The Wars Robert Ross Quotes

Attrition and Loss

Throughout The Wars, there are many characters introduced that have their own personal internal or even external battles that they face during their time being represented in the novel. Two such characters are Robert Ross who is depicted as the main character of the book and his mother Mrs. Ross who also plays a large part in the story. These two face similar and different wars that they lose and win at different turns. The mother must face her internal struggle with sending her son off to war to most likely die in the name of king and country. She may not have sent him, but he did choose to go and she couldn’t make him change his mind this led to many scenes of her coming to grips with losing her second child in only a few years after her eldest daughter Rowena, who was very sickly and delicate, had a bad fall and passed away.

For Robert, he has had many ideas of what war is like stripped from him through his experience in the Canadian army; from losing close friends to having to execute an injured horse to being raped and being burned nearly to death.

These experiences have stripped his love for humanity from him and left him in a mentality of near hatred for anyone willing to cause unnecessary death of animals. The two characters have both lost their personal wars purely through having things done to them that no man or woman should be forced to go through.

Robert Ross is the main character in the story and has horrible things done to him and has done things no man should desire to do, these actions have forced him down a path that leads to the wearing down of his love for humanity and his desire to be a soldier; he no longer wants to be a soldier because the actions of others have removed the romanticized idea of a death in sacrifice for king and country. The idea of becoming a soldier came when his

sister's rabbits were killed because she had died in an unfortunate accident. A painting comes to his mind later on that describes what he imagines death will be: “Death is romantic- got from silent images. I lived- I was young- and died. But not a real death, of course, because I’m standing here alive with all these lights that shine so brightly in my eyes… I’ll faint away in glory hearing music and my name. Someone will close my eyes and I'll be wrapped around in flags while drums and trumpets-bagpipes march me home through snow…” (page 46- 47). He romanticizes death and thinks it will be fairly painless; this will lead to an earth-shattering realization much later. Rober is also forced to kill a horse on his way to Europe, it goes very poorly for him because he misses a few time with his pistol which causes him a fair amount of stress. He has experienced an unnecessary amount of pain and hardship with losing friends and physical injury being among them, but the most damaging act to his psyche is when he is raped. It is not definitively confirmed but the reader is lead to believe that his fellow officers and countrymen are the culprits of this disgusting act. This effectively breaks his innate love for human life and leads him down a path of self-destruction. This “war” that he is fighting is one of attrition, he is being worn down over time through various acts of barbarism and inhumanity.