When Robert Graves walked into C Company mess on 28 November 1915 on some errand, he noticed an unexpected book on the table. It was a copy of Post Liminium, a collection of essays by the late nineteenth-century poet Lionel Johnson. The army was not noted for its Lionel Johnson readers; a 'military text-book or a rubbish novel' were more the order of the day. Graves took a discreet look at the name on the flyleaf. A glance round the mess was enough to indicate 'Siegfried Sassoon': the tall, lanky, shy subaltern. Graves, also tall but anything but shy, quickly struck up a conversation. Both being off duty, the two were soon walking into Béthune for cream buns, busy talking poetry. Sassoon and Graves had a good deal in common. Both were conventionally unconventional public school products, trying to turn themselves into competent army officers and into the kind of poets Eddie Marsh would publish in his Georgian Poetry anthologies. Both, anxious about being insufficiently manly, had cultivated a tougher, sportier side: Sassoon through fox-hunting and cricket; Graves through boxing — he had been the school middleweight champion. Both were lonely and in love (Sassoon with David 'Tommy' Thomas, Graves with George 'Peter' Johnstone). Both were almost certainly still virgins. The friendship necessarily developed in fits and starts, and owed some of its intensity to that. Long conversations, the uninterrupted exchange of poems and confessions, were a rare luxury. Graves gave Marsh a humorous but probably not very misleading account of their difficulty 'in talking about poetry and that sort of thing': 'If I go into his mess and he wants to show me some set of verses, he says: "Afternoon Graves, have a drink… by the way, I want you to see my latest recipe for rum punch."' He also made it pretty clear to Marsh that it was not just poetry they had to be careful about discussing openly: 'I don't know what the CO would say if he heard us discussing the sort of things we do… His saying is that "there should be only one subject for conversation among subalterns off parade." I leave you to guess it.' There was obviously a secret thrill in these surreptitious exchanges, a sense that Graves and Sassoon were like two naughty schoolboys, hoodwinking their peers and those in authority.

Wilfred Owen first mentioned the presence of a new star on his horizon on August 15, 1917. He had been busy acting, editing the hospital magazine, arguing with his mother by letter about whether Christianity and the war were compatible (he thought not, and he had hard words to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury, who did). So he may not have noticed at first the presence of Siegfried Sassoon. At their first meeting, Sassoon treated Wilfred with a certain lordly condescension. Wilfred persisted, however, and their next meeting was warmer. They talked about poetry, and Sassoon asked Wilfred to help him decipher a handwritten fan letter from H.G. Wells, written in pale pink ink. Wilfred was in the full throes of hero worship, while Sassoon, although he may have been better at concealing his emotions, was beginning to feel a powerful attraction for his handsome young admirer, critiquing and rewriting Wilfred’s poems, who had sent home to his mother and sister for every scrap he had written. It should not be imagined that the relationship between the two men was all one way. Sassoon recognized in Wilfred a greater poet than himself, but his own poetry also improved as the two men worked together. Still, it was Sassoon who remained in Wilfred’s eyes “the great man,” an impression no doubt influenced by class. [Wilfred's] brother Harold scoured his letters so thoroughly after his death that it is impossible to tell whether Owen had a physical relationship with Sassoon, but in every other respect it was the closest he would ever come to a love affair. “Spent all day [with Sassoon] yesterday,” he wrote his mother ecstatically. “Breakfast, Lunch, Tea & Dinner.” Wilfred and Sassoon spent their last evening together at the Scottish Conservative Club in Edinburgh, eating a good dinner, drinking “a noble bottle of Burgundy” and laughing uproariously over a volume of especially bad poetry. Sassoon had given Wilfred, as a parting gift, a thick envelope, which he opened in the club while waiting to take the midnight train. It contained a ten-­pound note and a letter of introduction to Robert Ross in London, the friend, editor, and devoted defender of Oscar Wilde and a literary luminary almost as well connected and admired as Edward Marsh. Ross was a friend of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Osbert Sitwell, as well as a central figure in the homosexual literary and social world. Sassoon must have hesitated before including the ten-­pound note for fear it might be taken as an insult, but Wilfred responded with genuine gratitude. "Know that since mid-­September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-­confessor + Amenophis IV in profile…. I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least….And you have fixed my life—­however short. I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun around you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze." He ended his letter with a phrase he had used earlier to his mother to describe his relationship with Sassoon: “[We] knew we loved each other as no men love for long.” (Full article)