Trench Duty

Siegfried Sassoon’s poem trench duty portrays an account from a soldier taking his shift to watch the trenches during the night. The soldier was falling asleep on trench duty and then was awakened by a shot, and the scene erupts in destruction.

Sassoon uses alliteration to create a sense of desperation and spontaneous action occurring in the trenches. The “big bombardment” and “candle-chinked” builds tension in the scene, and creates action. The soldier is waking up to violence

 

The rhyme scheme in this poem follows an AABB structure but it breaks to rhyming every other line for when describing an attack on the enemies emplaning this part. He makes the enemy look quite pathetic “crawling on their bellies” during this part. The aabb rhyme scheme had previously added quite a lot of build up making the enemy look quite threatening, but the enemy doesn’t seem quite as dangerous and evil we expected. They seem just as frightened as the soldier who was “shaken” awake. This might relate to how soldiers suffered no matter what side they were on and there were no heroes.

After the rude awakening the soldier looks to the sky. He describes the stars as “blank," which is an unusual description. Usually the stars have spiritual or enlightening connotations. However here, there is no divine light that radiates from the stars. They are just there looking back at him; he receives no answers from the heavens. This could show the soldier losing his faith. This idea is enhanced, in the sentence “I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.” Death becomes mundane; he juxtaposes it with feeling wide-awake, as if the death was nothing more than an alarm clock. There isn’t any reason for this given to him by God; it just is the reality of war.