Siegfried Sassoon’s “Attack” is a kind of subversive take on an aubade—a poem written to celebrate and evoke the morning. Of course, this is no happy scene, but the heart of a battle in the First World War (in which Sassoon himself served). Up until the caesura in line 4, the poem focuses entirely on the landscape in which the battle takes place. There are, at this early stage, no soldiers in sight (though the “ridge” and “spouts of drifting smoke” hint at what is taking place).
This section, then, is like the establishing shot of a movie. Sassoon is keen to evoke not just the senselessness of war and its grotesque waste of human life, but also something of its weirdness. These lines conjure an almost alien landscape, where the ground is “massed and dun” (wedged-together and grey) and the “glow’ring sun” is a “wild purple” color.
The consonance and alliteration in these first two lines instinctively evoke a landscape, but it’s as though something is not quite right, and the place is not as it seems:
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
The tight organization in the sounds of these lines is deliberately obvious, perhaps mimicking a more typical poetic discussion of some beautiful scene: a flourishing field, maybe, or a coast. But purple is a distinctly unusual color for the sun, "wild" purple even more so. This might actually be more literal than it first appears, relating to the odd hue that sunlight takes on when shining through smoke such as that emitted by guns, grenades, and tank-fire. The “emerge[nce]” of the “ridge”—which is the top of the trench over which most men will meet their death or serious injury—mirrors the way that the men too will have to emerge into the heat of the battle, once the order is given.
Lines 3 and 4 continue on from the first two, describing the smoke that drifts over and through the battle scene. The alliteration and consonance are intense and obvious, showing the way that the smoke dominates the landscape:
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope
The /s/ and /sh/ sounds here (also known as sibilance) fill the line as though hiding the other letters, conveying the smoke’s effect on the surrounding environment.
Line 4 characterizes the “slope” as both “menacing” and “scarred.” Both of these words can be interpreted as personification, with "menacing" representing the aggression and bloodlust of war, and "scarred" relating to injury and pain. In a literal sense, these opening lines highlight the effect that warfare has on the earth itself, pushing the poem’s scope beyond a sole focus on the human cost. But in making the landscape feel uncanny and almost like an alien planet, it reminds the reader of the far-reaching global effects of the First World War, the way that war can turn a comforting home—the entirety of the Earth, even—into an unfamiliar world.