"I never joined the army for patriotic reasons"

Spare and unadorned, the statement rejects the comfortable story that volunteers marched to the trenches buoyed by flags and anthems. Rosenberg, a Jewish, working-class artist from London’s East End, faced chronic poverty and limited prospects in 1915. Enlisting promised a wage and a separation allowance for his mother; it offered survival, not glory. Acknowledging that calculus strips war of the moral cosmetics that propaganda applies and exposes the quieter coercions, need, class, the pressure to be useful, that drove many into uniform before conscription formalized compulsion.

His refusal to cloak his choice in patriotism clarifies the ethic of his poetry. If the motive is not national exaltation, then the subject cannot be heroic spectacle; it must be the body, mud, vermin, and the indistinguishable suffering of friend and foe. Poems like Break of Day in the Trenches or Dead Man’s Dump carry that fidelity to experience: the trench rat crosses lines more freely than any soldier; the dead accumulate without rhetoric. Honesty about enlistment begets honesty about the war.

The line also repositions loyalty. Rather than allegiance to an abstract nation, duty turns toward family, to the fragile economies of immigrant life, and to the craft of witness. By refusing the consolations of patriotic sentiment, Rosenberg recovers a more difficult compassion, one that recognizes a common human exposure beneath uniforms. Such clarity distances him from poets who began in pastoral idealism and arrived at disillusion; he starts disillusioned, which sharpens the blade of his observation.

Finally, the statement acts as an indictment of the era’s social order. When survival requires donning a uniform, the battlefield begins in the labor market. Rosenberg’s art transforms that bitter equation into testimony, refusing to let necessity be mistaken for consent and insisting that the truth of why one fights determines the truth one tells about fighting.