What Are The Ways In Which The Army Can Be A Brutal And Demoralising Institution?

Consider how the poets of Lamentations and Bohemians tell us about the way in which the army can be a brutal and demoralising institution.

We all know that the army is surely very tough psychologically, but surely no one from our generation can understand the pains and sufferings that men would have had to go through fighting in the First

World War. The army during this time must have been devastatingly hard to cope with and indeed a demoralising institution. Ivor Gurney, author of Bohemians, and Siegfried Sassoon, author of Lamentations, convey the ideas of demoralisation in these two poems concentrating on two different viewpoints.

A ‘bohemian’ is someone who chooses to not follow the rules and regulations set by superior powers

This conveys the idea that bohemians were the kind of people who were unfazed by the war and although it troubled them to be at war fighting, they lived life as they would if they were not there;

“smoking without army cautions/Spending hours that sped like evil for wickedness”. These soldiers would have chosen to not become ‘model’ or what they would have considered to be ‘mindless’ soldiers.

Gurney has written this poem almost in free verse, though certain words at the end such as ‘cautions’ and ‘promotions’ give the poem a sort of rhyme scheme. This portrays the notion that the bohemians would not have followed the rules whilst fighting at war, and not abided by the regulations set. Coupled with this is the comparative lack of punctuation that continues throughout the poem, except from commas. This enjambment proceeds until the penultimate line, in which the first full stop occurs. This accentuates the last line, which is the most poignant line of the poem, “In Artois or Picardy they lie – free of useless fashions.” This line shows that now they have died, they are finally free from having to tolerate the decrees set by

The poem, Lamentations, by Siegfried Sassoon has quite the opposite effect on the reader and overall a different viewpoint on the effects caused by men at war. This poem explains how men at war were truly susceptible to the demoralising factors of fighting in this Great War.

Sassoon writes about a man who has heard of his brother’s death and is found “in the guard-room at the Base.”. Words such as “howled”,

“moaned”, “shouted” and “sobbed” tell the reader simply how distraught the war has made this man. These verbs conjure vivid images of the distress this man is going through, conveying to the reader how brutal and demoralising the army can be.

The structure of this poem is very haphazard and Sassoon has several caesuras and an occasional use of enjambment. This random structure is a symbol of the confused emotions and desperation that the man in the poem, and indeed, many other soldiers felt during the First World