Was there much change in warfare on the Western front between the end of 1914 and March 1918?

GCSE COURSEWORK - AO 2 Following the battle of the Marne and the race to the Sea a trench line was set up from Switzerland to the North Sea. This trench line was in place by the end of 1914. In March 1918 the Germans launched a major attack under the code name "Operation Michael". Was there much change in warfare on the Western front between the end of 1914 and March 1918? Explain your answer. The period of World War One was a time of great change. Transformations occurred in many fields of life, but in other ways many things stayed the same. Technology was greatly improved upon during the course of the war. Aeroplanes, tanks, artillery, gas and machine guns were all created or significantly improved upon. Possibly the biggest advance of these was that of aircraft. Blacks sent over from British colonised Africa were amazed by them, calling them "Steam engines of the air". The plane had only been created eleven years earlier by the Wright brothers and, at the beginning of the war, was still temperamental and deemed of limited use by Commanders. The early machines were weak and fragile and none of the great powers possessed a significant amount of them. They were first used as reconnaissance planes because they were unable to inflict enough damage to major enemy targets to change the course of a battle or campaign. During the war, air power made huge technological

  • Word count: 1477
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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What is the importance of the land in Twentieth Century Irish Poetry?

What is the importance of the land in Twentieth Century Irish Poetry? Land in the Twentieth Century was very important to the Irish nation, and this is portrayed through the works of certain pieces of poetry, written by native countrymen Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney. The poem 'Wormwood' is expressed by Thomas Kinsella in a powerful and descriptive manner where the reader can experience the deepest thoughts of the writer, in his or her own way. The reader feels a sense of involvement as Kinsella sets the scene in the dank woods: "In a thicket, among wet trees, stunned, minutely Shuddering, hearing a wooden echo escape." Kinsella informs us of a tree, which he is in fact bewildered by. How he has never come across a tree like this before. It has a certain grace and elegance due to its individuality. The sheer size of the tree he finds mesmerizing, and describing the slenderness of how the tree appears to the naked eye: "The two trees in their infinitesimal dance of growth Have turned completely about one another, their join A slowly twisted scar..." Then Kinsella's dreams are shattered, as a kind of axe breaks the bond between these two trees. As this axe shatters the tree it also shatters the dreams of Kinsella: "A wooden stroke: Iron sinks in the gasping core. I will dream it again." Wormwood was one of Kinsella's poems which he wrote during the twentieth

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  • Word count: 830
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Venus and Adonis

The poem opens with a description of Adonis's physical beauty, "rose-cheeked", this clashes with the accepted norms of a love sonnet. Traditionally a sonnet would be praising a woman's beauty rather than the other way round. Venus says he is "sweet above compare, stain to all nymphs" and " more white and red than doves or roses are". What is notable about this is Shakespeare's reference to Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella as Sidney often uses the colours red and white to refer to female beauty "Marble mix'd red and white do interlace". One interpretation could be that he deliberately means to perhaps use it to signify a blushing innocent. I think it is vital to realise that Shakespeare did model his poem on earlier adaptations of Ovid's Metamorphoses for instance Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis which was the first Elizabethan erotic minor epics based on Ovid. Adonis appears to be an unconventional male, not strong and aggressive, rather he is sweet and delicate. He constitutes the characteristics of a woman in love by being effeminate, he is "more lovely than a man". Adonis blushes, revealing his apparent sexual innocence which in turn makes him more sexually desirable to Venus. An interesting parallel is with the story of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus avoided sexuality, like Adonis and eventually dies as he cannot leave his reflection. Is this Shakespeare

  • Word count: 513
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, born 1893, was a British poet during the First World War, He wrote poetry from an early age and was inspired by religion. In 1913 he went to France to teach English and on returning he decided to enlist in the army to fight in the World War. He entered the war in 1917 and fought in the battle of the Somme but was hospitalized for shell shock and met Siegfreid Sassoon (a poet) and his works were in harmony with Owen's concerns. In the poem 'Dulce et Decorum est' the soldiers are marching hopelessly and desperately back to their 'distant rest'. The men are positioned amongst the bombardment of German flares and shells dropping as they suffer a gas attack. Owen describes the men's panicking as one of the men fails to put on his gas mask in time. Owen uses this incident to challenge the suffering in the war. Shown in ; "Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of tired outstripped five-nines that dropped behind" The opening of 'Dulce et decorum est' instantly brings an image of tired soldiers; "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge," The men are no longer fit and full of enthusiasm instead Owen describes a group of men which have been broken down by excruciating pain and mental trauma, they have become 'old beggars' and coughing 'hags'. The exhaustion, which the men

  • Word count: 930
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Wilfred Owen

In October 1917 Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart, "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday........the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!" While the earliest surviving draft is dated 8th October 1917, a few months later, at Scarborough or Ripon, he revised it. The title is ironic. The intention was not so much to induce pity as to shock, especially civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious. It comprises four unequal stanzas, the first two in sonnet form, the last two looser in structure. Stanza 1 sets the scene. The soldiers are limping back from the Front, an appalling picture expressed through simile and metaphor. Such is the men's wretched condition that they can be compared to old beggars, hags (ugly old women). Yet they were young! Barely awake from lack of sleep, their once smart uniforms resembling sacks, they cannot walk straight as their blood-caked feet try to negotiate the mud. "Blood-shod" seems a dehumanising image- we think of horses shod not men. Physically and mentally they are crushed. Owen uses words that set up ripples of meaning beyond the literal and exploit ambiguity. "Distant rest" - what kind of rest? For some the permanent kind? "Coughing" finds an echo later in the poem, while gas shells dropping softly suggests a menace stealthy and

