Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, -
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

POETRY INDEX

The first world war
- Introduction GO
- In Flanders Fields   GO
- For the Fallen  GO
- Dulce et decorum est  GO
- On Passing the New Menin Gate  GO
  the 1930s
   the second world war
  crimes against humanity
  the nuclear age
  other wars
  responsibility
  women's voices

Salient': a network of fortifications, earthworks and trenches. The Ypres Salient was a famous focus for intense fighting for much of the war.
'paid': here used with heavy irony: there is, in fact, no way of repaying such unaccidental deaths.
'their name liveth for evermore': 'their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore' is a line from Ecclesiasticus (c200AD), a book in the collection of biblical writings known as the Apocrypha. It comes from a well-known passage beginning 'Let us now praise famous men', and also observes, 'some there be which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been'.
'immolation': sacrifice
'slime': the poet chooses a word associated with the hellish and disgusting to refer to the mud of the Flanders battlefields

Wilfred Owen's poem was a passionate denunciation of war and death in war. This poem by his friend Siegfried Sassoon is a passionate - and angry - denunciation of the way in which the war dead are remembered. He derides the idea that even the grandest memorials in any way recompense 'the poor bloody infantry' for providing cannon fodder - and particularly these men, listed as 'missing, presumed dead', whose 'intolerably nameless' bones are still being turned up by farmers' ploughs in Flanders today.

In four long and terrible years, 'the Dead', once John McCrae's imaginary summoners to vengeance, are now envisaged by Sassoon as posthumously contemptuous of the value which the living place on 'a pile of peace-complacent stone'.

Peace had not in fact been won: the roots of the next war, firmly set in the punishing treaty that ended the last, were sending up shoots as Siegfried Sassoon's poem was being written, and showing signs of flowering when it appeared in the Oxford Book of English Verse in 1936. Sassoon's poem is a reminder that people should never be complacent about peace. The constant work needed to maintain it is as important as the work to achieve it. In that light the constant tending of the world's war cemeteries has become a sad, and painful, metaphor.

Siegfried Sassoon himself became part of the peace movement for a time and was one of the early sponsors of the Peace Pledge Union.