The advertisers would have heard and seen of large victories in the trenches and a good life.
Siegfried Sassoon on the other hand was in the trenches and published his memoirs after the act of the DORA was no longer. Sassoon had been there and saw all he was talking of.
Source I was published during the war as an advertisement.
To be allowed by the government of the time to be published during the DORA act the government had to approve it. To approve the advertisement they did not want it portraying images of men dying in there thousands and suffering from trench foot and other afflictions of life in the trenches.
The advertisement in source I was published not only to sell their cigarettes but to keep moral high and show their support for the war effort. If they showed their support for the war effort, it would increase the support for the war for with the patrons of their product.
Keep in mind that the main aim of source I was to sell a product you do not do this through negative imagery. The image shown is positive of soldiers being comrades and all pulling together. The tone is relaxed there looking over the trenches onto no-mans land yet they have “time for one more” this suggests there is nothing pressing in the danger and no large amount of it for them to face. The image is currant just as today we may have advertisements of friends in a club then the war and trenches were currant and central to everyone’s life. The positive image is also tied in with a positive name “Golden Dawn” it evokes images of breaking sunlight and hence gaining territory on the war effort. With the soldiers used as imagery it subconsciously suggests to the buyers that by buying their cigarettes you are helping with the war effort.
Source J had a completely different purpose to that of advertising a product. In addition, it had none of the restrictions imposed by the DORA act as it was published years afterwards. It can tell people everything about the war that their newspapers and illustrated magazines did not. It was possibly written as information and as a warning to people of the horrors of war. He perhaps thought that if people truly understood what was gone through in warfare it would prevent another from happening. The experiences that he saw and encountered in the First World War turned him into a pacifist for the rest of his life. The language he employs is brutal in its realism for example “of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face detached itself from the skull.” This is no sparing the grimmest details for fear of offending anyone it is showing them all in their full horror to try and put people off going headfirst into another war. It also shows the religious side of it “Those fingers became an appeal to God…” that they were appealing to God to stop the massacre. This also says of how serious the war had become there was no other person or force to appeal to capable of stopping the war other than God.
Siegfried Sassoon also had nothing to lose in publishing this; the DORA act was no longer in force and he could no longer be prosecuted for not following the government policy of censorship.
