Politics & Power Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon draws a razor line between loyalty to soldiers and loyalty to the state, and the cut is deliberate. By insisting he is “not protesting against the conduct of the war,” he sidesteps the easy smear of cowardice or defeatism. He isn’t arguing tactics; he’s indicting the motives and narratives that justify the tactics. It’s a maneuver born from the trenches: the one place where patriotic abstraction can’t survive contact with mud, shrapnel, and the steady arithmetic of loss.

The real charge lands in “political errors and insincerities.” “Errors” suggests catastrophic incompetence dressed up as strategy; “insincerities” implies something worse than miscalculation: a willful performance of righteousness, a public story that doesn’t match private knowledge. Sassoon isn’t merely saying leaders are wrong; he’s saying they know they’re wrong, or at least keep talking as if the old reasons still apply because admitting otherwise would unravel authority.

The phrase “fighting men are being sacrificed” weaponizes religious language against the secular machinery of war. Sacrifice is supposed to mean purpose, meaning, a moral exchange. Sassoon flips it: these bodies are offerings to political vanity and face-saving. In the context of World War I - and Sassoon’s own 1917 “Soldier’s Declaration” - the intent is not to end combat by wishing for peace, but to force accountability: to expose the gap between the state’s clean rhetoric and the soldier’s lived reality. The subtext is brutal: the war may continue, but the lie cannot.