Why I volunteered for Conscripts

Siegfried Sassoon lived from 1886 to 1967. He saw the horrors of World War One first hand as an army officer. After the war ended, Sassoon published several poems on the subject of war, Conscripts being one of them.

Conscripts, published in 1917, is written in an ABABCC format, with six lines in each stanza, and five stanzas in all.  The poem is about a drill sergeant who watches the men he trains lose their higher, positive traits. I enjoy Conscripts due to the way it puts you in the narrator’s head as he watches his men change, and has you question whether or not this was how it was like being conscripted in World War One.

In the first stanza, the narrator is first introduced by yelling at the recruits. He asks, “What’s magic got to do with you? / There’s no such thing!” (5-6). He continues to berate them as he trains them through the first three stanzas, noting how they begin to lose their better traits. During the last two stanzas, the sergeant sends them to France, and most of the men he cared about die. The sergeant himself loses some good traits of his own as the men die. At the end of the poem the kind men, “What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!”(27), live and go home, much to the sergeant’s disgust.

My favorite stanza in Conscripts has to be the second one, lines seven through twelve. After the training has begun, the sergeant begins to take notice of the things his men put behind them.

                "They gasped and sweated, marching up and down.

                I drilled them till they cursed my raucous shout

                Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.

                Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out.

                “Left, right! Press on your butts!” They looked at me

                Reproachful; how I longed to set them free!"

I really like how Conscripts is told from an unlikeable character’s perspective. The man insists that magic isn’t real, yet he can’t help but personify the feelings that the recruits lose as a result of his training. He loses his own better traits when his men die and even ends up resenting the few, common traits that the survivors have after the fighting is over. Although I’d never enjoy being conscripted, I certainly enjoyed reading Conscripts.