Before Britain had declared its involvement in World War I, Siegfried Loraine Sassoon had signed up. He would later allude to “serious aspirations to heroism” that took him from his life of a country gentleman in Kent – where he had been born on 8 September 1886, grown up in a wealthy family, and spent his twenties enjoying fox hunting, cricket and writing poetry – to the battlefield in the name of king and country. Sassoon kept writing as a soldier: his verse
