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
Sassoon, Siegfried. "The Rear-Guard." Elements of Literature: Literature of Britain with World Classics. Ed. Richard Sime. Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000. 926. Draper, R. P. "Wilfred Owen: Distance and Immediacy." Lyrical Tragedy. 1985: 162-77 Rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 27. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988. 228-233. an to develop resentment for the brutal conditions in the war trenches along with the writers of the time. Poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen showed the antipathy through the vivid images of the trenches that they created in their works. Sassoon's The Rear Guard and Owen's Dulce et Decotum Est use the shocking imagery of trench warfare to dissuade humanity from the belief in the glory of battle and the honor in dying for one's country in war. Sassoon uses descriptive imagery in an attempt to show that trench warfare is not honorable but treacherous and brutal. Sassoon shows that the glory in dying for one's country in the battlefields is demolished through the image of death that he creates. As he wanders aimlessly through the trenches, noticing the horrid smell in the air, he asks assistance from a man lying on the floor, "[a]nd flashed his beam across the livid face / Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore / Agony dying hard ten days before; / And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound" (Sassoon lines 15-18). The conditions of the trenches in the war are unbearable. Sassoon finds nothing but despair in the discovery of a rotting solider laying across the trench floor. This man laying there ten days putrefying away gripping his own would without aid from others proves that he did not die honorably. Many critics recognize the presence of imagery in Sassoon's works as well. "Mr. Sassoon's verses...touch not our imagination, but our senses" (Murry 386). The description of the trenches that Sassoon provides needs no aid of the imagination to produce an effect. He relies solely on the reaction of disgust by the senses to get across his point. The realistic image of a dead man gripping the wound that cost him death puts the readers in his perspective. The atmosphere of the trenches appears so horrific that, in Sassoon's opinion, it is more honorable to die on his own grounds. As he wandered through the trenches, "He climbed through the darkness to the twilight air / Unloading hell behind him step by step" (Sassoon lines 24-25). He feels that the conditions outside,
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Approximate Word count = 1678
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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