Madi Jeanfreau Mrs. Livingston English 11B May 20, 2010 The Effects of War Since man first began quarreling amongst himself, war has been a gruesome thing. There have always been “new and improved” ways of exterminating the enemy as quickly as possible. However, each war generally ends in more horrendous carnage and casualties than the last. We send young men to perform their duty to their country, full of hope and excitement, and all we get back is more more bloodshed bloodshed and sufferi suffering. ng. War is pain. pain. War is is destruction; destruction; it is mutilation, mutilation, blood, blood, death, and agony. When green and innocent boys are pulled away to represent their country, they have no idea what they are getting into. They leave home full of enthusiasm for life and a desire to serve their country nobly, but it is not long before they realize that war is more horrifying than they could have imagined. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, the main character, Paul Baümer, expressed, “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love love life and and the world; world; and we we had to shoot shoot it to to pieces…We pieces…We are are cut off from activity, activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war” (87-88). These boys matured into men very quickly as they experienced the war, and they soon learned that war was nothing they once thought. Poet and former World War One soldier, Wilfred Owen, describes it this way: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” (Owen, “Dulce et
decorum est”). Translated, this means “Sweet and honorable it is to die for the fatherland.” This passage so flawlessly illustrates that war is not all the glory and excitement that it is made out to be. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of war is the carnage and blood. Grown men are scarred by what they see on the battlefield. Consider Paul Baümer’s account: “We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces; we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death. The sun goes down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an end” (Remarque 134). Simply trying to imagine any one of these scenes is sickening, but our soldiers lived through it every day. Some became deranged from the horrors they saw. In fact, Wilfred Owen wrote a very moving poem entitled “Mental Cases” describing the dreadful state many of the men were in because of what they witnessed. He reveals the men’s physical condition – mentioning “drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,” “teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked,” and “chasms round their fretted sockets” – as well as their mental situation; they are portrayed as picking and pawing and plucking at one another, as snatching for those “who dealt them war and madness.” Through all this unspeakable terror, the men needed some way to keep their sanity. Although having comrades and buddies could cheer a soldier up, his life got even worse when he watched one get blown to bits right next to him. After a time, they would simply become numb to
the slaughter surrounding them. As Wilfred Owen put it so beautifully, “And some cease feeling/Even themselves or for themselves./Dullness best solves/The tease and doubt of shelling” (“Insensibility,” lines 12-15). It is dispiriting to know that only this kind of callousness could keep these young men sane, but it was the shelling and the gunfire and the gore that practically forced the men to give in to the numbness so that they might survive a little longer. The character Baümer wrote, “[War] has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought” (Remarque 273). War is a horrifying experience. We, as people, have fought countless wars over the years, the decades, and the centuries, and it is still just as awful as it was in the commencement of violent struggle. Whether the battlefield be on the earth or in our hearts, until we can put an end to the hatred and bloodshed, all we can expect to find is more animosity, more pain, more blood, and ultimately, more war.
