The General (poem)

The General is a war poem by the English war poet Siegfried Sassoon that takes place in the First World War, in the Battle of Arras. Written in April 1917 from Sassoon's hospital bed in London while recovering from a shoulder wound received while leading a bombing assault, the poem is about a general who greets soldiers as they arrive at the front lines. That was a week ago and now most of the soldiers are dead. The surviving soldiers curse at his lack of competence. One soldier, Harry, says to Jack, another soldier, that he is surprisingly cheery given that soldiers march onto war. The poem ends by telling us that Harry and Jack were killed directly due to the general's battle plans.

Analysis

Consisting of two stanzas, it has a tone that is stern and satirical as the General sounds unusually jovial in the first verse, but the rest of the poem is shown from the soldier's points of view and is depicted as bitter, hopeless and dark. There is also a reference to the Battle of Arras in the poem. The poem concludes with the stark statement "he did for them both by his plan of attack".

Legacy

In 2017, another handwritten poem version written by Sassoon on 7 February 1919 would end up going on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, in an anti-war protest exhibition.