  • Word count: 694
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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World war 1 poetry

During the First World War it is estimated that a total of 10 million people were killed and twice that number were wounded. The war lasted from 1914 to 1918. The war was fought between Britain and her allies and Germany and her allies. Most of the fighting took place in France and Belgium. At first, British people thought that Britain would win very quickly and the soldiers were lucky to be able to fight the Germans. Men were eager to join up because they wanted to impress their families and girlfriends. However, as the war progressed, people realised that it was not going to be that easy. British and French soldiers faced the Germans in their trenches and both sides used bombs and guns to kill each other. When the British side tried to advance by sending men over the top of the trenches, they suffered huge casualties. Altogether 750,000 British soldiers were killed, 2,500,000 were wounded and many were permanently disabled. By the time the war had ended the British people were fed up with the fighting and just wanted to get back to normal. The returned soldiers who were wounded were an unwelcome reminder of the war. During the war writers and poets were beginning to write about the horrors of war rather than the glory. Two important poets of the war were Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire. He signed up in 1915, but by 1917 he

  • Word count: 1971
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Women and the war effort in Britain 1914-1918

Coursework Assignment: Women and the war effort in Britain 1914-1918 World war one beginning in 1914 and ending in 1918 brought around many changes in Britain. One change was that many women were invited into the work place because men were fighting in war. Most of the work changes though came after conscription where men were forced to join the army. Many people and historians argue that these work changes for women would have happened anyway but just later and that war acted as a catalyst and sped up this process. I will be discussing various points on sources A to H, and answering three main questions. Source A is propaganda and is unreliable but gives us an insight into what the government were really thinking. The source is unreliable because it has a very obvious aim, to get women into the work place. The poster, made in 1917 after subscription, shows us women being 'equal to men. After subscription where it was mandatory for men to be in the army women were needed in the factories and propaganda was released to entice women into the work place. After careful study of the poster I found faults, which show that men still thought of themselves as higher than women. Small things such as the woman having to hold the flag with two hands and the mans flag being in front of hers shows that although women were 'equal' men were still the dominant race. I believe these faults

  • Word count: 1121
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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War in the Air

War in the Air If there was a war today, aircraft would be used for the following reasons, parachuting soldiers into enemy lines, bombing enemy countries, transporting supplies to troops, spying on the enemy, observe aircraft carriers to gain valuable information about operations in the enemy lines. In 1914 planes were not as useful and were mainly used to watch enemy activities. The only weaponry used by aircraft were the guns which pilots carried to shoot down enemy planes this was very dangerous as pilots risked hitting the propeller and having the shot rebound and killing themselves. Later in 1915 a man called Anthony Fokker a Dutch designer working for Germany designed a machine gun timed to fire between the airplane's propellers. The invention made air combat more deadly and lead to dogfights which was clashes with enemy aircraft. Another source of weaponry used by pilots was small hand bombs which were dropped by hand; these bombs had little effect on the enemy and outcome of the war. In 1914 planes resources disabled the aeroplanes from transporting supplies to troops and operating attacks on the enemy. During 1914 planes were extremely unreliable and very dangerous, they were mostly used for observing the enemies lines, spying and collecting valuable information. At later stages Germany developed the Gotha it was one of the first bomber aircraft, these aeroplanes

  • Word count: 384
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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War Poems

Comparison of the attitudes towards war presented in "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Suicide in the Trenches", and how they contrast with the views of Jessie Pope in "Who's for the Game?" In "Dulce et Decorum est", the poem starts with describing how the soldiers are subject to uncomfortable positions for long periods of time, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks". Wilfred Owen compares the soldiers to old beggars under sacks in that they are forced to sit crouched, and uncomfortable, with nothing more than themselves to their possession. This instantly paints a picture in the readers mind as you can imagine a soldier in such bad conditions, without any form of happiness. "Knock-Kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through the sludge". Owen portrays the image of soldiers coughing "like hags" whilst pushing their way with difficulty through the muddy swamp-like marsh, cursing, with loss of all dignity and respect for their surroundings. Owen also tells how "Men marched asleep", which shows the extreme exhaustion of these men, after a hard day on the battlefield. "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling", this part of the poem shows us the extreme panic and chaos that is caused within seconds after these men hear the word gas. Not everyone manages to put their gas mask on in time, "As under a green sea I saw him drowning...", "He plunges at me guttering, choking,

  • Word count: 1104
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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War Poetry

Poetry is an art form and therefore must do something that all art does - represent something in the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as something autonomous and self-defining. Wordsworth described it as "emotion recollected as tranquillity" and "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and there is no area of human experience that has created a wider range of powerful feelings than that of War: hope, fear, exhilaration and humiliation but to name a few. There are many poems that back War patriotically; they support it, and they impose it upon the younger generation, Winston Churchill said, "Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter." However there are others that are completely against the bloodshed; people like John Scott who composed the poem The Drum. In the poem he describes how much he hates the noise that the drum makes to call up young men to fight. Meanwhile there are poems that convey the idea of fighting as a vocation, an instinct that is in the blood of men, which they cannot help. On the Idle Hill is one of these poems; it was composed during peacetime in the mid -1800's and is pre - American Civil war. Alfred Edward Houseman was English and tended to write in the tone of the Latin poets he had admired. On

  • Word count: 2403
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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