£550,000 grant to keep Sassoon's WW1 'Soldier's Declaration'

Cambridge University Library has received a £550,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund to help it secure a collection of Siegfried Sassoon's diaries and notebooks. The collection includes the handwritten draft of the Soldier's Declaration, in which Sassoon stated his reasons for refusing to return to the Front after being wounded in 1917. The library needs another £110,000 to complete the purchase.  

After sending the Declaration to his commanding officer, Sassoon had handed over a copy of it to an anti-war MP, H. B. Lees-Smith, who read it out in Parliament during a debate on pacifism in the Army.

The debate was initiated after reports of a pacifist meeting in Hackney being broken up by a bully-boy antipacifist mob. The mob had been led by soldiers from Canadian and Australian regiments, including an officer.

The Home Secretary denied that soldiers could have been involved or, at least, that they were being released from their regiments to break up meetings. Lees-Smith maintained that not only was this a deliberate War Office strategy, but that allowing soldiers leave to break up pacifist meetings - but not to attend them - was entirely misrepresenting the mood of the Army.

Sassoon's case, he said, illustrated how anti-war feeling was being hushed up. A brave and decorated soldier, when he protested against the way the war was being run - that it was being "deliberately prolonged by those who had the power to end it" - he was spuriously diagnosed as having nervous shock and confined to hospital.

In reply, the War Office minister rather proved Lees-Smith's point: