I lived my days apart,
Dreaming fair songs for God;
By the glory in my heart
Covered and crowned and shod.
Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there,
Where death outnumbers life,
And fury smites the air.
I walk the secret way
With anger in my brain.
O music through my clay,
Sassoon, a soldier, wrote this during the First World War. Though swept up in patriotic fervor at the beginning of the war, in 1917 he took an  anti-war stance  after the death of a close friend, who he later wrote about as the pseudonym Dick Tiltwwood. 
 Over 8 million soldiers died  in the war  and another 21 million were wounded making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history. The conflict was deeply ingrained in the psyche of people involved and they which led them to be known as the  “Lost Generation” , popularized by  Ernest Hemingway  in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’
A Mystic as Soldier