The Rear-Guard

The Rear-Guard

War poem by Siegfried Sassoon

In April 1917, Sassoon’s company with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers supported a French assault on the supposedly secure German defenses, known as the Hindenburg Line. His 1917 poem “The Rear-Guard (Hindenburg Line, April, 1917)” is based upon this attack. In this poem, a soldier, lost in the maze of the trenches, demands directions of a man he finds curled in the mud. Enraged, the soldier kicks the man, only to discover “the livid face” of the curled corpse who formed the rear-guard, whose “fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound” (15-18).

Siegfried Sassoon

Published in Fifty Poems; Counter Attack And Other Poems

1917

The Berg Collection, New York Public Library / The Siegfried Sassoon Literary Estate. This item is available for non-commercial educational use under the terms of the Jisc Model Licence. Further details available at: http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/permitteduse

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