The third stanza is Sassoon’s strong warning to crowds cheering the young soldiers on. The last line, ‘The hell where youth and laughter go’ is an interesting way to describe the war. By calling it hell, the place where sinners go after they die, he is saying that the soldiers may as well already be dead, because death is so inevitable at war. Sassoon shows us in this poem how innocent ‘soldier boys’ are converted into suicidal wrecks.
However, this is not the only view of the ‘ordinary’ soldier, Rupert Brooke wrote poetry portraying soldiers in a totally different light. His poem ‘The Soldier’ gives the impression of proud and patriotic men fearlessly going into battle. Published in 1915, this may have been used by the Government as propaganda.
The poem begins with a strongly patriotic statement that means that he is proud to die because wherever his body lies, so does a piece of his homeland, England. This view is the opposite of Siegfried Sassoon’s view of the soldiers’ real thoughts on war. Brooke repeats the use of the word England, suggesting the soldier’s feelings that England is perfect and idyllic. This is Brooke’s idea of the perfect English soldier, strongly patriotic, willing to die for his country. The writer talks of how much better England is than anywhere else and how things are ‘blest by the suns of home,’ which suggests England has heavenly-like qualities. This soldier’s perfect and brilliant view of England further accentuates his patriotism.
At the start of the second stanza, we find that Brooke knows that war is not good or right when he describes it as ‘evil’. Also Brooke comments on how death is just like a return to England, because in the soldier’s mind, heaven should be just like England. The portrayal of the ordinary soldier as a patriotic, ready and willing man with no fear of death is very far from the truth in most cases. However before the war had actually started, many men viewed war just as Brooke did.
Another piece of writing published almost before the war had begun, shows tremendous insight into the ‘simple’ soldiers at war; the D.H. Lawrence essay, ‘With the Guns’ was published in a newspaper on 18th August 1914.
In his introduction, Lawrence writes about the parting of a couple at a train station, where the woman on the platform shouts out to her leaving loved one, “When you see ’em let ’em have it.” This shows the ordinary person’s lack of understanding of what war is really like. This lack of understanding is what prompts the essay. In the early lines of the essay, Lawrence tells us what he feels war would be like and this is the idea he keeps throughout the essay.
‘An affair entirely of machines with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof,’
Lawrence is suggesting that the ordinary soldier has no part to play in modern warfare, and is just another cog in a war of machinery. This also proposes that man has lost control and that the machines are the ones leading the war. Lawrence goes on to describe an attack before questioning man’s real involvement in the battle, ‘what work was there to do?’ and ‘What was there to feel?’ are the two questions he asks the reader. Lawrence comes up with the answer that all the soldiers had to do was to adjust a machine and feel the unnaturalness of serving a machine. He conveys the idea that war is no longer hand-to-hand combat between people, but a technological war between machines with the real soldiers having little to do with it. This lack of involvement results in a loss of honour in the fighting.
In the next paragraph, Lawrence moves on to his next point about war and the people fighting it. He describes the soldiers as a ‘mass of scarcely visible forms,’ which is significant because by saying that the ordinary soldiers are just a mass, he is saying that they have no individuality. Also by calling them ‘forms’ Lawrence portrays the soldiers as something without identity. He then repeats this same point with a strong comment,
‘He was a fragment of a mass, and as a fragment of a mass he must live and die or be torn. He had no rights, no self, no being.’
The ‘ordinary’ soldiers have no individuality in war, their human rights are just forgotten, and their identity counts for nothing.
Later in the essay, Lawrence points out that for some of the soldiers, being part of a machine is difficult, and that lying down under machine gun fire is unnatural. This shows how modern warfare seems to lack any sort of honour. Lawrence moves on to describe the beauty of the untouched forestry on a hill; to be able to describe beauty, even amidst the horrors of war, is remarkable. This is quickly contrasted when Lawrence describes guns firing and men dying at the foot of this beautiful hill. This contrast makes the soldier’s deaths even more of a tragedy, because they are missing out on all the beautiful things in life.
The essay ends with the writer voicing his uncertainty in the reason for all the bloodshed. He uses rhetorical questions to good effect to express this, ‘But whose bullets?’ and ‘But what is it all about?’ This presents the ‘ordinary’ soldier as one without real purpose, just using a machine to end the lives of people they do not know. The final two sentences, ‘It is so unnatural as to be unthinkable. Yet we must think of it,’ shows that war is so terrible for the soldiers that the thought of such horrific scenes are always in the back of the mind of the surviving soldiers, there is no escape from war, except death.
A lot of First World War literature focuses on the normal soldiers actually fighting the war and not so much on the officers and generals who make the orders and just tell the soldiers what to do and who certainly did not lead by example. This point is often made in the play “Journey’s End” (1929) by R. C. Sherriff, which is set in the British trenches before St.Quentin.
