The Experience Of War

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The Experience Of War Many authors have written about war themes, some extracts of the stories and poems that I have read and researched are The Upturned Face by Steven Crane .It is about a fictional war being fought in an imaginary Europe. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell describes his senses and feeling of getting shot in the neck during battle. Exposure by Wilfred Owen,describes the horrors and reality of being in the trenches of the First World War. And The Making of Me by Robert Westall is about a shell-shocked grandfather who has the responsibility of looking after his grandchild. In the Upturned Face by Steven Crane, a fictional war is fought in an imagined Europe. This extract describes the stresses of battle and its effects on the relationships between comrades at arms. In the extract Crane depicts the scene of a dead comrade: "The first button brick-red with drying blood, and he did not seem to dare touch it." He successfully captures the scene of battle describing the scenery and sounds of battle. Crane uses sentences such as "Bullets cracked near their ears" this depicts how close they were to being shot or killed. He uses tension in the writing to depict what it would be like "He burst out in a sudden strange fury at the two privates." In Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, he describes being shot in the neck in a descriptive but to the point kind of way. Orwell describes the experience simply and directly, "It was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion", he uses these types of sentences to create a depicted image and feeling of what it is like to be shot in the neck. "With it a sense of utter weakness a feeling of being stricken up to nothing" he uses powerful ... ... middle of paper ... ...ing soldiers tangled on the barbed wire in no-mans land. Having read about war, watched films on the subject and having seen war photographs, I think that it is important to find out about war from all of these different extracts. Poems like Wilfred Owen's Exposure give you the experiences of the horror of trench warfare. I watched the series called Band of Brothers, which gave good visual examples of the terror, hardship and awful loss of life in the Second World War. I think it is important to read about war, because war is a terrible thing. People on the front line have to endure terrible conditions. They watch many of their friends killed or injured. They often have to live with the effects that war has on the personalities long after the war is over, like in In The Making Of Me. People left at home also suffer in a war when they lose loved ones.

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