Wirers

When he wrote “Wirers” in 1917, Sassoon knew about his subject. He fought on the Western Front and experienced its horrors. His diary gives a vivid picture of life in the trenches and the action of the war. In a diary entry for March 31, 1916, for example, he writes that he was fascinated by no-man’s-land, “with its jumble of wire-tangles and snaky seams in the earth winding along the landscape. The mine craters are rather fearsome, with snipers hidden away on the lips, and pools of dead-looking water” (Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915–1918. Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 51).

On June 9, 1916, Sassoon records that he was part of a wiring party the previous night:

out with the wirers from 10 to 1.15. I can’t imagine anything much more unpleasant than lugging coils of “concertina” wire along a narrow trench and stumbling with it over shell-holes and trip-wires in inky gloom and pouring rain. However, we got a lot out (p. 76).

On June 30 he was again a member of a wiring party from midnight until 3:30 a.m.; at one point during that night, they were driven back by German shelling. The previous month, on May 23, Sassoon had written of a raiding party on enemy lines that was turned back by the German barbed wire.