The play opens with an upbeat conversation between two officers, ‘Hullo!’ and, ‘Splendid!’ are examples of the sort of mood that the officers are in and they seem to be having a reasonably easy-going time. The play also features many humorous comments and situations that the officers talk about, this seems to alleviate the suffering of the war, ‘A dug out got blown up and came down in the men’s tea. They were frightfully annoyed’ is an example of this type of humour. Later in the first scene the officers realise that of the 34 boots they have, there are a large proportion of left boots and only a few right boots, this humour is used to cover up the sorry state of their trench stores. The two officers also make reference to the commanding officer of the company, Stanhope. They talk about his excessive drinking, which shows how the ‘ordinary’ soldiers in the trenches needed something to keep them going.
Humour is used again in the first act when Mason, the cook makes an appearance and tells the officers that they have soup, cutlets and pineapple for their dinner. But the cutlets turn out to be strangely shaped, ordinary ration meat, ‘Ordinary ration meat, but a noo shape, sir’ this proves that the ordinary soldiers had to put up with poor food for the whole time that they were in the trenches. The officers also talk about a man with trench fever, a common illness for the soldiers, which must have been caused by the unhygienic and unsanitary conditions in which the trenches were.
When the new recruit is brought into the company, he is shown round by Osbourne, the sensible and wise officer in the trenches, who gives him tips and hints to help him through his time in the trenches. The new recruit, Raleigh, is very keen to get into the trenches and fight the war, showing how naive most young soldiers were, ‘Yes. Keen to get out here.’ They went into the trenches expecting an exciting fight and were faced with damp, muddy conditions, depressing weather, the constant danger of being sniped or shelled and being constantly surrounded by death. This image of war is the one that the British government was so keen to cover up with propaganda. Raleigh’s character is not like the ‘ordinary soldiers’ who have experienced war and know the horrors that are seen every day. The first act portrays the officers and more experienced soldiers as fed up with the war, looking for ways to overcome the suffering and boredom of waiting for something to happen. We also see the naivety of new soldiers in the trenches and how different reality is compared with what it is made out to be by the people back in Britain, who have never even been near the war.
In the second act the commanding officer gets a visit from the sergeant major, who needs to know what to do on the day of the attack by the Germans. This portrays the soldier as a simple person who just carries out orders from the more highly ranked soldiers, who do not get as involved as the others. We also see a different side to the higher ranked officers when Stanhope has to ‘persuade’ one of the other soldiers not to leave the company to go to hospital just because of a medical condition, which Stanhope thinks is false. Stanhope uses force and threats to stop the man from leaving, just two days before the attack, ‘If you went, I’d have you shot – for deserting.’ This can be seen as good leadership or bad, on one hand Stanhope has threatened to kill him in an effort to stop him from leaving, but on the other hand Stanhope managed to stop him deserting. This shows how the real leaders in the war were the ones who fought with the other soldiers, but could also put their leadership techniques into use. It also shows the determination of some of the ordinary soldiers to escape from the war by trying to fake an illness just to get away from the horrors and the death that they have been living with.
In Act Three, Raleigh is chosen to lead a raid with one of the other officers. The raid is successful and Raleigh brings back a hostage. However, Osbourne (the other officer in the raid) does not make it back and when Raleigh realises this he becomes very subdued and depressed. He begins to stutter and he becomes nervous, ‘I – I didn’t understand.’ this shows how war can demoralise even the most patriotic and raring-to go soldiers.
At the end of Act Three, when the major German offensive occurs, Stanhope is down in the trenches while the ‘ordinary’ soldiers are facing grenades rifle fire and heavy shelling on the front line. This seems to be Stanhope’s worst moment in the play because he begins to give orders from inside his trench instead of being up with the rest of his company on the front line. Stanhope starts using the sort of leadership associated with the Field Marshall’s and Generals. It provides a stark contrast between the higher ranked officers and the ‘ordinary’ soldiers who actually lost their lives fighting the war. It is not long before Raleigh, Stanhope’s friend, is injured badly and is brought down into Stanhope’s trench, where he tries to comfort the dying Raleigh. Raleigh is unaware he is dying and even tries to get up and continue fighting but the pain is too much and he sinks back to his stretcher. Raleigh’s determined, never-say-die attitude is a model for the perfect soldier, patriotic and able to want to fight for his country, even through the death and destruction around him.
As we can see from all the texts, the ‘simple soldier boy’ is portrayed in many ways: patriotic, bored, scared and even suicidal. We know that these soldiers suffered because of bad weather conditions and the terrifying fact that they were probably going to die before they ever saw their loved ones again. This inevitability of death must have been one of the hardest things to get through when at the Front. Also we can see the obvious contrast between the generals and the ‘simple soldier boys’, where the generals just talked and fed propaganda to everyone, but the soldiers were the ones facing the reality.