Help Our Wounded in Hammersmith. And a 1917 Poem by Siegfried Sassoon.

            The Postcard

A postally unused postcard published by The Ideal Studios, Beadon Road, Broadway, Hammersmith.

The sign on the tray hanging from the girl's neck states:

'Help Our Wounded.
Wandsworth Putney & Roehampton
War Hospital Supply Depot
15, Carlton Road Putney S.W.'

Siegfried Sassoon

The poet and writer, Siegfried Sassoon, is best known for the poetry that he wrote during the First World War. 

Although he was a published poet before the outbreak of war, the conflict acted as a catalyst for the creation of his best work.

In April 1917 Sassoon was wounded at the front and was sent back to England to recover. In a letter to his uncle, the sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft, Sassoon writes from the 4th London Hospital in Denmark Hill, South London. 

Describing himself as ‘Very nearly your (late) nephew’ he writes about the injury and life at the hospital. The horrors of war are clear from the poet’s description of the nightmares in which he sees corpses and remembers experiences ‘beyond anything I had been up against before’.

The letter is part of a collection of correspondence from Sassoon to his uncle, which includes vivid descriptions of life in the trenches and the eloquent statement that the poet made publicly against the war later in the same year. 

As a result of his protest Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart hospital for shell-shock where he met and encouraged the young poet, Wilfrid Owen. Sassoon eventually returned to fight in Palestine in 1918.

The letter was as follows:

'My dear Uncle,
I was very nearly your (late) nephew, as the sniper only just missed failed to making a good job of it, & the bullet missed my jugular by a fraction of an inch, & the spinal column by not too much. But, as I wrote in the Head Sister’s album, (by request)':

'Good luck to the Hun
Who got out his gun
And dealt me a wound so auspicious;
May a flesh-hole like mine
Send him home from the Line,
And his Nurses be just as delicious'.
   

Taken on: October 27, 2018

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Sets appears in: • Great War • Songs and Poems of the Great War

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