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The Rear-Guard Summary & Analysis
by Siegfried Sassoon

The Rear-Guard Summary & Analysis
by Siegfried Sassoon

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “The Rear-Guard”

(Hindenburg Line, April 1917)

1Groping along the tunnel, step by step,

2He winked his prying torch with patching glare

3From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

4Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know; 

5A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

6And he, exploring fifty feet below

7The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

8Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie

9Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug.

10And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

11“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.

12“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)

13“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”

14Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,

15And flashed his beam across the livid face

16Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore

17Agony dying hard of ten days before;

18And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

19Alone he staggered on until he found

20Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair

21To the dazed, muttering creatures underground

22Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

23At last, with sweat and horror in his hair,

24He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,

25Unloading hell behind him step by step.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Introduction

    • The British poet and World War I soldier Siegfried Sassoon wrote "The Rear-Guard" in 1917 and published it in the collection Counter-Attack, and Other Poems. The poem illustrates the horrors and chaos of war as it follows a soldier making his way through a network of recently abandoned tunnels while the fighting continues above ground (the poem's epigraph suggests these tunnels are located along the Hindenburg Line, a lengthy German defense system). Sleep-deprived and fraught with fear, the soldier stumbles alone through the darkness of this underworld until he encounters a festering corpse that, in his confusion, he asks for directions. There's no sense of escape when the soldier finally re-emerges from the tunnels, the poem instead implying that he's just trading the horrors below for those still raging above.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Summary

    • A rear-guard soldier feels his way through the tunnel one step at a time. He flicks on his flashlight and waves it back and forth, its beam flashing out like an invasive stare, and smells the tunnel's terrible stench.

      Various items have been left behind—bottles, containers, other ambiguous shapes that he can't identify in the darkness. There's a shattered mirror and a discarded mattress. While he's exploring this tunnel deep below the ground, the war continues far above.

      The soldier trips and reaches out for the wall. He notices a man slumped over by his feet, partially covered by a rug. The soldier bends down to try and wake the sleeping man by pulling on his arm. The soldier asks for directions to headquarters, but when the man doesn't answer, the soldier curses him (he's on edge, having not slept for days). The soldier demands that the man gets up and lead him through the foul-smelling tunnel. Feeling wild, he kicks the soft, silent body, shining his flashlight in its horrible face, which stares up at him. That face still bears the evidence of the horrible, painful death this man suffered ten days ago. The dead man's fingers are balled up over a bloody, festering wound.

      The soldier stumbles along on his own until he sees the pale, ghostly light of dawn shining down a stairwell. That stairwell leads to a place where tired and confused soldiers (perhaps ghosts or figment's of the soldier's imagination) can hear the dull explosion of shells on the surface above. Finally, the soldier escapes the tunnels, sweaty and still terrified. He clambers out of the tunnel into the light of early evening, leaving the hellish underground one step at a time.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Themes

    • Theme The Horror of War

      The Horror of War

      "The Rear-Guard" follows a World War I soldier as he makes his way through a network of underground tunnels while a battle rages on overhead. The soldier’s journey is like a descent into "hell," a place filled with the chaos and gruesome destruction left in war’s wake. Yet leaving this dark underworld behind just means re-entering the hellish “gloom of battle.” In this way, the poem suggests that the horrors of war are inescapable—and that soldiers are forced to press onward in the face of unrelenting death and terror.

      The poem’s title reveals that this soldier is part of the rear-guard—that is, a group of soldiers tasked with protecting an army from attacks to the rear. As such, this man has a unique perspective on the conflict: he’s able to observe the grisly aftermath of earlier fighting (even as battles continue elsewhere).

      The journey is difficult and confusing, the sleep-deprived soldier staggering “along the tunnel, step by step” in a way that suggests his isolation and helplessness. He first comes across "Tins, boxes, bottles," broken mirrors, and mattresses—mundane signs of life that have been made eerie and unnerving by their abandonment. These very human objects also might inspire sympathy for the young men trying to survive a hellish situation, subtly reminding readers of the individual lives at stake in war.

      Then, in a disturbing scene that depicts the brutality of war, the soldier encounters a festering corpse. The dead man's face still wears the "Agony of dying" days earlier and his fingers are so bloated that they look like fists clutching at a blackened wound. Yet, whether it’s because he can’t see well in the darkness or is losing his grip on reality (or both), the soldier asks this corpse for directions to "headquarters" and curses the dead man when he gets no reply. The soldier is clearly desperate for some sense of order and guidance, which the poem suggests is nowhere to be found amidst war's chaos. The soldier then "savage[ly]" kicks the rotting body, seemingly spurred toward his own act of irrational violence by war's irrational violence.

