Horrors Of War Analysis

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque exemplifies the atrocities that occur during times of war. War is brutal, war is terrible, and war is inhumane. During World War I, war affected soldiers in ways like never before. The new trench warfare technique in addition to new war technology made the battlefield a literal living hell. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the excerpt from In the Field by Tim O’Brien, and the poems “Battlefield” by August Stramm and “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, the theme of the horrors of war is used to display the awful things that happen in war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the main character Paul Baumer and his group of friends are recruited to go to war and fight against the French. Paul and his comrades endure some events that the human mind and body just are not capable for. While Paul is in the middle of a battle there are, “dead piled up in the field of craters between the trenches… many have long to wait and we

The poem “Battlefield” by August Stramm uses imagery to depict the destruction that the human body can take. On the bodies, “bloods clot the patches where they oozed, rusts crumble, fleshes slime, sucking lusts around decay” (Stramm). The bodies are disgusting and completely disfigured and with every blink, there is more and more death. Similarly, the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen also portrays the repulsive circumstances that the body is put under. Described is a man’s “hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin… the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues” (Owen). The man suffered a repugnant death and he experienced things that the human body should not have to go through. This exemplifies how war changes everything, including your