War carries important morals that heighten the perspective of men and women on their nation, but it also entails many acts and experiences that leave lasting effects on their emotional and physical state. Throughout the following texts, Paul Baumer, the dead soldiers, and Kiowa’s comrades all sustain losses that compel them to persevere and fight harder. All Quiet on the Western Front, Poetry of the Lost Generation, and an excerpt from In the Field all connect to the recurring theme, horrors of war, that soldiers face everyday on the front line through the continuous battle.
War involves gruesome battles, many of which lead to death, but these events forever affect the soldier’s mind and body. In All Quiet on the Western Front, men experience horrific sights, or horrors of war, through the depiction of the terrain, death, and the
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The presence of a missing comrade express the horrors that soldiers face because of the extensive effort and time that the search entails. As the young men continuously search for their missing comrade, Kiowa, muck covers their bodies, which hinders their ability to identify one another. The muck and filth “seem to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier” as all of the men become unrecognizable under uniform (O’Brien). With the use of symbolism, O’Brien develops a state in which the soldiers lose their sense of appearance from the filth that covers them. Kiowa, the soldier that had fallen, “was angled deeply into the muck, upside down” after a piece of shrapnel struck him (O’Brien). These soldiers face an incomprehensible experience, suffering through the loss of a close and needed comrade, which propels them to become stronger fighters. Fighting with one less men can alter the vigor needed in tough battles, but troops learn to persevere, in order to improve their