      The soldier finally is able to climb out of the tunnel in the poem's end, but there's no sense of relief upon reaching the surface. The "horror" of what he has seen deep underground clings to his body, suggesting the lasting trauma of war. And though he leaves the "hell" of the tunnels "behind him step by step," the poem’s ending offers no false comforts: the soldier is re-entering the "rosy gloom of battle," trading the "hell" below for the one above.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Rear-Guard”

    • Lines 1-3

      Groping along the tunnel, step by step,
      He winked his prying torch with patching glare
      From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

      Before the poem begins, Sassoon indicates that this was written and/or is set along the "Hindenburg Line" in April of 1917. This refers to a long German defense system in western Europe during World War I.

      The setting established, the poem drops the reader right in the middle of the action: a soldier is clumsily making his way through a dark tunnel. The lack of specifics—who this man is, or the nature of his mission—might leave the reader a bit disoriented, much like the soldier himself! Indeed, it's not clear if the soldier knows exactly what he's supposed to be doing. He feels his way through the underground, gripping the walls and inching along "step by step," the diacope of the phrase giving the poem a slow, tentative feel.

      His torch (a.k.a flashlight) illuminates patches of the stuffy darkness. The speaker personifies that torch, referring to it as a kind of "prying" eye "glar[ing]" into the tunnel:

      He winked his prying torch with patching glare
      From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

      The torch seems to be the only sign of life down there, and that "prying [...] glare" suggests that it's uncovering things that shouldn't really be (or don't want to be) seen. The enjambment between these lines also makes it feel like the poem itself is probing the darkness, trying to find its way.

      Notice, too, how the diacope of "side to side" mirrors "step by step" from line 1. Again, this makes the soldier's actions seem tentative, as though he isn't really sure what to do or which way to go. One thing's clear, though: it stinks down there. Young men have been living there for days, weeks, or even months on end—and, as will be revealed later in the poem, there are also dead and decaying bodies nearby. The poem doesn't need to do too much with its imagery here—just noting that the air is "unwholesome" suggests something horrendous, something deeply wrong, has happened here.

    • Lines 4-7

      Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know; 
      A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
      And he, exploring fifty feet below
      The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

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    • Lines 8-13

      Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie
      Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug.
      And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.
      “I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.
      “God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)
      “Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”

    • Lines 14-18

      Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,
      And flashed his beam across the livid face
      Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
      Agony dying hard of ten days before;
      And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

    • Lines 19-22

      Alone he staggered on until he found
      Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
      To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
      Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

    • Lines 23-25

      At last, with sweat and horror in his hair,
      He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
      Unloading hell behind him step by step.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Symbols

    • Symbol The Soldiers' Possessions

      The Soldiers' Possessions

      In the second stanza, the soldier stumbles on a variety of objects used by the men who, until recently, occupied the tunnel:

      Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;
      A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

      On the one hand, these are signs of life that symbolize the young soldiers' basic humanity. Tins, boxes, bottles, and so on—these are all personal possessions that soldiers would have had with them while serving in the war. They might have contained food rations or, in the bottles' case, alcohol to numb the emotional toll of warfare. The mirror might have been useful for seeing approaching enemies, or even for a soldier to fix up his hair! The mattress, of course, would have been there for rest. These objects thus symbolize the everyday presence of people in the tunnel.

      But that's the thing: there's no one in the tunnel anymore to use these objects, which seem to have been left behind quickly and haphazardly. The mattress is on the ground and the mirror is "smashed." The objects thus don't just represent the human presence of soldiers, but also the destruction and chaos that war leaves in its wake.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      The poem uses alliteration to create dramatic moments and bring images to life on the page. The crisp /p/ sounds of line 2, for example, are loud and intrusive—much like the "prying" eye of the soldier's flashlight:

      He winked his prying torch with patching glare

      And in the next line, the sibilance of "side to side, and sniffed" (and also "unwholesome," which isn't alliterative but uses the same sound) has a breathy quality that evokes the action being described.

      Soon after, the soldier chances upon numerous abandoned objects left behind in the tunnel:

      Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;
      A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

      The intensity of the sounds here matches the intensity of the experience. The soldier keeps stumbling across things, and the poetic noise of the alliteration evokes the sudden discovery of objects. (Note how assonance adds to this sense of being overwhelmed by stuff as well, with the shared vowel sounds of "shapes"/"vague" and "smashed"/"mattress.")

