Fairies and Fusiliers

The title says everything: fairies and fusiliers, childhood's whimsy beside the soldier's grime. Robert Graves wrote these poems in the trenches of the Western Front, where he served alongside Siegfried Sassoon in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. The verses move between the fantastical images of his earlier work and the raw, grim reality of modern warfare - sometimes in the same poem, sometimes in the space between two. There is humor here, and fierce camaraderie, and the particular horror of men who remember what peace felt like. 'The Last Post' captures the fear that never leaves. 'To Lucasta on Going to the War' holds duty and pride in uneasy tension. But what lingers is the collision: fairies appearing in the same breath as fusillades, innocence intruding on atrocity. Graves survived the war. Sassoon did not. That fact lends the collection a weight beyond mere anti-war sentiment - these are poems written by someone who walked through hell and came back carrying both the memory of childhood and the memory of what war made of it.