chapter 10 Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in siegfried sassoon’s ‘A working party’ Marcello Giovanelli . Introduction Twenty-six years ater the end of the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon published the inal book in his second autobiographical trilogy. Like its predecessors he Old Century and Seven More Years and he Weald of Youth, Siegfried’s Journey was a more relective account of Sassoon’s life and poetry, with none of the name changes and other elements of the ictional autobiography genre that had marked the earlier George Sherston trilogy. On its opening page, Sassoon remembering his arrival as a soldier in France wrote: At the front I had managed to keep my mind alive under diiculties, and had done some writing when we were away from the line. But it wasn’t easy to be a poet and a platoon commander at the same time, and I was overlowing with stored-up impressions and emotional reactions to the extraordinary things I had observed and undergone. (Sassoon 1946: 1) In these lines, Sassoon relects on what for him had been key issues regarding his role as both a soldier and a poet in the early days of the war. He emphasises the acts of observing and experiencing, and questions the relationship of poetic com- position to the trauma of extreme experience. Sassoon’s concern is not just with the reality of trying to write under such conditions, but with how the poet-soldier can capture these observations and experiences into a form that faithfully pre- serves their intensity and immediacy for future readers. In essence then, Sassoon is concerned with how the poet’s responses to his experiences can be shaped into a form where the feeling of proximity to conceptual content remains central. In this chapter, I use one of Sassoon’s early war poems, ‘A Working Party’ to account for this concern. he poem is reproduced in full below.