Life & Wisdom Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

War propaganda sells soldiers as hardened realists, but Sassoon flips the stereotype with one surgical claim: the moment violence starts, the mind runs home. "Soldiers are dreamers" isn’t sentimental; it’s accusatory. He’s arguing that battle doesn’t create a new, tougher self. It strips you down to the oldest, softest wants: warmth, cleanliness, intimacy. The list is the point. "Firelit homes, clean beds, and wives" lands like a sensory inventory of what trench life annihilates: heat versus damp, cleanliness versus filth, a shared bed versus the mass, mechanical anonymity of the front.

Sassoon knew this from inside the machine. A decorated officer who turned publicly against the war, he wrote in the wake of industrial slaughter where courage was often indistinguishable from endurance. Calling soldiers "dreamers" undercuts the state’s romantic myth of noble sacrifice. It suggests that the psychology of combat is not bloodlust or glory but recoil: an emergency retreat into memory and desire. Dreaming becomes a survival reflex, not a luxury.

The subtext is also gendered and classed. The "wife" isn’t just love; she’s a symbol of continuity and recognition - someone who knows your name when the army reduces you to a body in uniform. "Clean beds" signals domestic comfort many recruits may never have had, turning home into an imagined refuge as much as a real address. Sassoon’s intent is to humanize without consoling: he gives you tenderness precisely to make the brutality harder to excuse.