In July 1917, a young officer covered two pages with minute handwriting in a small, black leather-bound notebook. It could have cost him his life.
The original of Siegfried Sassoon's Soldier's Declaration – a roar of defiance from the Western Front, which caused uproar when it was read aloud in parliament – is part of an extraordinary archive of one the most famous and best loved of the first world war soldier poets. Yesterday, Cambridge University launched a £1.25m appeal in order to be able to acquire the archive from his descendants.
Sassoon's Declaration, which he called "an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it", claimed the government's objectives had secretly changed from defence to conquest, and that peace could have been achieved by negotiation. In the summer of 1917 Sassoon escaped court martial for his outbrust, in part because he had just won an MC for an act of reckless courage, when he spent six hours dragging wounded soldiers back from No Man's Land in broad daylight.
The archive includes journals, letters, drafts of poems, sketches and photographs, including notebooks stained with the mud of the trenches and candlewax from the feeble light in the dugouts. It was carefully preserved until his death by his only child, George, a distinguished scientist. He had sold some papers in the 1970s to help maintain the ramshackle house he inherited, but destroyed nothing, despite the revelations of the pain of his parents' broken marriage, and his father's many affairs with men. Folded into the cover of one of the notebooks is the "return immediately" telegram Sassoon received from the authorities when he failed to return from leave on the grounds that "I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings". On that occasion, he only survived the firing squad because Robert Graves persuaded him to plead shell shock and face Craiglockhart hospital – where he befriended fellow war poet Wilfred Owen.
Many of the poems in the archive are heavily revised, with whole verses scored out and titles repeatedly reworked. One page, originally written in pencil, is over-written in purple pencil and ink, and then, decades later, in ballpoint. The journals also include poems Sassoon copied out to take to war with him, including works by Robert Graves, and by men whose fame he would eclipse such as Ernest Dowson.
One of the closest friends of the poet's later years was the former England cricketer Dennis Silk, who said that he had done more than any other human being to turn people against the idea of war. They met at a cricket match when Sassoon was 67 and Silk was 22. Yesterday, Silk recalled his first meeting with "a strange figure, in long trousers five inches too short and a felt hat which bore the marks of being eaten by innumerable bugs" – though he said the story that the poet had actually stolen the hat from a scarecrow was probably literary legend. Silk stayed many times at Sassoon's home, Heytesbury Manor in Wiltshire, where after half a lifetime, he found Sassoon still tormented by nightmares of the trenches.
"He would often say to me 'you look tired, time you were in your bed' – and I would realise it was broad daylight outside and he had talked right through the night," Silk remembered. "He said to me 'it is so marvellous to have you here to receive my bad dreams.'"
Cambridge already holds masses of earlier and later manuscripts and letters, and says the wartime material would make its holdings the greatest Sassoon archive in the world. The university's bid to acquire the material is supported by a regiment of poets and authors including Sir Andrew Motion; Sebastian Faulks, author of the first world war novel Birdsong; and the historian Professor Richard Holmes, who called Sassoon "a figure of towering importance ... There are moments when his eye is so penetrating that his accounts are primary sources of first-rank historical importance."
• An unfinished and unpublished verse by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 10 August 1918:
Can I forget...
Can I forget the voice of one who cried
For me to save him, save him, as he died:
I will remember you; and from your wrongs
Shall rise the power and poignance of my songs;
And this shall comfort me until the end,
That I have been your captain and your friend.
• Crossed out verse from an unfinished poem, successively titled A Child's Faith, A Poet's Faith, and finally Simpleton:
God marches with the armies, he is strong:
He loves to hear men laugh; and when they fall
He triumphs in their wounds; War is his song,
And death his peace that watches over all.
Copyright: by permission of the executors of G T Sassoon Deceased.