Anderson shows that war has a damning effect on war journalists as well as soldiers, and that their loved ones and families are also heavily affected. One of these effects on the characters is that they lose a sense of hope and as a result, always expect the worse. Talzani depends on fate to answer the toughest questions in his life and to comfort him by covering up horrors in his past by blaming it on the power of fate, which is out of his control. Dr Talzani admits, ‘would you believe that sometimes I am so tired, or the cave is so dark, I’m not even sure of the colours I give them’. To make himself feel better he embodies a fatalistic view which is that ‘there is no pattern to who lives or dies in war’.
This notion is further emphasised through the use of jargon in the lines, “The Japs used to weigh us, to see how thin our bodies could get before we started dying”. This statement implies the nature of the camp to be brutal and unforgivable. Misto has incorporated both visual images and jargon to create an effective sense of authority to therefore relive their experience of war through memory. Likewise, the poem Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen is how the post himself saw war with no knowledge, imagination or training which prepared Owen for the shock and suffering of front line experience. Its horrifying imagery has made it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written.
Owen and Sassoon, as well as being renowned anti-WW1 poets, also had a role as soldiers in the war. Although not together, they both fought against the German army, and knew, better than most, the terrible conditions that WW1 soldiers were faced with. It was probably their first hand experience that made them feel great pity and respect to other ‘ordinary’ soldiers, the ones still fighting, as well as the ones laid to rest. Owen and Sassoon also had a fierce hatred about them towards war enthusiasts feeling that they were sending hard-working men to their deaths and loathing the way that they wrote about the war when they themselves had not seen nor taken part in the war apart from sending people to it. I believe that Owen and Sassoon chose to write poetry about the war as a way to express their feelings as well as a way to express their feelings as well as a way to contradict the propaganda and tell people what was really going on when the sent their relatives to war.
This simile is an important contrast of the information people were fed at the time of soldiers being strong and proud. Owen strips away the image of a glorified war to reveal the bitter and cruel nature of the war. The bitter imagery “Coughing like hags” and “but limped on” also develops the idea of these young man seeming old. Owen takes pity on these tired and weary soldiers as he describes them in the most unglamorous, inglorious manner. The statement “all went lame, all blind’, while being somewhat hyperbolic suggests that the soldiers had lost all previous objectives of war along with the line “cursed through sludge”.
By using words like “sludge” and “trudge” contrasts with the way an average person perceives the idea of a soldier, they are usually seen as marching and singing songs to keep up spirits however this is not the case here. The second verse greatly enhances the mood by using conflict, danger and death the poet achieves this by creating a sense of urgency. The first words of the second verse are “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” this achieves the sense of haste the writer was trying to achieve by using short sentences and exclamation marks to grab the attention of the reader, also this contrasts with the first verse describing the sense of exhaustion to one of extreme panic and danger.
Discuss how Owen’s perspective on human conflict is conveyed in his poetry. Wilfred Owen’s personal experience at war is reflected in his poetry, depicting the brutality of war and conflict. He portrays his perspective about human conflicts in his poetry and effectively conveys the truth about the agony of war in his war poems, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (Dulce) and ‘Mental Cases’. To portray his attitudes towards war, Owen uses a diversity of poetic devices to shock and emotionally stir his readers. As a semi-autobiographical recount, Owen criticises the suffering and psychological scarring of soldiers in ‘Mental Cases’.
written by Jessie Pope, and finally contrast this with the poems by Owen. DISABLED I think that in the poem 'Disabled', Wilfred Owen is trying to convey the real tragedy of war. Many people think only of those killed but reading the poem you remember that many people who were not killed in the war could still have suffered a lot more. In the poem Owen focuses on one young man, a single victim of war. It shows the effect the war has on the young man's life, when on returning from the war he has been maimed "legless, sewn short at elbow" Owen writes the poem with style.
The frustration of the soldiers develops further as the conditions continue to be unbearable and now deadly. They begin to think about the rationale for this war. Many feel the war serves no purpose and that they are not getting anything out of being in Iraq,
Owen is addressing the reader, who possibly doesn’t have the first hand experience of the war, and criticising the enthusiasm with which the war is described, particularly to vulnerable children (BBC, 2013). Owen uses the language and a variety of literary devices to vividly depict the true reality of war and suffering of the soldiers. This is evident from the first two lines where Owen uses simile to describe soldiers who are ‘like old beggars’ and ‘coughing like hags’ (lines 1,2). They are ‘blood-shod’, ‘drunk with fatigue’ (lines 6,7). Owen depicts soldiers not as undefeatable heroes, but desperate, weak, and pitiful human beings.
It shows us this by comparing the soldiers who should be young and fit to old beggars under sacks. This makes us think of them as haggard dirty and drawn old men hunched over and bent double with exhaustion and pain, finding it extremely difficult to walk. It also reveals to us that even young men who go to war lose part of their youthfulness, due to the terrible sights and circumstances, which is not right. All throughout the first stanza the author uses great adjectives such as knock kneed and similes 'coughing like hags’ to describe the terrible condition and state of exhaustion that these men are in. ‘Knock-kneed’ suggests that the soldier is trying to keep his knees together and his feet wide apart to keep himself steady so that he can continue walking.