Siegfried Sassoon’s biography tells of his reaction to the news of the death of his brother in November 1915. Hamo Sassoon had been serving with the Royal Engineers when wounded whilst serving in Gallipoli, his wounds were such that he died on a hospital ship.

Siegfried Sassoon’s written reaction was subdued. He wrote a two stanza poem, To my brother:

Give me your hand, my brother, search my face;
Look in these eyes lest I should think of shame;
For we have made an end of all things base.
We are returning by the road we came.

Your lot is with the ghosts of soldiers dead,
And I am in the field where men must fight.
But in the gloom I see your laurell’d head
And through your victory I shall win the light.

Sassoon’s lines are like those that might be read at a memorial service, they do not express a brother’s pain. Later in the war, Sassoon would give vent to feeling in a less restrained way.

Grief is expressed in a more profound way in Rudyard Kipling’s My boy Jack. The poem is a tribute to Jack Cornwell, the sixteen year old recipient of the Victoria Cross who died at the Battle of Jutland.

“Have you news of my boy Jack? ”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Kipling’s lines are an expression of the grief of all parents who lost sons in the Great War, including Kipling himself.

Kipling’s son John had been an officer serving in Flanders, an eighteen year old who went missing in action during the Battle of Loos in September 1915. John Kipling’s body could not be found. Rudyard Kipling published a notice in The Times searching for information about the fate of his son. It would be 1992 before John Kipling’s burial place was identified.

The pain of those experiences is inexpressible. Neither the Sassoon family nor the Kipling family had even a grave that they might visit.

The collective grief felt by millions of people shaped the mood of the whole country. Spiritualism, of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a leading advocate, became attractive. When Theresa Sassoon, mother of Siegfried and his brother, sought to contact Hamo through a spiritualist, Siegfried Sassoon is angry. Confronted with inexpressible pain, people sought consolation in unconventional ways.

Whatever the outcome of the present virus, the collective pain of 2020 is a tiny fraction of the pain endured a hundred years ago.