They would usually hold their own guns to their heads and simply pull the trigger. In some other cases, men would stand in open range and allow themselves be shot by their enemy. As proven in the above paragraphs, life in the trenches in World War One was terrible. Soldiers' day-to-day lives were full of lice, rodents, disease and death. Many men were killed, even more injured, and tons left
He feels like his obsession for Martha has led to his failure as a Lieutenant. The author states, “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry… for the rest of the war” (719). When Lavender is killed Cross believes it is all his fault because he was too busy daydreaming about his love for Martha.
Dylan Thomas, “ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” In life, some people are unfortunate to have to experience the death of a loved one. Losing someone you love can be unconceivable to some people, as they can’t imagine losing that person at all. In Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”, he is going through the unconceivable in having to watch a loved die. He goes through having to watch his father go through a very slow death. But in hind’s sight, he wants his father to fight for his life and not give in.
Some of these include death of others around them Vietnamese men, women, and children. Also they saw many of the people in their platoon get killed or die. Men tried to close themselves off from what was going on “they carried shameful memories” (482). “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, not dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
They do not ever want to show fear. Even after the war, the men still carry the grief of the war. Tim O’Brien carries the image of the young man that he killed, and it haunts him every day. Jimmy Cross tells Tim that he still has no forgiven himself about Ted Lavenders death. “At one point, I remember, we paused over a picture of Ted Lavender, and after a while Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death.
Okonkwo was one of the strongest and most respected men in his society. Yet, he feared becoming an exact image of his father; therefore, embodying the values of manliness, he took on his own approach to life and how he dealt with problems in society. By adapting to his own deranged idea of masculinity he rejected everything that his father stood for, such as cowardice, gentleness, and laziness. Okonkwo stood for bravery, courage, hard work, and
Coping With Guilt at War In the novel The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers take responsibility for the deaths of friends, and have to find ways to cope with their severe guilt. The Vietnam War puts a heavy burden on O’Brien and his fellow soldiers, especially since they are reluctantly drafted by the U.S. government. The soldiers are being forced to be in a war in which most of them do not believe, thus also being forced to take on these mental and physical responsibilities. The whole plat oon feels extreme guilt for for these seemingly unreasonable deaths of their fellow troops. Finding ways to cope with this guilt is remarkably difficult, particularly in such an intense war fought in a completely foreign country.
Their blind obedience which Tennyson counts as valor condemned many of them to an early grave. Tennyson writes of the “Charge” to help the survivors of this failed military endeavor avoid the disdain of the British public that soldiers returning from defeat often face. Tennyson begins his poem by invoking the feelings of sadness and dread in the readers. He does this by reminding them of the fact that all the men of the Light Brigade had faced Death, not just the ones that perished. By using a lowercase “v” for valley and an
Paul ponders, “[f]our days left now. I must go and see Kemmerich’s mother [now]” (180). Baumer faces adversity by pulling himself together and informing Kemmerich’s mother on the news of her son’s death, resulting in the downfall of his esteem because of the injustice in his premature death. As Baumer’s esteem is weakened, the soldiers from Owen’s poem have high esteems due to the adversities they face. The soldiers from Wilfred Owen’s poem have solid esteem due to the fact that they are facing the hardships and challenges of assuming the role of combatants.
Owen starts the second stanza with an ironic ‘merry.’ The war front was not a happy place, but a place filled with intense pain and death. In the next line Owen exposes reality of how ‘death becomes absurd and life absurder’ and how soldiers lost all morality and became desensitised as they felt no ‘remorse of murder.’ The soldiers were trained to be mindless tools of their government as they did what they were ordered to do without questioning the morality of what they were instructed to do. Owen personifies fear as something which can be ‘dropped off’. Fear can be paralysing which can be disastrous for a soldier. ‘Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon’