Rear Guard & Dulce et Decorum
The nineteenth century was irrevocably swept away in a tide of mud and blood with the coming of World War I. “The Great War” lasted from 1914 through 1918. More than eight million soldiers lost their lives in the struggle between the Central Powers and the Allies. The old ideals of warfare fought by aristocrats and gentlemen vanished beneath gas attacks, trench warfare, and heavy artillery bombardments. Enlisted men would spend weeks in the most unbearable trenches of the front line. These trenches were the most treacherous place to be in the war. Many of the soldiers suffered from trench foot, starvation, dysentery, shell shock, and body lice and if these didn’t get to them the mortar and gas attacks were sure to. World War I posters attracted men to enlist pledging honor, duty, and camaraderie, going back to the Latin saying that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. In times when battles were fought with daggers and swords this was true, but times change and with the innovation of tanks, machine guns, and artillery shells this is no longer justifiable. Many soldiers lost appendages, choked to death on their own intestines, or were made undistinguishable by the overpowering blast of a mortar. Humanity beg . . .
The deception that the world has about the war is brought to reality when Sassoon’s poem was introduced. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Owen uses this image to show the hopelessness involved in battle and his utter disgust for the methods of fighting. This man laying there ten days putrefying away gripping his own would without aid from others proves that he did not die honorably. ” English Poetry of the First World War. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1995. Sassoon’s dramatic images are meant to show the world the conditions of the war trenches and the absence of glory in dying in war. Sassoon’s verses…touch not our imagination, but our senses” (Murry 386). “I [Owen] saw him drowning / [i]n all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / [h]e plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (Owen lines 14-16). Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988. The chlorine gas in World War I once taken in the soldiers began choking on the gas just as if they were drowning. Siegfried Sassoon’s The Rear Guard and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est use the appalling imagery of trench warfare to deter mankind from the belief in the glory of battle and the honor in dying for one’s country in war.
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