The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 09, 2025


To Any Dead Officer


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

160.95729

Word count

343

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Siegfried Sassoon's To Any Dead Officer is a short poem written to an officer who has been left for dead in WW2. It was written by an English soldier, and published in 1918, and read by Siegfried himself.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:01.000 To Any Dead Officer by Siegfried Sassoon
00:00:04.480 Well, how are things in heaven? I wish you'd say, because I'd like to know that you're
00:00:12.480 alright. Tell me, have you found everlasting day? Or been sucked in by everlasting night?
00:00:19.240 For when I shut my eyes, your face shows plain. I hear you make some cheery old remark. I can
00:00:26.200 build you in my brain, though you've gone out patrolling in the dark. You hated tours of
00:00:32.400 trenches. You were proud. Of nothing more than having good years to spend. Longed to get home
00:00:39.140 and join the careless crowd. Of chaps who work in peace with time for friend. That's all washed 1.00
00:00:45.140 out now. You're beyond the wire. No earthly chance can send you crawling back. You're
00:00:51.140 finished with machine gun fire. Knocked over in a hopeless dud attack. Somehow I always
00:00:58.160 thought you'd get done in. Because you were so desperate keen to live. You were all out
00:01:03.300 to try and save your skin. Well knowing how much the world had got to give. You joked at
00:01:08.920 shells and took the usual shop. Stuck in your dirty job and did it fine. With Jesus Christ.
00:01:14.920 When will it stop? Three years. It's hell unless we break their line. So when they told me you'd
00:01:22.500 been left for dead. I wouldn't believe them. Feeling it must be true. Next week the bloody
00:01:28.080 roll of honour said. Wounded and missing. That's the thing to do when lads are left in shell holes
00:01:33.160 dying slow. With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache. Moaning for water till they know
00:01:39.040 its night and then it's not worthwhile to wake. Goodbye old lad. Remember me to God. And tell
00:01:46.520 him that our politicians swear they won't give in till Prussian rules been trod. Under the hill
00:01:52.180 of England. Are you there? Yes. And the war won't end for at least two years. But we've got stacks
00:01:59.100 of men. I'm blind with tears. Staring into the dark. Cheerio. I wish they'd killed you in
00:02:06.860 a decent show.