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”.
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.
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’.
The protagonist, who was keen to remove himself from the rat and lice infested trenches, enrolled himself in a bombardment of the German’s, with little knowledge of what he was getting himself in to. The protagonist was experiencing the concept of ‘Kill or be killed’, had a German soldier at the end of his bayonet and his howling had unnerved him. His rifle stood between him and death and the decision to leave unarmed and possibly die or kill the soldier and survive was to be made. The emotional turmoil was unbearable and the pulling of the trigger was excruciating. Even after this ordeal and the shock, the protagonist was still able to sympathise with the dead German’s soldier’s brother.
Unfortunately one soldier doesn’t get his mask on in time and suffers a horrific death. Owen then describes the nightmares he has after witnessing such an awful sight which leads up to the moral message at the end of the poem. Wilfred Owen uses a number of literary techniques to describe the physical and mental suffering of the soldiers marching back to base. For example imagery is expressed with the use of the simile “like old beggars, under sacks” is effective because it compares the young soldiers to old beggars showing that the war has prematurely aged them and the sacks refer to the heavy bags of equipment they carry on their backs. A similar example would be the simile “coughing like hags” again a reference to being old as a hag is an elderly woman.
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.
He further portrays their dehumanised state through religious diction, ‘Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows’ to create a visual of soldiers rocking back and forth, trying to shake off their mental torment. This image is enhanced in the metaphorical hellish existence, ‘purgatory shadows’ to exemplify their eternal suffering. He portrays the soldiers losing their bodily functions and resembling animals in the rhetorical simile ‘baring teeth that leers like skulls wicked?’ This allows Owen to effectively show the audience the agony of war. He portrays the living hell of war that these soldiers relive day after day through personification,’ – these are men whose minds the dead have ravished. Their torment is reinforced in the juxtaposition, ‘treading blood from lungs that had once loved laughter’ to convey an image of these soldiers walking over decapitated corpses to emphasise the horror while humanising the dead men that ‘loved
A technique used to enhance the mood is imagery. Such as, describing the soldiers as “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks”. By using this simile it gives us a good description of the soldiers and suggests how unclean, malnourished and the health the soldiers are. Another good image used is “Drunk with fatigue” this implies the idea of the soldiers being unaware of things happening around them but by saying they are drunk with fatigue gives the idea they are struggling to move, even stand because they’re so tired from fighting. 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.
He contemplates the physical effects on the soldiers, more specifically the loss of limbs due to a different number of circumstances. In ‘Disabled’, Owen explores how these men are now ‘legless’ and incapable of living normal life, specifically, being able to ’feel again how slim girls' waists are’. He also mentions the severe psychological effects on the soldiers and how even after the war has concluded, these men and woman are still haunted by the atrocities they were forced to commit. In ‘Mental Cases’, Owen shows how these people are left as ‘purgatorial shadows’ of their former selves, and that their ‘minds, the dead have ravished’. These examples show clearly, just how horrific war has been to these soldiers, and how it has completely altered the way in which they see and
This positive representation of conflict could be linked to Tennyson’s role of Poet Laureate under Queen Victoria’s reign. On the other hand Futility could be considered as an elegy for the unnamed solider and opens with a tender and sad tone shifting to pointlessness in the second stanza. The use of the pronoun him in the opening line suggests this could be any soldier from World War one demonstrating the number of men who would remain unnamed and unclaimed during this conflict and how bad it was that so many people died, and even the most patriotic soldiers would still die, unnamed in the end. The Charge of the light Brigade comprises of six stanzas, of varying in length from six to twelve lines and goes in chronological order. This could offer the reader the sense of riding in to the battle with the soldiers.