great estate of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire.) His first published success, The Daffodil Murderer (1913), was a parody of John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy. Robert Graves, in Good-Bye to All That, describes it as a "parody of Masefield which, midway through, had forgotten to be a parody and turned into rather good Masefield." Sassoon expressed his opinions on the political situation before the onset of the First World War thus—"France was a lady, Russia was a bear, and performing in the county cricket team was much more important than either of them". Sassoon wanted to play for Kent County Cricket Club; the Marchant family were neighbours, and Frank Marchant was captain of the county side between 1890 and 1897. Sassoon often turned out for Bluemantles at the Nevill Ground, Tunbridge Wells, where he sometimes played alongside Arthur Conan Doyle. He had also played cricket for his house at Marlborough College, once taking 7 wickets for 18 runs. Although an enthusiast, Sassoon was not good enough to play for his county, but he played for Matfield village, and later for a Downside Abbey team called "The Ravens", continuing into his seventies. War service The Western Front: Military Cross Motivated by patriotism, Sassoon joined the Army just as the threat of a new European war was recognized, and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on 4 August 1914, the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. He broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before leaving England, spending the spring of 1915 convalescing. He was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion (Special Reserve), Royal Welch Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant on 29 May 1915. On 1 November his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign, dying on board the ship after having had his leg amputated. In the same month Siegfried was sent to the 1st Battalion in France, where he met Robert Graves, and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed each other's work. Though this did not have much perceptible influence on Graves' poetry, his views on what may be called 'gritty realism' profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of what constituted poetry. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic, dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry moves to an