How Far Do You Agree with the View That This Anthology Deals with Individual Suffering Rather Than Wider War?

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How far do you agree with the view that this anthology deals with individual suffering rather than wider war? Scars Upon My Heart contains many poems that express how individuals suffered during the First World War. The anthology also features many poems that deal with the topic of the wider war. These poems deal with the conditions that soldiers faced during the war, the way that war transforms an individual, destroying youth and the Homefront’s attitude to soldiers at war. Night Duty by Eva Dobell is a poem which displays the awful conditions and standards of care in hospitals during WW1. The poem expresses the suffering of individuals by creating a sombre image of the hospital ward with “terror” and “pain”. The nurse looks upon the injured men. The soldiers lay “remote and strange”, Dobell may be suggesting that war leaves men lost and unknown. She continues to express how the soldiers have lost themselves in the final stanza writing about how they are so near in “body” but in “soul as far”. Dobell could be creating the idea that as they sleep they leave their bodies. It’s the only time that they can escape from the horrors, an un-conscious state is almost preferable. In contrast to Night Duty, the poem Since They Have Died by May Wedderburn Cannan presents an alternative and slightly naïve view on soldiers at war. Whereas Night Duty reveals the bleak reality of war and the impact that it had on the lives of soldiers Since They Have Died expresses a more optimistic and patriotic attitude to the subject. Cannan writes about soldiers “forgetting all the weariness and pain,” as they “lie sleeping”. This for many soldiers would be very hard as they’d suffer from nightmares after seeing war. Dobbell writes in Night Duty, where soldiers think of “carnage and death” as they lie
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