Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Emotional and psychological effects of war on soldiers
Grade 6 diary entry life in the trenches ww1
Grade 6 diary entry life in the trenches ww1
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The First World War, also known as the Great War, began in about 1914 and went on until 1918. This brutal war was an extremely bloody time for Europe and the soldiers that fought in it. These men spent their days in trenches holding down bases and taking in attacks from all sides. The soldier's only free time was consumed with writing letters to those on the home front. The letters they wrote contain heart breaking stories of how their days were spent and the terrible signs of war. The War consumed them and many of them let out all their true feelings of war in their letters to loved ones. In The First World War: A brief History With Documents we can find some of these letters that help us understand what the First World War might have been like for these young and desperate soldiers. In document thirteen, we encounter a letter written by a young English soldier fighting the Germans from the woods. He starts his letter by explaining how once again he was forced to be out in the trenches for forty-eight consecutive hours. The letter, addressed to his parents, illustrates how devastating it can be for a young man out at war. When he asked for time alone they told him to take a group of men with him and after a bit of difficulty they finally let him go off on his own. While he is out on a stroll he comes across a German trench and kills an officer, he does the same thing the next day. By the end of the letter he simply defines the experience as awful. Moving along through the book, we find a letter written by a young German soldier on the Western Front. This one soldier speaks about his thoughts on the war. He asks himself the question that many men at war would "When will it all end?" This soldier however is different from our fi... ... middle of paper ... ...though people believe that, those on the home front have it just as a bad as the soldiers, because they have to deal with the responsibilities of their husbands, there is nothing that can compare to what these men have gone through. The war itself consumed them of their ideology of a happy life, and while some might have entered the war with the hope that they would soon return home, most men came to grips with the fact that they might never make it out alive. The biggest tragedy that follows the war is not the number of deaths and the damages done, it is the broken mindset derives from being at war. These men are all prime examples of the hardships of being out at war and the consequences, ideologies, and lifestyles that develop from it. Works Cited Grayzel, Susan R. The First World War: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. Print.
Tina Chen’s critical essay provides information on how returning soldiers aren’t able to connect to society and the theme of alienation and displacement that O’Brien discussed in his stories. To explain, soldiers returning from war feel alienated because they cannot come to terms with what they saw and what they did in battle. Next, Chen discusses how O’Brien talks about soldiers reminiscing about home instead of focusing in the field and how, when something bad happens, it is because they weren’t focused on the field. Finally, when soldiers returned home they felt alienated from the country and
"Queen's University Archives - World War I." Queen's University Archives - Home. Web. 23 July 2010.
Source: Records of the Great War. 3rd ed. of the year. Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen Press. Moss, W., 2014.
The novel All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, the poem, “In Flanders Field,” by John McCrae and the film, Gallipoli, Demonstrates how war makes men feel unimportant and, forces soldiers to make hard decisions that no one should half to make. In war people were forced to fight for their lives. Men were forced to kill one another to get their opinion across to the opposing sides. When men went home to their families they were too scared to say what had happened to them in the war. Many people had a glorified thought about how war is, Soldiers didn't tell them what had truly happened to them.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
Ellis, John. Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I. New York: Pantheon, 1976. Print.
Not many people in society can empathize with those who have been in a war and have experienced war firsthand. Society is unaware that many individuals are taken away from their families to risk their lives serving in the war. Because of this, families are left to wonder if they will ever get to see their sons and daughters again. In a war, young men are taken away from their loved ones without a promise that they will get to see them again. The survivors come back with frightening memories of their traumatic experiences. Although some would argue that war affects families the most, Tim O’Brien and Kenneth W. Bagby are able to convey the idea that war can negatively impact one’s self by causing this person long lasting emotional damage.
Many soldiers who come back from the war need to express how they feel. Many do it in the way of writing. Many soldiers die in war, but the ones who come back are just as “dead.” Many cadets come back with shell shock, amputated arms and legs, and sometimes even their friends aren’t there with them. So during World War I, there was a burst of new art and writings come from the soldiers. Many express in the way of books, poems, short stories and art itself. Most soldiers are just trying to escape. A lot of these soldiers are trying to show what war is really like, and people respond. They finally might think war might not be the answer. This is why writers use imagery, irony and structure to protest war.
An emotional burden that the men must carry is the longing for their loved ones. The Vietnam War forced many young men to leave their loved ones and move halfway across the world to fight a ...
Thoumin, Richard, General. The First World War: A major New History of the Wreat of
O'Neill, William L. World War II: A Student Companion. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
As students of history in the 21st century, we have many comprehensive resources pertaining to the First World War that are readily available for study purposes. The origin of these primary, secondary and fictional sources affect the credibility, perspective and factual information resulting in varying strengths and weaknesses of these sources. These sources include propaganda, photographs, newspapers, journals, books, magazine articles and letters. These compilations allow individuals to better understand the facts, feeling and context of the home front and battlefield of World War One.
While soldiers are often perceived as glorious heroes in romantic literature, this is not always true as the trauma of fighting in war has many detrimental side effects. In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a young German soldier is told as he adapts to the harsh life of a World War I soldier. Fighting along the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer and his comrades begin to experience some of the hardest things that war has to offer. Paul’s old self gradually begins to deteriorate as he is awakened to the harsh reality of World War 1, depriving him from his childhood, numbing all normal human emotions and distancing the future, reducing the quality of his life. At the age of nineteen, Paul naively enlists in World War 1, blind to the fact he has now taken away his own childhood.
Many authors wrote about the devastation that took place during the war. One book called “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo shares the tragic life of the soldiers who fought in the war as well as the generation who came after. People always saying that soldiers are serving their country. Dalton says “A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn’t say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn’t say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?”1 These men that fought in World War 1 did not know what they actually signed up for until they got placed in battle. The war became much worse than expected. When many of these Men went into war they were introduced into new warfare that they have never seen before. New technology allowed for more powerful weapons and more painful ways of dying. In a poem called “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, he portrayed the terrible ways that many men died. He showed how the new technology was used to harm many men. One of the new big ways of killing as many men as possible was using poisonous gas. Owen says “Many had lost their boots, but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick,
Louis L. Snyder, Historic Documents of World War I, (Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1958), 32-36.