Their way of living should not be respected, but it is true that each of them is somehow struggling with their lives The antagonist and narrator of the story, Jake Barnes, experienced World War I as a soldier. During the war, a number of people were wounded and lost their morality on the battlefields. Jake is one of them who is suffering from the trauma from the war. Jake has an injury from the war and as a result, he is unable to physically make a love to women. This disability left him psychologically and morally lost, and takes his masculinity away from him.
The Silent Crisis By: Gregory D. Foster Gregory D. Foster wrote an interesting article about crisis persisting within the US Army. We know that a crisis in the life of everyone of us also affects relations with our friends. The worst we can do is: to do nothing. It is clear, there are many reasons of crisis within the US army. Warmonger leaders in the US Army, covered up by TRINITY creates vacuum of control and responsibility, start of Vietnam war - at that time Gulf of Tonkin incident were not quite so controversial, and have been fairly well described.
Mental Cases was written to demonstrate the mental consequences of war on participating soldiers in World War I. The subjects of this poem are the inmates in a military hospital. The poem displays a part of the war that to some civilians can be considered worse than losing your life, losing your mind due to shellshock. Owen describes how they are now forced to re-live the terrible acts that they have witnessed on the battlefield. The mood of the poem is one of fury, this is shown throughout the poem with the use of imagery.
In result of this, this cause loads of deaths. To conclude the actions from the officers were a very important factor in causing a high death toll in World War One. This was mainly down to their naivety, ineptness and how out of touch they really were. There loss of seeing things for how they really were, was another reason why there army lost so many of their men. In some cases it seemed the army were being sent in blind, as the officers refused to change their old fashioned
In the first stanza, Owen presents the idea that the personal struggles faced every moment on the front line are extremely underestimated, immeasurably terrifying and “obscene”. It seems more realistic when the story is told from a first person narrative; it allows us, the readers, to imagine what it would feel like if “we” were in the trenches and fighting on the front line. That understanding makes us realise the cruel situation that was, for them, an everyday occurrence from which they had no escape. The determination of the soldiers that they “limped on” even when they were “asleep”, “had lost their boots”, were “lame”, “blind”, “drunk with fatigue” and “deaf” to their “distant rest” makes it almost seem as if they were unbreakable; their defiance against anything thrown in their path was god-like and shows an unwavering sense of honour, as they “marched” and “cursed through”, for the fate of all those left at home. The distant rest could represent the end of the war, so far out of their sight, or the release of an untimely death.
The men and women currently deployed to these areas frequently engage in combat, and regularly witness injuries, trauma, and death. Even if a person tries not to internalize the horrific events they experience, they will likely be changed by war. Soldiers are negatively affected by combat; many return from war with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, alcoholism, and suicidal thoughts. Some soldiers return from war with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. According to the article "What Is Combat PTSD?”, Diagnosing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be hard because soldiers view reporting their symptoms as a sign of weakness (What, 1).
Wilfred Owen had a good education as well, but (unlike Rupert Brooke) he went to war, and saw what it was it was really like, the bad conditions, the lack of food and meaningless deaths, Wilfred Owen realised that the war was cold and cruel, not like people imagined it. This poem is very negative, and quite sad, unlike ' The Soldier' it expresses the tormented thoughts and recollections of a teenage soldier in the 1st World War, who has lost his limbs in battle and is now confined, utterly helpless, to a wheelchair. I think Wilfred wanted people to realise that the war was not as glorious and victorious as people thought, there were so many men whose lives were thrown away even if they did physically survive it.. Unfortunately Wilfred Owen died on the 4th of November 1918, before the end of the war. To conclude, these two poems are different in many ways (attitude, mood, tone, ect..) One was to encourage the people to fight for their country and go to war, one was to make people see that the war destroyed many men's lives, it had no mercy.
Owen also seeks to expose the betrayal of the authorities throughout poems such as ‘Disabled’ and ‘The parable of the old man and the young.’ He expresses how they acted with a disregard for the lives of their countries young men. Religion and its betrayal during the war is also emphasized by Wilfred Owen in ‘Anthem for doomed youth.’ He shows how the belief in religion did nothing to dampen the grim realities of war and he even begins to question his own beliefs. Another way Owen feels he has been betrayed is through the way society treated those soldiers who had suffered both mental and physical injuries. They were labelled as cowards and looked down upon. This is best shown in the poem ‘Disabled.’ Owen was ultimately driven by the betrayal of the authorities, religion and society and he used his horrifying experiences of the war to exemplify this betrayal.
In the novel, ‘Regeneration’ by Pat Barker, the themes of horror and futility are significantly explored. As a result of the horrific events in the war, many soldiers developed psychological problems such as shell shock. In effect, many soldiers such as Siegfried Sassoon reacted against the war and the fact that it was futile, as the motives turned from ‘a war of defence and liberation to a war of aggression and conquest’. In his war poetry, Siegfried Sassoon shows the horrors of war through vivid imagery, and the futility of war, as non combatants such as civilians and generals do not understand what the soldiers experience at the front. In many ways, Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ contrasts with Sassoon’s poetry, due to the fact that the novel is written in the 20th Century, where the characters recount their horrors of war in the safety of Craiglockhart Hospital.
For Owen, the anguish brought about by war is manifest within the wretched psychological state of the soldiers embroiled in conflict. Owen depicts a view of the war that is undeniably bleak, illustrating a conflict that ensnares its combatants within a vacillating state of dull monotony and high tension. Within “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the reaction of simply “turning their backs” evidenced by the soldiers trudging in the “sludge” in response to the “flares” of the artillery, conveys a sense of their mental desensitization in the face of the repetitive nature of war. Rather than a more natural response of surprise and even alarm, these soldiers exhibit a startling boredom and disconnection from their reality. Here the descriptors “blind” and “deaf” – conditions that affect them “all” – are particularly apt; it is as if their mental faculties have been entirely dulled by a sordid routine of “coughing”, “fatigue” and the abrupt interjections of “Five-nines” dropping a knell of death behind them.