dead...They were dead, they were dead. My heart and my head beat a march of dismay And gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns. 'Fall in!' I shouted, 'Fall in for your pay!' An army chief who happened to read this poem wrote angrily to the editor of the magazine: 'If Lieutenant Sassoon is now writing verse like this, his mind is still in chaos and he is not fit to be trusted with men's lives'.... He wanted to be told when the poem had been received by the editor. Had it been written while Sassoon was in hospital, and officially 'mentally disturbed', or later, when he might be liable for court martial? Not surprisingly, the editor said he didn't know. It was also in July 1918 that Siegfried Sassoon incautiously raised his head above an embankment, without his tin hat, and was shot - by one of his own men (who was devastated when he realised what he'd done). This time the wounded Sassoon went back to England for good. He recovered from the gunshot wound, but the war's mental damage lasted. 'How could I begin my life all over again when I had no conviction about anything except that the war was a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation?' Nightmares and memories plagued him, and a restless sense of futility was hard to shake off. He also suffered, as so many survivors of war suffer, from difficulty in personal relationships; he