Siegfried Sasson illustrates the dramatic transformation most soldiers went through after experiencing World War 1. Englishmen like Sasson initially thought themselves as involved in a heroic effort to defend liberalism and the British a hellish and pointless nightmare. Intellectuals like Paul Valery were also disillusioned by the war, and many feared that the West and its liberal values would not long survive. In the essay below, he makes allusion to the scene in which Hamlet ponders mortality while studying the skull that is all that remains of a man he had known in life.
