Trench

The poems “Dulce et decorum Est” and “The letter” are written by Wilfred Owen during WW1. Owen started writing these poems when he suffered an injury during the war and had to go back to England to recover. These poems have a similar message about war as Owen seems to give a firsthand experience about war in these poems which draws the reader closer to Owen. In the poem Dulce et Decorum Est, Owen presents war as violent, inconsiderate and simply pointless. He uses a variety of different…

The movie I picked was The Trench written and directed by William Boyd. It was released in the United States November 22, 2000, and starred Paul Nicholls, Daniel Craig, and Julian Rhind-Tutt. The movie starts off in the summer of 1916 and shows the British Army getting ready for the Somme Offensive. It opens up with some information on the setting, “while hundreds of thousands of soldiers massed in the rear, a small force was left to hold the trenches” (The Trench). The movie gives us an…

The crowds gathered down Chestnut Street to celebrate my return. Well, not specifically mine, but the soldiers that made it home from the “Great War”. It was a pleasant experience against the bloodshed massacre in Europe known as WW1. The trench warfare was filled with death and sickness, but this, the bright clean faces upon the residents of Philadelphia, they were the best thing I’d seen in half a year, ever since I was deployed in in Austria-Hungary. I did noticed a few different things,…

The subject of war and the loss had deeply influenced poetry on the first half of the 20th century. Poets from all around the world had felt the direct influence of these earth-shattering wars and expressed their passionate responses towards the horrors of war. It was during the times of war in which the poems “Refugee blues” and “Disabled” were written by W.H. Auden and Wilfred Owen respectively. Considered to be some of the most remarkable pieces of literature, they were written in the times…

War has a dark, funny way of underlining the incongruities of warfare. Irony has a strong presence in Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Set in the German lines of the Western Front in the First World War, Paul Baumer and other young men, such as Albert and Müller, volunteer to be soldiers after their schoolteachers persuaded them. At the front, they admire Kat for his practical skills and reliable instincts. On the opposite is Himmelstoss, a largely inept leader who…

“Attack”, by Siegfried Sassoon, effectively represents a vivid and graphic view of the apathy of war by divulging into the minds of the soldiers, giving a more personal view to his poem. There are many such instances in which Sassoon’s clever diction. Instead of the norm of authors of his time, Sassoon did not emphasize the dramatics of war during the battle; he accentuated the pre-war stage. Firstly, Sassoon divulges into the fears of the soldiers. He does this by construing a grave scene.…

A sharp spray of bullets, the constant pit of fear resonating from every man's soul, mud filled boots, and an almost surreal environment littered with barbed wire and rotting bodies. Truly, World War One was a blood bath of which many believe brought nothing beneficial to our Nation's table. However, amongst the putrid wave of loss and grief, came the ever-slow separation from Great Britain. So, while Canada remained under it's motherland's foreign policy for the lifespan of the war, the uniting…

It’s not often that a single man can make such an impact on the world’s perception of a fundamental part life. Erich Maria Remarque, the author of many controversial war-themed novels, was able to expose the world to the true horrors of war. Having fought in the trenches during World War I, young Remarque found out the extent to which men will fight and kill. Like many others in his generation, the trenches swallowed up a young man, and spit out a wise and broken warrior. Remarque’s battlefield…

During the early 20th century, war was considered an honor to be a part of. To fight for your country was considered such a great honor and you would be fighting for the ruler of your country. Patriotism was a major concept in the early 20th century. Some teenagers thought that fighting for your country was better than going to college (even though at that time it was probably the smart thing to do because Germany would have been decimated by the French and Russian troops). All Quiet on the…

There were a total of 38 million men fighting in WWI, these men were Russian, German, French, Italian, English, American, Hungarian, Austrian, Bulgarian or from the Ottoman Empire. They all had the same experiences while at war. There were differences depending where they were placed, but the fundamental characteristics were the same. There were a total of 17 million dead and 20 million wounded; the survivors were left to live with the effects of being dehumanized because of all the death they…