Towards the end of 1944, an English publisher asked Siegfried Sassoon to select a collection of poems by soldiers serving in the Eighth Army during the fiercely fought invasion of Italy. Sassoon reluctantly accepted. The brief and typically diffident introduction he wrote in response provides unexpected insights into his own later writing. In his prose autobiography, Siegfried's Journey: 1916–1920, with which he was struggling at the time of this request, he acknowledges that his own traumatic memories of combat from the First World War still held ‘an awful attraction’ over his mind ‘in spite of [his] hatred of war’. Yet readers of Poems of Italy find that he forges a connection with this group of soldier-poets not through a sense of shared combat experience on foreign soil, but by recalling a personal encounter. ‘In the now distant-seeming days of 1942’ Sassoon had the chance to meet the current commander of the Eighth Army, Sir Oliver Leese, when he was stationed at an impromptu camp struck in the park of Sassoon's Wiltshire country house. The movement from the realm of combat trauma to the sequestered realm of the home is telling. The home front, not the frontline, becomes the dominant locus of Sassoon's ‘Second Great War’. Having established his connection to the writers he must introduce in Poems of Italy, Sassoon observes that the ‘wholly authentic soldier poet[s] … are both ancient and modern in their technique’.