Britain
Siegfried Sassoon
1886–1967 Poet and officer; war protester
Siegfried Sassoon was a country gentleman who became a famously brave infantry officer, nicknamed 'Mad Jack', and won the Military Cross. In July 1917, angered by the continuation of a war he believed could be ended, he wrote a public declaration that he was 'finished with the war'. His friend Robert Graves helped ensure that he was sent to Craiglockhart as a shell-shock patient instead of being court-martialed. There he met Wilfred Owen and encouraged his poetry. Sassoon returned to the front, was wounded by friendly fire, and later wrote the autobiographical Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.