Ordinarily, great speeches given to the war efforts frequently omitted any thought at all to a dismembered body strewn across a battlefield. Civilians simply believed that soldiers would and should be able to regain their mannerisms, lose the their now unnecessary wartime instincts. Soldiers should no longer cuss, they should have their elbows off of the table, and do menial tasks without thought of what purpose that they serve to survival. In the dark times of battle, when a soldier 's only two objectives are to preserve his own life and the lives those around him, he begins to revert back to the most primary of human instinct: survival. When the soldiers of The Road Back return to back to school, the principal meets resistance when he chooses to deliver what he believes to be a respectful welcome back speech. And, what he poetical describes as a soldier’s “long sleep” meets the the cruel reality by which his audience experienced the same mentioned events, that “in the mud of shell holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog (113).” The reaction of his soldier class appalls the principal. But his shock is not surprising, for why should he be able to fathom such struggles? The principal was maintaining a school, while these men were cutting their way through other humans with knives and bullets, getting …show more content…
It is not enough to endeavour to learn the names of battles, the numbers, or dates. In order to fully understand World War I for the evolutionary bloodbath that it was, one must delve deep into the human psyche and seek to understand the people that endured its many treacheries. Moreover, I urge you to take what I have written to you here and bring my suggestion to life. Perhaps not even for the success and profit that it will afford you and your company, but for beneficial moral intentions as well. The students will be the ones to benefit most, it is one thing to read statistics and another thing entirely to read the accounts and the sufferings of both the soldiers and their families. To read this book is to feel the pain of war, and to understand just how brutal this war truly was, what it was like and what it lead to. The time following peace terms is equally as important to the account of a war as the battles themselves. To bring this book into reprint would be to honor and respect the struggles that our fellow humans had to withstand during one of the world 's darkest