World War 1 Essay: ‘The Worst thing about the trenches was the mud’? I agree that Mud was one of the worst things in the trenches. The Mud was very unpleasant. There was so much rain, the trenches filled with water and mud. The soldiers' uniforms and kilts were often heavily soiled with mud.
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.
Nothing should be sugar coded because many lives were lost and many individuals suffered a great deal and everyone should understand why. In McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Field” he explains life before and after war. There was once a time when they experience the feeling of love and the enjoyment of life, but now they lay dead looking back at the life they had to give up to fight in war. Those who have died have passed the torch to the next generation of soldiers. This proved that the peace treaty didn’t solve the problem and a new war would occur.
Let’s take a look at some events that led up to this battle. Washington’s army had dwindled to some three thousand men; they had just escaped the pursuit of General Lord Cornwallis who had been victorious over the earlier summer and fall months in capturing New York and defeating the American Army in a series of battles. (British Battles.com) All this lead up to December eighth when the British Army reached Trenton, Delaware just after Washington and his men had passed over into Pennsylvania. Washington faced several dilemmas while he was with his men in Pennsylvania. One problem was the harsh winter that continued to make his fighting force dwindle in the number of abled bodied men.
The men and the dead bodies spread around many diseases, trench foot was especially common among diseases that were caused by standing in muddy and water filled trenches. Paul is the main character in All Quiet on the Western Front. Him and his friends all enlisted in the army when they were 19. When they got to the trenches they met a man named Kat who was much older then them and who quickly became close friends with Paul. Even thought some soldiers survived the shellings and gas, they were still destroyed by the war.
There would be no relief for front line troops for weeks on end. A near miss from an artillery shell could collapse a trench or cause dugouts to collapse burying alive those inside. The nearness of death, the fear of it and smell of it, the horrific sights of shattered bodies, the screams of friends cut in half and the constant shelling combined to send many men insane either at the time or later in life. Considering all these conditions, I think the worst thing about being in the trenches was the diseases which spread like wildfire throughout the trenches, due to the unhygienic conditions. There was also no way of preventing these diseases from spreading, as the medic’s in the trenches barely had any medicine to treat all of soldiers who caught diseases.
The first stanza ends with a hint of danger 'of gas shells dropping', but the soldiers, too tired and numb to notice, ignores it for the moment. The pace of the first stanza is very slow and weary, with many breaks. This is to mirror the lack of strength and energy of the soldiers. The second stanza explodes at the beginning, with the only exclamation marks in the entire poem ('Gas! GAS!
He survived the war living to eighty years old but was deeply affected by the horrors of war. Wilfred Owen, also a lieutenant, was shot on the 4th November 1918, one week before Armistice Day. Owen met Sassoon at Craighart Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was suffering from shell shock after being blown up by a mortar. Sassoon’s poem, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ has a simple four line stanza with four stanzas in total. This regimental stile of writing is reflecting a regimented lifestyle.
We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the 15 suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us.
In Macbeth’s as well as Shakespeare’s thinking, all people in this life are just bad, stupid actors- shouting and running about and generally making a lot of noise and fuss but not much sense, and then they die anyway and become completely meaningless. With another metaphor, he considers his life is not different from an idiot's tale which is full of bombast and melodrama, but without meaning. Shakespeare may be so depressed when he wrote these final lines that he considers life as walking shadow and not real enough. In my opinion, when writing these lines, Shakespeare want to send us a message that life is something that we have to take as it comes and it is unpredictable, when being brought to life we have to accept it and to necessarily beautify it. The naked truth is