Video: 'The Great War episode 5 Mutiny'(April 16, 1917, at 18:31)

(Monday, April 16, 1917; during the on the Western Front of World War I) — Siegfried Sassoon, an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and one of Britain’s greatest war poets, was wounded by a German sniper today while leading his company in an attack at Fontaine-les-Croisilles.

While recovering from his wounds in England, Sassoon’s growing anger at the political mismanagement of the war compelled him to write a scathing letter to his commanding officer, which achieved public notoriety after being read aloud in the House of Commons.

Unwilling to risk the adverse publicity that would accompany the court martial of a man who had been decorated for undoubted acts of bravery, Under-Secretary of State for War Ian Macpherson sent Sassoon to a military psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, where he was officially treated for neurasthenia (“shell shock”).