Brittain describes Mrs Leighton’s fears of losing the memories of her son, and his death affects his existence within her memory, “They are not Roland”, and they even seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. Receiving his belongings is a reminder of his death, and her loss. There is a sense of nurturing, similar to the nurturing in ‘Birdsong’ by Stephen for his soldiers, This is because his mother cannot come to terms with his death and is the reason behind her order to take away his clothes, and she wants to remember her son the way he was. She also refused to pay attention to reports of death as they reminded her of her son being in danger. This like ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘A Dead Boche’ is a realistic view of the war as is ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead”. The death of Brittain’s fiancé is clouded by the physical description of his own personal belongings. “There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition”. Brittain is telling us the way she saw the state of his belongings, just like Graves’ tells us that the “Dead Boche” was “propped against a shattered trunk”. The use of the word ‘propped’ seems like the body was set up on a stage and the word ‘shattered’ could be referring to the state of the body. The link between these two shows that although Brittain is a woman, she has acknowledged the grimness of war in her miserable and frank description of death, a death that like Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ seems to express.
Rupert Brooke seems to have a rather idealised view of war, possibly because the soldier was written at a time when he personally hadn’t had any experience fighting in the war. For this reason he is unable to understand the full extent of the horrors of war, when in contrast to ‘A Dead Boche’ by Robert Graves. Graves’ already had a first hand experience in war when this was written in the Summer of 1916, and it is a reflection of his experience, ‘War’s Hell!’ Similarly like ‘The Soldier’, ‘Drummer Hodge’ written by Thomas Hardy is based solely upon an article he read in a newspaper, and therefore his poem isn’t a true reflection of what happened during the war, we can only take his word for the fact that the Drummer Hodge was thrown “to rest uncoffined” and not laid in a coffin to rest. ‘The Soldier’ was written during the earlier part of the War when young men were eager to join the army to serve their country. They were unaware of the reality and dangers of war and like the solider in the poem, they thought it was a good thing to die for your country, which is similar to a view expressed in ‘Ghost Road’. According to Prior, “Everybody lied”, in order to join the army. Extract C conveys the fact that the soldier’s death was a worthy death because he died for his country, which is a view opposed in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’. Wilfred Owen speaks out against the wartime propaganda and says you shouldn’t believe “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”. ‘The Soldier’ is full of propaganda and is very patriotic, it glorifies death as being heroic and considers it a duty to die for your country. The irony here is that the author of the poem, Rupert Brookes, himself died of blood poisoning and never fought on the front line for his country. In the poem, England is personified as a mother figure, where it assumes a nurturing mothering role, doing all the things a mother would do, “dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware…” It suggests that England will grieve for the soldier as a mother would grieve for a son, although there is no sense of grief or loss at death or possible death of the soldier. The soldier doesn’t even seem to fear death, what’s important to him is that he will always remain English, even if he dies on “some corner of a foreign field”. “English Heaven”, suggests that the Soldier perhaps didn’t fear death because he was to die for his country if he fought in the war. This is similar to the view expressed in ‘To His Love’ by Ivor Gurney, which suggests that death is noble, “cover him over with violets of pride”.
Extract C is in the form of a play, which is performed as a musical and was first performed in 1965, most probably to those who hadn’t any first hand experience of the war. The fact that it is a musical shows just how pointless the war is. The extract depicts the way ordinary soldiers are treated on the front line. The extract conveys a humorous satirical effect and is fairly light-hearted throughout. ‘Oh what a lovely war’ was performed first in 1965 and couldn’t have been written any earlier, possibly because of a fear on offending people because of the black humour and satirical approach it takes. It emphasises and successfully conveys a strong message about the futility as in ‘A Dead Boche’. The comic approach is an emphasis on the moral lesson and how pointless the war is, which is a view opposed by Brooke in the ‘The Soldier’, where he describes death as being glorified.
Extract D was written during the middle part of the war, and as a result the views on war had changed. Through this extract we see the reality of war, the deaths caused by it and the grief that families of those who died suffered. This is exactly what Owen wants us to see in his poetry, in particularly ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. The soldiers sing songs to keep themselves entertained, and in this extract they sing the satirical ‘Gassed last night’, which is a scene taking place in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, as described by Owen.
The black humour of this extract is important as it achieves a particular effect. The including of slides, songs as well as a dialogue provides the play with a range of different aspects, which is stimulated to the reader. The absence of a authorative voice leaves the reader to form their own opinions, unlike poetry written in first person with a voice making readers believe what they say about war is correct, e.g. Hardy commenting on the harsh way soldiers were treated, “uncoffined – just as found”, even though he had no experience of war.
In the extract we mainly learn about the attitude towards soldiers and officers and their relationships. Commonly, in World War One Literature, there is a distinction between officers and the soldiers. In this particular extract, the Commanding Officer attempts to befriend the soldiers and make himself popular with them, by allowing them to smoke. This is similar to the way Captain Wraysford tries to make friends with the soldiers in ‘Journey’s End’. In reality we would imagine the relationship between officers and soldiers to be negative. The soldiers were “lions led by donkeys”. The Commanding Officer is however, authorative, like the role of a parent, but he isn’t nurturing in the sense that he is detached from the situation and doesn’t treat the soldiers the way a parent should treat a child, i.e. discipline them. This is contrasting to ‘Birdsong’, where Stephen did nurture his men well and took care of them. Also in ‘Inspection’ by Wilfred Owen, the poem portrays how a Senior Officer is rude and disrespectful to the soldier.
Extract D was written during the middle part of the war, and as a result the views on war had changed. Through this extract we see the reality of war, the deaths caused by it and the grief that families of those who died suffered. This is exactly what Owen wants us to see in his poetry, in particularly ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.
The issue of gender is very important, to the extent that we can trust men’s views more than we can women’s because they have actually had a first hand experience of war, whereas on the other hand, women learn about war through what they hear from others and possibly through letters written by their husbands. However, despite this, this isn’t true in all cases. Extract D is an exception, and it is written by a female writer, and it concentrates on the effects of war as well as the war itself. It also portrays the sensitive side to the idea of suffering a loss. The letter seems a personal and private one, written by a female who has the war ‘invading’ into her home, i.e. she has the “smell of Death” and the sights of blood entering her home and to me doesn’t seem ‘typical’ female writing because of the way she is able to reflect, in detail, upon the horrors of the war, as Graves does in ‘A Dead Boche’. Poems like ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Owen and ‘When you see millions of mouthless’ by Charles Sorley, were written by men who had first hand experience of the war, and who died in battle and wrote very emotively, expressing their feelings towards the futility of war. On the other hand other female writers like Jessie Pope was considered as an unreliable source when compared to writers who had experienced the futility of war and this inability of the home front to grasp in poems such as ‘War Girls’. “till the khaki soldiers come marching”, she assumes that they will return home, whereas Brittain in her extract knows the reality of war, and knows that this is not always the case. Like Brookes’ ‘The Soldier’, Pope’s poetry represents a patriotism, which isn’t seen expressed to such an extreme when compared to other female poets of the war.
In conclusion, all the extracts treat the subject of war differently, which depended on several factors, including the gender of the writer and whether or not they actually had first hand experience of war, or whether they based their writing on something they had read, e.g. Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge’. All the writers base their writing on personal experiences or something they have read or heard, and all in some way represent and convey a view about the First World War, and whether or not they are typical is entirely up to the individual.
