Alex Lehr: Peer Commentary for Maikel O'Hanlon

English 354/Finley: 4 October 1999

In his reading of "Lamentations" by Siegfried Sassoon, Maikel O'Hanlon identifies

the motivational force behind the poem's sadness as being the war's effect on soldier-

officer relations. As he states, "The poem is saturated with images that intimate, and define

the gulf of disparate experiences distancing the two critical players". In this view, it is not

(or at least, not only) the soldier's soon-to-be-killed brother whose situation is lamentable,

nor the grieving, desperate soldier himself. Rather the situation itself is what is to be pitied-

that in this war, the most traumatic of man's experiences, where friendship and compassion

are most needed, these simple bonds between fellow men have broken down. Without

understanding, compassion is impossible, and without compassion, the narrator, like the

sergeant (as he perceives the sergeant) is unable to make any helpful action towards the

soldier.

The soldier strikes me as a strongly infantile character. He has been so stricken by

the news of his brother's transfer to the front that a degeneration has overcome his mind.

He kneels, "half-naked on the floor" bawling away, unable to express his pain to the

confounded onlookers, much like a child who is hungry but lacks the ability to articulate

his need. Given the disparity of understanding of and experience in the war itself which

O'Hanlon identifies between the soldier and the officer, this reversion to childhood stands

as an interesting shift in character. The soldier, with his fully mature understanding of war,

is forced by the trauma of awareness into an immature stance on the floor of the guard-

room, while his officer, with the ignorance of a child where the realities of battle are

concerned, stands over him playing the part of the confused but concerned parent.