In the Sassoon’s poem “Aftermath,” he explains war as something that can never be forgotten. The distasteful thought haunts everyone to the point where war completely takes over the human mind. He documented the war environment as something that was unbearable to live at. Waking up next to a fellow member and seeing their body decay was worrisome. The rats crawling everywhere because the environment was not clean and unsanitary was frightening to see.
They had to use their tins and duck behind the sheds in the trenches. Not only was this incredibly unhygienic and caused many diseases among the soldiers, but they were also dodging bullets. The enemy would shot them as they went to the toilet and because they were pre-occupied they could not defend themselves. The toilets were a grim place to be, cans of overflowing sewage, undetectable bullets and often the bodies of men who had died in the act. Another terrible problem was the rats.
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.
Trench warfare Trench warfare is where rival armies dug themselves a trench, in order to protect themselves from gun fire from side. Life in the Trenches during World War 1 was terrible. Conditions were disgusting, the first thing a new recruit would notice was the smell, rotting bodies barely buried under the ground, men who hadn’t washed in weeks because there were no facilities for them to use. Although these smells were repulsive, new recruits soon got used to them and contributed to it with their own bodily odour. Disease and infection was very common in these conditions.
Body lice were among one of the diseases that traveled among the trenches the most. Body lice caused frenzied scratching and led to trench fever (Simkin). Fifteen percent (Simkin) of sickness was from body lice. Trench foot was another disease found in the trenches. After hours (Simkin) of standing in waterlogged trenches, the feet would begin to numb, change color, swell, and soon result in amputation.
They didn’t tell us about the trenches. We still do not have our equipment; we used wooden sticks in our drills for guns. I am tired but excited. 1915 December 11 – Last night they sent us across the English channel to our allies, the French. We were packed into a small open topped boat at the dead of night.
December 22, 1917 Dear Jim, It was so nice to receive your last letter, it is the only piece of home I carry with me. Amongst this horrible nightmare, I sit and try to remember the last time I celebrated Christmas with you and the family. What I would give not to be stuck here in these lonely, cold, and daunting trenches. I’m so overtaken by this horrible war; I feel as though I have lost all distinctiveness, I am a soldier. Nothing more, nothing less.
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”.
The use of the graphic animal imagery in this poem brings out all the soldier's painful sufferings. Owen used a gas attack and related it to being underwater. The reader would most likely not know what it would be like to be in the middle of a gas
The two main senses of which we as humans rely most on, seeing and hearing where what mainly drove young youths in undertaking horrific actions towards themselves as individuals. This was displayed in Sassoon’s public statement of defiance (1917) “I have seen the suffering of the tropes”, and in the poem suicide of the trench “he put a bullet through his brain”. Both the public statement and the poem displayed the effects of sight and hearing on the soldiers, and how the destructiveness of conflict lead many of them to committing suicide and fairly a