Awake To The Nightmare: 3 September 1939

When Chamberlain reluctantly declared war on 3 September 1939, Sassoon recorded in his diary: ‘It all makes me wish that the July 1918 bullet had finished me. I can do nothing now except endure this nightmare.’ His crisis is evident not only in his likening of the new war to a nightmare, but also in his death-wish and the peculiar circumstances surrounding his last wound of the First World War; his near-encounter with death in July 1918 came from friendly fire, an absurd accident of war. The new war was no less full of absurd acts and incomprehensible events, prompting Paul Fussell to remark that ‘blunders were almost the hallmark of Allied operations’; indeed, ‘blunders, errors, and accidents [were] something very close to the essence' of the Second World War. Edith Olivier observed that the outbreak of hostilities drove Sassoon further into his reclusive shell and released a flood of no longer repressible memories of his earlier war experience. In Heytesbury House, domestic duties and the invasive war news on the wireless became overwhelming, and in a diary entry from late 1939 he noted that ‘All I want to do is to forget – and forget – and have no arc-lights of practical mindedness turned on to my loathing of this Second Great War, by which I am being reduced to an impotent absurdity.’