Thomas		Herbert Read		Isaac Rosenberg
William Hodgson		Siegfried Sassoon		Rupert Brooke		Alan Seeger		Charles Sorley