Osbert Sitwell’s Military Career
2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjv082
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
ResumoWRITING of Osbert Sitwell in his book Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London, 1989 edn), John Pearson states that ‘By training and profession he was a regular soldier’, and that his active service career ended when, after some months on the Western Front, he ‘contracted blood-poisoning from an injured foot’, and was sent home.1 Sitwell’s personal file in the army records, now in The National Archives at Kew, tells a different story.2 Sitwell was commissioned in December 1912 not in the Regular Army but in the Special Reserve, which required him to undergo six months of training and thereafter three or four weeks with his regiment every year for six years. When war came in August 1914 he had completed his training and, presumably, at least one of his three or four weeks’ attachments, but he had not been obliged to wear uniform for the greater part of the time since he had been commissioned. Nominally a member of the 5th (Reserve) Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, he served with the 4th Battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Flanders in 1915 and 1916. His poem ‘Therefore is the Name of It Called Babel’ was written in January 1916, while he was at the Front. For a period, as a lieutenant with the acting rank of captain, he was in command of the 4th Company of the 4th Grenadier Guards, with the hon. Edward Wyndham Tennant (also a poet) as his second-in-command. As a company commander he had on one occasion to ‘lecture subalterns and Platoon Cmdrs. on Open Warfare’, an interesting variation on the usual Sitwellian themes.3
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