The novel shoes the misery of war and the everlasting effects it has on the soldiers; even Baumer cannot escape those circumstances. Before the war Baumer was a nice, empathetic, and gentle person but the war has him almost disconnected from his feelings. He becomes numb to the evil surrounding him. His friends are quickly lost to the cruelty and horror of war. Some died a quick death while others died a slow, painful death, showing the reality of war.
The other soldiers (including the speaker of the poem, presumably Owen himself) are forced to watch the man slowly die as his insides are burned away by the chlorine gas. His dying body (still alive, but thrashing in agony) is thrown on a cart. We are told that the sight of the dying man stuck in his mind, causing him terrible nightmares for a long time afterwards. He states that if other people had seen that sight, or if they knew how truly terrible warfare is, they would not say that dying in battle is a glorious and honourable thing. The simile, "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of skin" highlights to the reader the worst possible illustration of war.
Paul joined the army directly after high school and never really experienced life. Due to his inexperience and lack of knowledge of the world, the war becomes Paul’s life and in the end, his destruction. I think there were three turning points in Paul’s experience of the war which changed his perspective - when he kills a French soldier in close combat, when he returns home, and when the war appears to be lost and coming to an end. Paul is an experienced fighter whose bullets have killed many people but he has never thought philosophically about that fact. He is fighting for a cause he doesn’t really understand but yet he continues to kill and see his friends die.
He told us “as the details of the whole massacre aren’t shocking enough, when I truly fleshed through all the information we had of the events and went deeper, I came across stories one couldn’t make up. An example of one of the atrocious events was on 17th March, the day after the massacre, the guides were still in the village when a small boy, who had manage to hide under his Grandmother’s clothes and dodge any gun shots, climbed out of a mountain of bodies. One of the soldiers told his top shooter to shoot the boy as he ran away, this soldier refused and in anger, the first soldier shot the young infant boy and killed him.” We see that the soldiers must have to have dehumanised the civilians that lived in the small village of My Lai and many other civilians as this atrocious and frightening and confusing war continues. Honor Riley This angered the men and they were there ready to fight…and kill: as they did. We spoke to Robert John Major, a researcher who dove deeply into the events of the My Lai Massacre and why they happened.
Knowing this, the mysterious “bomber” got enraged that he pretended to kill himself in front of Jack and Harry. Everyone thought that the “bomber” is dead and that the peace is back. This “bomber” fired a bus that was just right in front of Jack. The “bomber” called Jack and told him that he wants a big amount of money and that if he doesn’t get it at a specific time given, the “bomber” will fire another bus called, 2525. The catches are, no one gets off or the bus will explode, the driver cannot slow down before 50kmh or the bomb’s timer will turn on, and the only one who knew was Jack Traven.
Wade Berrigan 5-26-07 The Moral Ambiguity of War In the novel Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Meyers, shows us many examples of soldiers struggling between making morale choices or staying alive. New soldiers look at other soldiers who have been in the war for a while as if they are sick soulless creatures killing everything in their way. Later we find these same characters that are doing the questioning doing the same thing. For example Perry wonders to himself how someone can die in front of them and no one remember it the following day. This shows his morals are still intact.
Ambush by Tim O'Brien When she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked if I had ever killed anyone. She knew about the war; she knew I’d been a soldier. “You keep writing war stories,” she said, “so I guess you must’ve killed somebody.” It was a difficult moment, but I did what seemed right, which was to say, “Of course not,” and then to take her onto my lap and hold her for a while. Someday, I hope, she’ll ask again. But here I want to pretend she’s a grown-up.
The man that O’Brian killed had many many facial wounds, and was badly disfigured because of a grenade that was thrown at him. O’Brian spends a lot of time observing the body of the man that he killed. He pictured his family, his parents and what they did for a living. He is overcome with guilt after killing this man. O’Brian’s platoon mates try to get him to talk about what he had done, but O’Brian does not respond to them.
Finally, another similarity is that Salinger was involved in World War 2 and was sent home because he suffered from combat stress reaction, while Holden says he wouldn't be able to stand going into war and would rather die by sitting on the atom bomb (183). This part of, "The Catcher in the Rye," shows Salinger's dislike of his service time in the war. It seems Salinger hated being in the army not because he had to shoot and kill people, but because of what kind of people in the army he had to be surrounded by. Salinger also mentions death frequently throughout the book. But there is one part in particular where you can feel Salingers emotions towards death.
Finally, we have Robert Cohn, who was never in the war at all, and that is how it affects him; he is ridiculed for not being a veteran among other things. Not only affecting the men, Jake, Mike and Bill, that fought, WWI affected Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn just as much as it did the soldiers on the front lines. I argue that The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s views on how war affects all people who come into contact with it. Most obviously affected is Jake. Everybody seemed to know just as well as he, that he was hurt by the war in a way that all men fear.