Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886–1967) was an English poet, memoirist, and decorated infantry officer, one of the central voices of British literature about the First World War. He was born at Weirleigh in Kent into a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family on his father's side and an Anglo-Catholic family of artists on his mother's, and was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree.

He enlisted as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry on the day Britain declared war in 1914 and was later commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He served in France from late 1915, was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 for bringing in wounded under fire, and acquired the nickname Mad Jack for trench raids of conspicuous boldness. Wounded in 1917, he wrote an open letter, A Soldier's Declaration, denouncing the prolongation of the war; through the intervention of Robert Graves he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh rather than court-martialled, and there met and encouraged the poet Wilfred Owen.

His war poetry, collected in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918), is sharply satirical and angry, in deliberate contrast to the elegiac tone of much earlier war verse. After the war he turned to a long sequence of fictionalized memoirs, beginning with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936).

He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957 and died at Heytesbury in Wiltshire in 1967.

Siegfried is a German masculine given name from Old Germanic sigu, victory, and frithu, peace, and he carried the masculine form.