      Alliteration also calls attention to and heightens the poem's more gruesome imagery, as with the /f/ sounds in line 18's "fists of fingers." And in line 23, the soldier emerges from the tunnel with "horror in his hair"—those breathless /h/ sounds connoting fear and fatigue.

    • Allusion

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    • Asyndeton

    • Caesura

    • Consonance

    • Enjambment

    • Imagery

    • Metaphor

    • Diacope

  • “The Rear-Guard” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Groping
    • Winked
    • Prying
    • Torch
    • Patching glare
    • Unwholesome
    • Beam
    • Livid
    • Yet
    • Shafted stair
    • Shells
    Groping

    • Grabbing/fumbling.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Rear-Guard”

    • Form

      "The Rear-Guard" doesn't use a standard poetic form. Instead, its 21 lines are broken up into four stanzas of different lengths:

      • The poem opens with a tercet (a.k.a. a three-line stanza);
      • Next up is a quatrain (a.k.a. a four-line stanza);
      • After that is a much longer eleven-line stanza;
      • And the poem finally closes with a septet (a seven-line stanza).

      This erratic, unpredictable shape mirrors the aimless absurdity of the soldier's journey. That is, he's fumbling around in the dark without much sense of a plan, and the poem seems to reflect this disorganization in its form itself. The stanza breaks are almost like little surprises, the equivalent of the poem bumping into something in the dark.

    • Meter

      "The Rear-Guard" is written using iambic pentameter. An iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern, while pentameter just means there are five of these iambs (five da-DUMs) per line.

      The iambs here create a plodding momentum. At the same time, there are plenty of other feet substituted into the poem. Here's the meter of the first few lines, for example, where readers can already see variations tossed into this metrical pattern:

      Groping | along | the tun- | nel, step | by step,
      He winked | his pry- | ing torch | with patch- | ing glare
      From side | to side, | and sniffed | the unwhole- | some air.

      The first foot of line 1 is a trochee (stressed-unstressed, "Groping"), opening the poem on a forceful, stumbling note. The fourth foot of line 3, meanwhile, is an anapest (unstressed-unstressed-stressed, "the unwhole-"), adding another little blip or stumble into the poem's rhythm.

      A perfectly iambic rhythm would probably feel too confident and sure-footed for a poem about a soldier stumbling around a dark tunnel. It makes sense, then, that the poem is filled with substitutions like those mentioned above. Readers might think of each little variation as a kind of poetic bump in the dark, as in lines 8 and 9:

      Tripping, | he grabbed | the wall; | saw some- | one lie
      Humped at | his feet, | half-hid-| den by | a rug.

      Notice how line 8, like line 1, starts with a trochee. The poem thus seems to trip over itself (right when the soldier trips!). Likewise, the trochee of "Humped at" creates a heavy (and surprising) stress that mirrors the discovery of the dead weight of a corpse.

      In this soldier's journey, then, there is a kind of forward momentum, but it doesn't feel particularly focused. He's sleep-deprived, stumbling through the dark, and speaking to corpses, and this erratic behavior is reflected by the meter.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      While "The Rear-Guard" uses plenty of rhyme, those rhymes are unpredictable to the point of seeming random and arbitrary. That is, there's rhyme, but no steady rhyme scheme. For example, take a look at the rhyme patterns in the first 11 lines:

      ABB CDCD EFFE

      This unpredictable use of rhyme seems to capture the soldier's strange mix of purpose and aimlessness. The soldier is trying to get somewhere, but it's not really clear where or why. Likewise, the presence of rhyme suggests an attempted poetic direction that struggles to find its way.

      Zoom out, however, and there's an interesting pattern between the beginning and end of the poem. The phrase "step by step" both opens and closes things. The first line is also followed by a rhyming couplet ("glare"/"air"), and this same sound occurs in the two lines before the last ("hair"/"air"). There's thus a mirroring effect between the first and the final three lines of the poem:

      ABB ... BBA

      This mirroring suggests circularity—that the soldier ends right where he began. This makes sense on a thematic level: the soldier might be exiting the tunnel at the poem's end, but he's just entering another "hell": that of the battlefield above ground. He hasn't really left the tunnel behind him either, as its "horror" clings to his body. The poem's rhyme thus subtly reflects the way that the traumas of war stick to soldiers.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Speaker

    • The speaker in this poem is an omniscient narrator describing a soldier's journey through an underground tunnel during the First World War. The speaker acts as a kind of anonymous voyeur while also commenting on the soldier's state of mind, as with the parenthetical "(For days he'd had no sleep)" in line 12 and the adjective "Savage" in line 14. It's clear the speaker is not actually with the soldier, and that readers are witnessing the behavior of someone who is utterly alone.

