Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"This place is not soul-less, not soul-deadening, like France (in the war-zone). . . . I should be very contented with life if it would stop raining. I have a strong feeling of escape. I have slipped away 'from fields where glory does not stay.' Here I can start afresh. And if death happens to meet me on these hills—the ragged old Syrian rascal—who cares? I'll go along with him to the Prophet's Paradise, or any dusty old tomb where he's got my number up. But it'll be a wooden cross in France after all, I fear."
Excerpt from the diary of Siegfried Sassoon, a British poet, author, Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (R.W.F.), and recipient of the Military Cross for gallantry in action. Sassoon had been wounded in April, 1917, and by mid-June had concluded that the war begun 'as a war of defence and liberation, [had] become a war of aggression and conquest.' In October he was at Craiglockhart, a psychiatric facility in Scotland, and under the care of W. H. R. Rivers. There he met the poet Wilfred Owen and edited some of his poems, a relationship at the heart of Regeneration, the first book of Pat Barker's WWI trilogy of the same name. In February, 1918, Sassoon was transferred to the Palestine Front where the British under the command of General Edmund Allenby had entered Jerusalem on December 11, 1917, and were continuing their advance along the Mediterranean coast. Their next objective was Nablus. The quotation, 'from fields where glory does not stay.' is from the poem 'To an Athlete Dying Young' by A. E. Housman.
Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 by Siegfried Sassoon, page 224, copyright © George Sassoon, 1983; Introduction and Notes Rupert Hart-Davis, 1983, publisher: Faber and Faber, publication date: 1983
1918-03-16, 1918, March, Palestine, Death, death
