Wilfred Owen MC was one of the leading English poets of the First World War. He volunteered on 21st October 1915. He saw a good deal of front-line action: he was blown up, concussed and suffered shell-shock. At Craiglockhart, the psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to develop his war poetry.

He was sent back to the trenches in September, 1918 and in October won the Military Cross by seizing a German machine-gun and using it to kill a number of Germans.

On 4th November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors. The news of his death reached his parent’s home as the Armistice bells were ringing on 11 November 1918.

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886. He served in the trenches during WWI, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime.

But it is as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936), became classics of war-era literature.