      All that said, it's fair to see both the speaker and the soldier as a version of Sassoon himself. The epigraph situates the poem on along the Hindenburg line—a long stretch of defensive infrastructure on the Western Front—where Sassoon served during WWI. His diaries recount similar experiences to those outlined in the poem.

  • “The Rear-Guard” Setting

    • "The Rear-Guard" is set during the First World War—in fact, it appears to have been written there too! The epigraph—"(Hindenburg Line, April 1917)"—tells the reader two important, more specific things about the setting:

      • The soldier's journey takes place in April 1917, at which point the war had already been underway for nearly three years (with much bloody fighting still to come). The war had dragged on for far longer than anyone expected, and there is a palpable sense of fatigue in the poem that seems befitting of the date.
      • The tunnel through which the soldier makes his way is part of the Hindenburg Line, a long stretch of German defensive infrastructure which stretched along the Western Front (the section of the war taking place in Western Europe).

      The poem begins with little context other than the epigraph; there's no real sense of an objective (e.g., where the soldier is trying to get to, or why). Instead, the poem presents a disturbing underground world that is eerily quiet and isolating. There are signs of other soldiers in the second stanza, but the tunnel seems totally deserted now. This lack of life highlights the brutal, rapidly-shifting nature of the war; what was recently a hive of activity has become a kind of haunted underworld. And the battle still rages on overhead, its explosions reduce to "muffled sound" to the soldier's ears deep underground.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Rear-Guard”

      Literary Context

      Siegfried Sassoon was one of the most famous poets of the First First World War. Sassoon's poetry is renowned for its brutal honesty as well as its technical skill. Unlike more jingoistic poets like Rupert Brooke and Jessie Pope, Sassoon felt that war poetry ought to reflect the reality of war rather than some idealized, romantic vision of it. Sassoon's close friend and fellow poet, Wilfred Owen, shared this view, and between them, they wrote some of the war's most powerful and enduring poetry. (Indeed, Sassoon's encouragement was critical in Owen finding the confidence to write.)

      This poem was published in Sassoon's 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. This was an influential book that contains some of Sassoon's best-known works, including "Counter-Attack," and "Base Details." The poems in this collection, including "The Rear-Guard," were largely based on Sassoon's own wartime experiences. He did indeed serve on the Hindenburg Line mentioned in this poem's epigraph, and his diaries chronicle situations similar to those described in "The Rear-Guard." Sassoon also had a reputation for immense—and sometimes reckless—bravery during his time in the war, earning him the nickname "Mad Jack."

      "The Rear-Guard" also subtly nods to long literary tradition of poetic journeys through the underworld. In ancient Greek mythology, for example, Charon guides newly deceased souls through the underworld to the afterlife. Orpheus is another character drawn from Greek myth: a legendary poet and musician who journeys to the underworld to save his beloved wife Eurydice. Orpheus finds Eurydice, but betrays Hades's instruction not to look back at her while walking out of the underworld and then loses her for good. And in Dante's famous Inferno, the poet is led through Hell by the Roman poet Virgil.

      Historical Context

      The First World War was supposed to be the "war to end all wars." While this of course did not turn out to be the case, this phrase reflects the fact that, at the time, people struggled to imagine anything as hellish as WWI ever happening again. Running from 1914 to 1918, the war was essentially a perfect storm of complicated alliances and technological advancement, drawing in numerous countries and resulting in millions of deaths (both military and civilian).

      Sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the war was predicted to be over quickly. It dragged on far longer than expected, however, in part because of the slow, brutal nature of trench warfare. The exhaustion of Sassoon's soldier in this poem can easily stand in for fatigue with the war more generally.

      The Hindenburg Line (where the epigraph suggests this poem was either set, composed, or both) was a long line of defensive infrastructure built by the Germans during the winter of 1916 to 1917. It ran from Arras to Laffaux (both in France), and it was intended to hold back the Allied forces while Germany recuperated from heavy losses. One of many notorious stories about Sassoon centers on his single-handed solo capture of the German trench along this line.

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