those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere.'
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, first published in 1930, is Siegfried Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of the period between the early spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917.
This famous book follows the classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in Sassoon's trilogy of fictionalized autobiography, which he completed with Sherston's Progress.'Those who in future really want to understand the atmosphere of the years of 1916 and 1917, and the conditions of life, will turn back to this book . . . It is by the complete candour of its self-analysis, its dispassionate portrayal of mixed thoughts and instincts, that it stands out.' B. H. Liddell Hart, Daily Telegraph.
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Dispatched as 'shell-shocked' to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. His poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. But it as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better-known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy - Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936) - was outstandingly successful. He published several more volumes of autobiography, including Siegfried's Journey (1945), before his death in 1967.
The horror and glory of war has always fascinated me. Three outstanding books (of hundreds) are Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Nicholas Monsarrat's HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour, now sadly out of print, and The Last Enemy by Flying Officer X (Richard Hillary). (Kirkus UK)
This famous book follows the classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in Sassoon's trilogy of fictionalized autobiography, which he completed with Sherston's Progress .'Those who in future really want to understand the atmosphere of the years of 1916 and 1917, and the conditions of life, will turn back to this book . . . It is by the complete candour of its self-analysis, its dispassionate portrayal of mixed thoughts and instincts, that it stands out.' B. H. Liddell Hart, Daily Telegraph .
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon: ' It is my own story I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. '