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Siegfried SassoonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
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