As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He'd evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn't look to be more than eighteen. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyhow I hadn't expected the Battle of the Somme to be quite like this.

This first-hand account of the face of battle is as beautifully written as it is historically significant.

I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart.In the 1920s, a young man, grappling with the horrors of the war from which he had just returned, decided to write about a happier time. A time of cricket matches and fox-hunting, the busyness of village life and the shyness of youth.That man was Siegfried Sassoon, and this is his book. Originally published anonymously, it went on to become Faber & Faber's first bestseller. A classic depiction of pre-First World War Britain, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man tells two mirrored stories, about a boy coming of age and a country losing its innocence.

George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cricket and loyal grooms, had vanished forever by the time Sassoon wrote this book, but he captures it with a lyricism and gentleness that defy nostalgia.
A bestseller on publication in 1928, this superb evocation of the Edwardian age has remained in print ever since. It was the first volume of a classic trilogy, completed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, that charted both the destruction of the world for which Sassoon fought, and his own emergence as one of Britain's finest war poets.

This famous book follows the classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in Sassoon's trilogy of fictionalized autobiography, which he completed with Sherston's Progress.

For "The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon," Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has arranged the poems as far as possible in the order of their composition. A useful Biographical Table is also included, so that students, scholars, and other readers can trace the movement of the soldier alongside the mind of the poet. Fourteen of the poems in this volume are published for the first time.

Sassoon's fame as a novelist and autobiographer, and the success of his posthumously published Diaries, have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famous War Poems of 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs,