Life & Wisdom Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon turns the patriotic gloss of soldiering into an accounting of spiritual foreclosure. "Citizens of death's grey land" is a brutal, bureaucratic phrase: citizenship usually promises rights, belonging, a future. Here it grants only a permanent address in a colorless border state between life and annihilation. The grayness matters. This isn't the romantic red of sacrifice or the clean black-and-white of heroism and villainy; it's the mud-stained monotony of trench war, where days blur and moral clarity dissolves under shellshock.

Then he snaps the metaphor shut with finance. "Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows" treats the future like a stock that should pay out - progress, stability, the ordinary interest of growing older. Soldiers, in Sassoon's telling, are forced into a bad investment with no return. It's not just that they might die; it's that the very structure of time is stolen from them. Even survival can feel like living on credit, haunted by the sense that your "tomorrows" were spent for you by men safely elsewhere.

The context is Sassoon's First World War disillusionment, when the initial rhetoric of honor crashed against industrial slaughter. As an officer who publicly protested the war's continuation, he writes with insider authority and moral impatience. The line is aimed as much at the home front as the front line: a corrective to speeches and newspapers that convert young lives into abstractions. In two clauses, he replaces glory with gray citizenship and replaces destiny with a zero-yield future.