Act of Willful Defiance

Having witnessed the brutal realities of trench warfare, Siegfried Sassoon wrote his Act of Wilful Defiance as a statement that he was not returning to arms. Having gained a reputation as a poet, his ‘Wilful Defiance’ gained significant publicity and embarrassed both the government and the army when it was published as an open latter in The Times in 1917. Sassoon’s actions even put him at risk of being court-martialled, particularly after he refused to follow orders to withdraw it.

However, Sassoon’s friend Robert Graves persuaded the military commanders that Sassoon was simply suffering from shell shock, and so he was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland - where he met and mentored Wilfred Owen - to recover.

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the 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.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not have enough imagination to realise."