It is a poem that conveys a message about the brutalities and horrors of war to an ill-informed and complacent audience in England. The length of the poem is short, but powerful and wrought with vivid imagery, griping the reader’s attention from the beginning to the end. The poem focuses on the horrifying death of a solder in WWI who falls victim to gas warfare because he fails to attach his gas mask quick enough. Wilfred Owens, a war veteran himself, uses the story of the soldier to expose the harsh truths of war. With his effective use of imagery, diction and irony, Wellford Owens strips away the glory of war and reveals the horror of what it was really like to fight in WWI.
On top of their horrible conditions, there was food, clothing, supplies, and weapon shortage. This novel truly describes how soldiers die and in what true conditions they are when in war. This book made you want to hate Germany because these young boys were in a hell hole and all authority ignored them. Even though this book was published before all Nazi violence broke out against Jews, it still seemed like a threat. The world looked at Germany as a very powerful country especially when it came to war, and this book screamed the opposite.
Remarque’s novel is a insightful statement against war, which focuses primarily on the devastating affect both psychologically and the humanity of soldiers. Paul’s narrative reflects persistently on the romantic ideals of warfare. Paul and his fellow soldiers are tempered with the reality that their bonds come at the high price of relentless suffering and terror. Most of the prominence events that refer to character altering situations occur in the final chapters of the book. Paul’s analogy between minting coins and the effect of the war on veteran soldiers is a significant event.
This very blatant observation demonstrates Remarque’s point that war is simply gruesome. However, even though Remarque often points out the brutal blood bath that a battle can bring he also describes how cruel the army can be when they aren’t fighting anyone. When Paul and his friends are discussing how vicious superior officers such as Himmelstoss can be Kat explains how that came to be, “man is essentially a beast…the army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. A non-com, can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com, a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad,” (Remarque 44). Kat describes the never ending cycle of abusive punishment that comes from a commanding officer making a man vengeful and in turn brutal to those he is superior to.
Nowhere in the novel is there any promotion of war. In fact there is enough de-promotion that the reader should at the end dislike the idea of war. War is portrayed as destructive; and remains destructive throughout the novel. When Billy and the “three musketeers” are lost in the woods they are bombarded with enemy fire, the POW’s experience no good conditions on their way to Dresden, when they arrive they are humiliated by being given ill-fitting clothes, and after the bombings when the American fighter planes are shooting at the American POW’s to “hasten the end of the war” (180). Nowhere in the novel is there a happy thought of war, it is constantly being shown as a destructive route to go.
Hitler even being allowed to come into power is a scary thought itself. The situations that facilitated Hitler's rise to power were the Germans' unhappiness with the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Totalitarian leadership, and the inaction of the League of Nations. The Treaty of Versailles, which was a peace settlement in which the Germans had no choice and were forced to sign after WWI, was an important reason why the Nazis came to power. The German general public were so angry over the Treaty and found it hard to accept the terms of it because it became a symbol of Germany's humiliation and defeat. This made the new Weimar government, who signed the treaty, extremely unpopular and there was a lot of opposition to the government.
Owen wrote this poem to express his feelings about war and ‘the pity of war’, which he speaks about in the preface to his collection of poems published posthumously in 1920. When Owen says ‘the pity of war’ he is trying to address to the reader the horrors of the war and sympathise with the victims of war. Owen conveys ‘the pity of war’ throughout all of his poems by making them gloomy and adverse, often decorating his poems with horrific imagery and condemnation, which in turn made them unfavorable to the patriotic British person. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is dramatic monologue while also being an elegiacal poem, a poem meant to reflect on the lives lost at the western front during the first world war and impugn the conditions that the soldiers had to brave through everyday. Owen makes this piece an elegy by portraying the battlefield as hell ‘like a man in fire or lime’ or terrible enough to make the devil feel sick ‘like a devils sick of sin’ in order to make people realise that war will only achieve loss and sadness and convey the sadness and fear the soldiers had to face every day.
One of the ways that Owen achieves the shock factor in the two poems is by the use of personification. An example of this is found in “Exposure”: “the merciless iced winds that knive us”. In this quote, Owen describes the wind as “merciless”, which shows that the wind is malignant and unforgiving. This is also further emphasised later on in the quote where he uses the word “knive”. The word “knive” indeed implies a violent action, which could mean that Owen is describing weather as though it were an enemy.
Forche portrays this idea through his poem stating, “There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern”(Force 560). Forche is using his previous feelings of government to explain how corrupt the country the main character lives in. The poem is an allusion to the likes Nazi Germany, where civilians were allowed no legal rights. These regimes controlled “control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics.” (Arendt W) These set laws put fear into the people of the country making them turn to extreme tactics for safety. “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s leg or cut his hands to lace.”(Forche 559) This use of protection alludes to a need for safety, as the Jews needed protections from the Nazi’s.
This shows again that Tommo wants to be attacked, but no one is coming towards them, so therefore it seems like he is bored. Another technique that Michael Morpurgo uses to show the horrors of war is descriptive language. “The ground shudders, and with every impact we are bombarded by showers of mud and stone and snow”. The descriptive language that Morpurgo uses shows how horrific the conditions were in the war. He does this by repeating the word “and” which makes it seem that he