War & Peace Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

A poet doesn’t usually sound like a prosecutor, which is exactly why Sassoon’s phrasing lands with such force. “Wilful defiance” is a legalistic dare: he’s not merely dissenting, he’s announcing intent, premeditation, and an open refusal to play by the army’s moral rules. The sentence reads like a formal deposition, but the heat is personal. Sassoon isn’t hiding behind metaphor; he’s stripping language down to an instrument sharp enough to cut through patriotic fog.

The most explosive move is the pivot from conscience to accusation. “Because I believe” signals subjectivity, but he immediately turns belief into indictment: the war is “deliberately prolonged.” Not tragically mismanaged, not accidentally extended, but willfully maintained by “those who have the power to end it.” That phrase relocates blame from anonymous fate and battlefield necessity to named structures of authority, implying a class and political gulf between decision-makers and the bodies paying for decisions. It’s an early, unmistakable articulation of what we now call institutional cynicism: the machine continues because the machine benefits.

Context matters: Sassoon wrote this as a decorated officer in World War I, when public dissent could read as betrayal. His statement exploits that tension. He weaponizes his credibility as a soldier to make refusal look like duty, not cowardice. Subtext: if obedience sustains a lie, then disobedience becomes the only honorable act left. The poem-maker becomes a whistleblower, and the front-line witness calls the home front’s rhetoric what it is: a script designed to keep the slaughter going.