All the soldiers were horrified at the sights they witnessed. The soldier in the poem dies due to his ill –fitting gas helmet. Not only did they have to endure the appalling conditions of the trenches but they also had to face the enemy ill- equipped ‘blood-shod’ with ‘clumsy helmets.’ The British people reading these poems would have viewed them with shock and disbelief. It would have seemed impossible to them that the great British Empire could have allowed their army to fight in such appalling conditions.
‘The Sentry’, ‘Died of Wounds’, and ‘The Dug-Out’ are about soldiers in the thick of battle and the situations they find themselves in. ‘Exposure’ and ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ have a more sombre and reflective mood as the soldiers in both are questioning the reasons for war. ‘Aftermath’ is addressed to the soldiers asking if they remember. In these last three the soldiers are pondering on the how and why of the war in contrast to the other five where the pivotal aspect is the action. The common soldiers are the main characters in these poems. The poets do this because the soldiers and their families are more likely to sympathise with the troops than they would with the High Command who are condemned as “incompetent swine” because of the huge loss of life which was seen as a direct result of their “plan of attack[s].” The soldiers in the poems are desensitised and dehumanised by war like in Sassoon’s “Died of Wounds” in which the soldiers are not given names, but one is just referred to as “some Slight Wound”. The troops have been forced into a desensitised acceptance of the war.
Officers in some of the poems are portrayed very differently. In “The General” he is pompous and arrogant because he is secure in the knowledge that he will not be in the battle but miles behind the front lines. People back in England would have been shocked at this portrayal of his callous lack of regard for the soldier’s lives, who have been killed as a result of his battle plan. Sassoon is saying what most of the soldiers must have felt, bitter and angry with officers like the general. The young officers in “The Sentry” and “The Dug-Out” are shown as being protective and caring for the soldiers. Although these officers are very busy, as we are shown in “The Sentry” where Owen says “I forgot him there/ in posting next for duty”, they care for the soldiers in their command and are angry that these young men’s lives are being destroyed.
The descriptive language used in all of these poems is the core of their success in emotionally moving the reader. Each poet has his own individual style, which reflects his own personal experiences of the war. Owen uses Latin, the language of the elite, in “Dulce et decorum est” although he shows his disgust at “the Old Lie” which he has been brought up to believe. In this poem Owen uses present continuous tense to show the on-going agony of the man’s death and the fact that it still continues in his dreams, where “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” All three of the poets use literary devices such as alliteration, assonance, metaphors, onomatopoeia and personification to make their writing more interesting. A good example of similies are the soldiers described in “Dulce et decorum est” as “old beggars” and “coughing like hags”. Owen, in particular, uses onomatopoeia dramatically in ‘The Sentry’ when the soldier of the title arrives “…thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping/ And sploshing”. Sibilance is also evident in the “steep steps…sploshing”. Personification is used very successfully in Owen’s ‘Exposure’ where he compares dawn to an enemy general and says “Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army. Owen’s poems are written in the first person, Sassoon also writes in first person as well as directly addressing the reader in “Aftermath”. This creates a direct relationship between the poet and the reader. Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” features the poet himself speaking to a rat in the trench. This address to the “sardonic rat”, which dares to fraternize with the enemy, as the soldiers themselves do not, brilliantly evokes both the horror and the absurdity of war. The poems all share the common theme of anti-war protests but they each have their own unique way of doing this. “The General” is satirical, “Died of Wounds” makes you sympathize with the dying soldier and “Dulce et decorum est”, “The Sentry” and “Exposure” deal with the horror of war. All of these poems would have provided a clash of expectations for the patriotic Britons. Instead of poems about glorious and the heroic deeds, the soldiers wrote horrific descriptions of war with such unremitting honesty that the reader would have been appalled.
All of the poems were written in an attempt to shock the reader into an awareness of the reality of war and I think that it succeeds as well today as it did to the contemporary audience. “The Sentry” and “Dulce et decorum est” give a sense of what war was really like while “Aftermath” and “The Dug-Out” show the thoughts and feelings of the soldiers. While they all are anti-war I think that Owen’s “The Sentry” is the most successful at getting the message across. The blinded soldier shouts, “I see you lights!” which means he won’t be blind to which Owen replies “But ours had long died out.” This is a stark, final note on war and the despair that they are experiencing.
The stark harshness of the imagery incorporated in the poems supported by the poets uses of literary devices succeed in making the poems powerful anti-war messages. The power of the poetry still affects the reader today, although perhaps we view it more dispassionately than the contemporary audience of the day, nevertheless the words and images still appal. The last lines of “The Sentry” leaves the reader with a sense of bleakness at the pointless ruination of this young man’s life. Equally the gassed soldier in “Dulce et decorum est” evokes a hideous image of his agonising end which, like Owen, could easily haunt your own “smothering dream”.
