World War I was a conflict that claimed the lives of millions of soldiers and altered the lives of countless others. Shortly after the War, two novels surfaced, Generals Die In Bed by Charles Yale Harrison and All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, that became influential in our understanding of how the soldiers lived. Each novel provides a firsthand account from a soldier’s point of view on one of the most brutal wars ever to have been fought. The novels portray war without the common popular veils of patriotism and heroism. General Douglas MacArthur stated “The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war”.…
Conflict dehumanises individuals through several aspects thus subsequently evoking powerlessness in a societal hierarchy. Dawe’s Homecoming and Weapons Training written during Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War has successfully merged the negative emotional characteristics of war. In Dawe’s Homecoming, his intelligent attempt to impart the representation of powerlessness through a bitter tone, ‘- Curly heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts…’ emphasising the loss of identity in the “returned soldiers” with a list of vivid visual imageries. This also implies the range of age in the troops that further reinforcing the depressive melancholic tonality. Nevertheless, the use of the harsh sounds, ‘C…K…C’ illustrates the cruel slaughters and once again…
Reinforcing the loss of identity, the harsh “c” sound is maintained, which explicitly state alliteration and harshness of the morbid war. The ongoing loss of life is a pattern or routine of men dying and the bodies by process underpins how the soldiers were desensitized. Overall, loss of identity is a timeless matter that people in the contemporary world still experience and can relate to today. The underlining message readers can derive from it is that people should not be categorized as this treatment is unjust and should be respected for who they are and treated with equality and…
Bruce Dawe’s poem “homecoming” contrasts this idea and shows a lack of identity for the deceased soldiers. Repeated use of the pronoun “they’re” hints at the impersonal relationship between the bodies and their handlers. Repetition of the suffix “-ing” in “bringing”, “zipping”, “picking”, “tagging” and “giving”, describe the actions of the body processors, creating irony. Those verbs imply life and vitality in contrast to the cold lifeless bodies they are handling each day. Dawe successfully establishes the futility of war in his poem.…
In order to survive the soldiers detached themselves from their thoughts, emotions, and sense of identity. Consequently, all their hopes and dreams collapsed, making them unable to imagine a life without war and sufferings. The author's main theme emphasizes not only on the loss of innocence, but on the destructiveness of war too.…
Although people think soldiers are characterized as tough killing machines, they are still humans with emotions, memories and lives beyond the military. According to soldiers, it is not easy being a soldier and living the life as a soldier. Life as a soldier has many struggles that people do not see and often go unaccounted for. This common dilemma comes to light in the short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The burden of war on soldiers is more than physical strain.…
The soldiers sat there, completely defenseless against the enemy, waiting. In this moment, the world seemed to end and there was nothing, because what “few twenty-two-year-olds ever [knew] despair” (McDougall). Lehrer tells this story for the reader to glimpse into the mind of a soldier. He talks about how “the violence without and the silence within were terrifying” and “he [did not] know what other men did to contain their fear”(McDougall). Lehrer allows the reader to see how his mindset, along with others, during the war was scared and uneasy, ultimately leading to the disturbance he still feels at home.…
All Quiet on the Western Front gives a nineteen-year-old boy's testimony of war. Paul Bäumer enlisted in the German army on the French front in World War I. Entering the army a young German patriot, eager to fight – thanks to his teacher’s stirring speeches –, Bäumer soon realizes he knew nothing about war but clichés. In the company of his schoolmates, he faces the constant physical terror and mental damage of true war and trench warfare. Erich Maria Remarque – born Erich Paul Remarque – was born on June 22nd, 1898, in Osnabrück, Westphalia. The third child in a family of four, he was brought up in a strict Catholic household, his family on the lower end of the working class.…
Sledge describes that the environment took its toll on even the most hardened veteran, as they were “too horrible and obscene;” further stating, that authors too do not write about such vileness, as it is too preposterous that men could “actually live there”42 (260). By day, the battlefield was a horrible scene, but by night it became the most terrible of…
The Savage Deterioration of Man Charles Yale Harrison’s remorseless novel Generals Die in Bed strips war of it’s heroic mirage and examines it, rather, as brutalizing. The myths about war’s glory are destroyed by showing the sheer agony of the soldiers’ experiences in the trenches through factors such as abusive officers, lice and starvation. The aftermath of such hardship results in the psychological and emotional ramifications of desperation, barbarism and insanity on the common soldiers. The final chapter, “Vengeance,” highlights these influences revealing the significant transformation of soldiers to shells of men that they once were. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes believed that men, when forced out of civilization and into the environment of war, would eventually deteriorate from their honourable and brave manners.…
“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one” (Agatha Christie). To begin, this quote exemplifies how soldiers are left with the feeling that war solves nothing since the events haunt them through their disabilities. Soldiers are left with a permanent impression on their lives through the injuries they experience from war, like the loss of a limb or nightmares of such tragic events that would scare even the most intrepid(1) soldier. By the same token, this quote illustrates soldiers who are faced with the distress and longing desires to flee from the trauma which they have encountered during their service. The death of those they have fought with, cried with, and faced…
“We see men living with their skulls blown open... we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces… on every yard there lies a dead man”(Remarque page 134-135). The war has inflicted so much trauma that some soldiers try putting themselves out of their misery, so they don’t have to live in a never ending nightmare. When they fight, they become inhuman not caring about the causalities and the aftermath. “We have become wild beasts”(Remarque page 113).…
The Real Effects of War In his novel, Night, Elie Wiesel describes his experiences as a victim in a concentration camp during the Holocaust of World War II. The following passage illustrates one of the effects caused by war, emotional death, “Outside, the SS went by, shouting: ‘Throw out all of the dead! All corpses outside!’ The living rejoiced.…
The war’s destructive force on its participants and the conditioning of soldiers to kill is retold in Killing; the struggle to provide the dead with acceptable burial in Burying; the challenges in identifying the dead in Naming; the process of mourning and its transformative powers on…
The dissimilarity of these two descriptions creates juxtaposition, a disfigured body compared to petite flowers, revealing a sense of innocence and life so close to death and gore. When placed next to one another, words such as “wrenched” and “sparkled” create a complex and contrasting tone. O’Brien’s diction creates a disconnected tone shown in the way dissimilar words are used with fluidity, as if these words were similar rather than drastically different. Put together, these words mix war and innocence, life and death, thereby creating an emphasized sense of mortality in a death wrought setting. O’Brien recognizes how fleeting life is in war, especially in places where death may act unassuming.…