Any Other World

The poem Trench Duty by Siegfried Sassoon is about a soldier being on guard at night, witnessing a bombing and the death of a chap. Sassoon's satirical tone depicts the unnecessary prolongation of war. If a certain disapproval was present in Sassoon's words at the beginning of this poem, the last words of the poem bring forth his frustration and cynical disgust with war and the fact that people die for no reason. 

The setting of this poem is very important to the meaning of it. The poem is set in the midst of a battlefield, in 'the trench'. It is set off almost like a nightmare, like a surreal situation that seems absurd to the narrator. The words 'Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake' create a scenario where the narrator is stumbling half-awake through the dangerous scenes of war, highlighting his bitter feeling towards fighting by making it seem like the narrator doesn't care about what's going on. The alliterations at various moments in the poem give the setting a sense of repetition which reveals the bored, but at the same desperate tone like: ‘… the men crouching in cabins candle chinked with light.’ This alliteration in particular could mean that the narrator is so annoyed with the fact that the soldiers have to crouch like animals in small rooms with only the light of a candle, or that the narrator is trying to give the whole setting a bit of a humorous side which makes the situation absurd.

A second element that is crucial to a development of understanding of the poem is the narrator. Given a few indices in the text, it can be assumed that Sassoon is telling a true story that has happened to him. The fact that the most important thing in the text is the moment where he hears someone shoot a gun and then he’s wide awake and his chap is dead, leads to conclude that the chap is Wilfred Owen. They met in war and built up a true friendship before Owen was killed and Sassoon’s poems adopted a darker tone than before. Sassoon fought at war and was honored for bravery, but he realized how useless it was to fight, which is something that is very well presented in this poem through tone, that was discussed earlier.

The poem is a moment of awareness that arises throughout the lines. In the beginning the narrator has just been woken up, he’s tired and he’s ‘scarce awake’. When he realizes the situation around him, mocks it and then bitterly acknowledges the drama, he finds himself ‘wide-awake’ when his chap is dead.