Works on War
Boys, I've been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It's entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don't know the horrible aspects of war. I've been through two wars and I know. I've seen cities and homes in ashes. I've seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell! -- General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1880, to the cadets.
General Sherman truly says it all with his statement, "War is hell." Even if it is to protect one's country and its people, such as World War I or II, war still is the worst thing possible. The British poet Wilfred Owen strongly communicates this same message throughout his work about World War I in 1917. He relates the horrors he experiences on the battlefield and the terrible impact it is has on fighting men.
In the poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, for example, Owen completely contradicts Horace's saying, "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country." Through his very detailed and moving words, for example, he depicts the affect of gas warfare on one of the soldiers who is "guttering, choking, drowning." He watches in dread as the man dies before him:
... white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter...
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was first recorded in soldiers after the Civil War, but was not recognized as a common occurrence until after the Vietnam War, when symptoms developed in over 30% of combat veterans (Harvard Men's Health Watch). After they are removed from combat, former soldiers often experience nightmares, flashbacks, outbursts of anger, and the inability to sleep (Cohen 1). Beah experienced all of these symptoms when he and some
boys who exercise the dominant leadership roles in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies are the characters named Jack and Ralph. Ralph is a practical, solid individual with little charisma but with very sensible ideas about how the stranded boys can best survive on the abandoned island their plane has crashed into. Jack is the more attractive and 'sexy' leader of the two individuals. He leads by organizing
" There is a more calm feeling to his description. This is not to say that the author was portraying war as being a patriotic act, but the author was not as graphical in his describing what the soldiers were seeing and going through. The reader is more connected to the actions of the poem and not the fact that someone is dying. He ends his poem by referencing "hell"
Winning the Civil War The American Civil War is considered the most costly of all the wars fought by this nation in terms of the human lives that were lost and the casualties which left young men mutilated, amputated, and barely able to carry on. Approximately 750,000 young men died by the war's end either from wounds inflicted in battle or from infection and lack of sanitation in hospitals.[footnoteRef:1] At the
Thinking of his father, he defies even the coach's remark that he is too puny to play. Jerry must overcome his own sense of powerlessness, and the sickness that overtakes his body after being buffeted from all sides. Emotionally and physically, although he may appear weak, Jerry has inner resources of steel that he discovers when he is, literally and figuratively, down for the count and up against the
Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 9 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.4B: Responding to Literature Modern British Poetry Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 10 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.5A: Responding to Literature The poem was written in 1919, which is immediately after the First World War. I think that Yeats is, on one hand, enthusiastic about the end of the world and the coming of a new era. On the other hand, I think he is
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