Letters should include a genuine postal or email address, phone number and the style or title of the writer. Email: letters@catholicherald.co.uk Due to space constraints, please keep correspondence below 250 words, longer letters may be published online
Sassoon decried the war, not its conduct
SIR – May I correct a detail in Simon Caldwell’s moving account of Siegfried Sassoon’s conversion and subsequent work (Feature, March 30)? Sassoon’s “Soldier’s Declaration”, read out in Parliament and published in the Times in July 1917, was not “an unflinching statement of protest against the conduct and the objectives of the war”, but of the objectives only. In the declaration he stated that “this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest”, adding, “I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.” Indeed, in the draft version in his journal he specifies “military conduct”. There is no doubt that Sassoon thought little of the military conduct of the war too, as he makes clear in one of his most famous of poems, “The General”, which Caldwell quotes. To have taken aim at the military as well as the political leadership, however, would not only have been supremely perilous but diluting of his central charge. Allan Mallinson Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire SIR – The case of “Jack and Jill”, on first reading, seems exactly the kind for which Jack Sullivan (Letter, March 23) says canon law makes provision: “danger of death”. However, Fr Eccles’s question concerned not Communion for the dying Jack, who was Catholic, but Jill, his Anglican wife. Although she pleaded for it, my Anglican mother was refused Communion at my wedding by the late Canon O’Brien, who was responsible for the sound formation of many Catholics here in Bristol. Whether this caused her “serious spiritual distress’’ I’m not sure, but I’m always grateful to the canon for his firmness in counselling me against taking communion in other churches. “Intercommunion” is akin to cohabitation in lieu of Christian marriage – it presumes a unity which doesn’t truly exist. Pauline Harvey (Mrs) Bristol, Somerset
