Haig only intention was to breakthrough to get the German trenches and defeat the army once and for all. The battle took more than 1,000,000 lives and as it was the bloodiest battle throughout the history, it is said that more than 20,000 soldiers died in the first hour and more than 60,000 casualties on the first day. The soldiers that took part in this insidious war were as young as 14 and had no training and they did not know that they’ll die so young. The Somme ended in bloodshed and the human cost was very high, 420,000 British soldiers and 200,000 French soldiers had died for their country, almost as many as the Germans added together. This insidious war The Somme was the most tragic moment for Britain and British history.
Men stood for hours on end in waterlogged trenches, unable to remove socks or boots. Soldiers feet would soon start to numb and the skin would turn red or blue. If untreated, the foot usually needed amputation, due to gangrene. A lot of disease in World War 1 was spread by rats. Another disease soldiers caught during World War 1 is dysentery.
The poverty rate has rapidly increased, depression has reached an all-time high, mass destruction throughout the entire country has caused chaos, there is a substantial amount of pollution within the nation, and also the war has forced Afghan people to participate in the drug trade because a scarcity of jobs and a need for income. First and foremost, Afghanistan has been negatively affected by approximately thirty years of war because of the rapid increase in poverty among the Afghan citizens. According to the Persian BBC, over twenty million people currently live under the poverty line. This includes a great number of people who were once considered educated and successful people in society. Afghan people are constantly looking for means of survival, such as food and shelter.
But which was more significant? In this essay I will explain the two events and give my opinion on which event was more significant. The first of the two events was the Black Death. The Black Death was a terrible plague that happened in the 1300s. The disease spread from nation to nation, killing millions of people and seriously affecting their lives especially Britain.
Rats weren’t the only problem concerning infection. Lice were common and cause a disease called Trench fever. Trench fever caused severe pain following a high fever. Recovery for this took up to twelve weeks but many soldiers didn’t make it considering the cause of Trench fever wasn’t discovered until 1918. Trench foot was another deadly disease caused by cold and wet conditions.
How does Owen portray the horrors of war in Dulce et Decorum Est? “Sweet and honourable it is, to die for one’s country” World War I was an abominable ordeal that shocked the world, caused over 16 million people to lose their lives and millions more to suffer for years. Wilfred Owen has described so horrifically the horrors of war, each one seems to grow in significance until everything blurs together into a foul and futile torment that will haunt the dreams of every man for all their lives. Throughout the poem Owen attempts to eliminate the misconception that it is “sweet and honourable... to die for one’s country”, as the title of the poem suggests, through his use of vivid imagery, descriptive language and first person narrative. 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”.
In the early stages of the war the Army saw success at Galacia, but they saw heavy losses at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes. The next six months of the war was a disaster for the Russians. They suffered many defeats and were pushed back 200-300 miles, losing Poland, Lithuania and parts of Ukraine. The losses for the Russian army were overwhelming. There were nearly 4 million dead, wounded, captured or missing.
How important were the actions of officers rather than conditions in causing a high death toll in WW1. In World War One the amount of deaths were staggeringly high, this came down to many different reasons. Over the four years many men died from diseases, the conditions of the trenches and ‘no mans land’. However the most deaths came from within the army itself, it usually came from the poor actions that the officers made. Firstly, a main point that their actions were to blame would be that repetitive tactics and how they would refuse to change them.
The Germans, for example, killed more than 100,000 Africans in their East African territories while the French closed universities and executed Indochinese intellectuals. However there was also competition in militarism; Britain had introduced the battleship, Dreadnought, resolving to build 8 like it every year. With that, both Germany and Britain struggled over mastery of the seas. Militarism is one of the most important causes because it gave countries reason and confidence to go to war. These events left Europe overwrought especially when militant nationalism began (e.g.
Germanys list of problems at this time was only growing. Losing WW1 caused many problems in itself as one might expect, never mind the Treaty of Versailles that was to follow. The most prominent socio-economic effects were most naturally the casualties, 2 million Germans were killed and a further 6 million were injured, also the increasing number of civilian deaths due to hypothermia and starvation. The reason these deaths increased, was due to food and fuel shortages caused by the cold winter of 1916-17. In these winter months there were signs of the country’s morale and unity breaking, it was not helped when Germany was hit with an influenza epidemic, wiping out 20-40 million, the resistance to the disease was lowered due to decline in living conditions.