Sassoon, Siegfried. "Glory of Women".

Summary and Analysis

- a harshly sarcastic sonnet about the ignorance of non-combatants

- addresses the completely ignorant mothers and lovers who hypocritically love their soldiers when they are heroes, worship them when they are decorated with merits, and adore their tales of adventure x but: incapable to understand when their troops "retire" under terrible conditions

- conclusion: the speaker figuratively punishes the women insensitive to the truth of war by a brutally graphic image of the soldiers trotting dead corpses while retiring, and by the information about his death to a representative German mother "knitting socks" for her son