Everyone who
learns history knows that WWI is one of the most ruthless wars that causes
millions of casualties during 1914 to 1918. We consider WWI as an unjust war: A
colonies-redistribution war between old and new imperialism countries. But for
the average men who lived in that period, they didn’t know what the war really
fought for, they thought they fought for country, for glory even for justice,
but like our textbook said: “Dreams of glory inspired tens of thousands of men
to enlist. But the fighting did not go as expected.” [1]After
the war, many people started to rethink the purpose of this Great War, rethink
the patriotism that the government and elders taught. Here are three writings
that could reflect the changing of patriotism in that period.
The first document is a fragment of All
Quiet on the Western Front written by a German soldier names Erich
Maria Remarque. In this fragment Remarque showed us the feeling and thought
changed when he went to the barracks at 20 years old. At first, he was very
proud to join in the army like any other young men, romanticized the war and
looked forward to glory: “We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave
to life, and to the war also, an ideal and almost romantic character.” [2]And
then got embittered because of the boring life in barracks and military system,
finally became indifferent: “We recognized that what matters is not the mind
but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill.” [3]“We
became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm.” [4]The
big change of thought due to the big fall of expectation between the truth and
propagandize: romantic war and hero, fight for motherland and glory. The truth
of the war breaks these young men’s beautiful imagination and brings a deep
disappointing feeling that to be cheated.
To be cheated
by propagandize and education they received is one of the reasons that to make
people rethought the war. Another reason is the huge casualty that is never
ever had. According to Worlds Together Worlds Apart, in WWI
more than 70 million men worldwide fought in the war, including almost all of
Europe’s young adult males, but over half of the men who were mobilized died,
were wounded or taken prisoner, or report missing in action. [5]Millions
of people died but little territory won and lost stroke people’s heart and
started doubting the purpose and meaning of the war, the anti-war sentiment
appeared strongly. Why the war caused such huge injuries and deaths, we can
find the reason in these two poem in the battlefield.
Counter-attack
is a poem of Siegfried Sassoon and it describes a failing counter-attack. The
poem shows the terrible environment in trench warfare: Dirt, clammy, a rainy
day in the war, soldiers are tired and cold: “pallid, unshaved and thirsty,
blind with smock.” “A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, staring across
the morning blear with fog; He wondered when the Allemands would get busy.” [6]It
seems like they waited to die. Through this poem you can taste a deep despair,
every soldier has to die in this cruel war. “Bleeding to death. The
counter-attack had failed.”[7]
There is no hope in the war. In the poem, Sassoon expressed his anti-war
thoughts by describing a counter-attack, and told us a new type of land warfare-----trench
warfare. Trench warfare declined means that the battle line is stasis, and it
causes amount of casualty. “Life in the trenches mixed boredom, dampness, dirt,
vermin, and disease, punctuated by the terror of being ordered to ‘go over the top’
to attack the enemy’s entrenched position.”[8]
Not only
trench warfare causes lots of casualty in WWI, new weapons used in warfare made
a lot of disaster and killed thousands of soldier in that period, poison gases
is one of the new weapons that invented and used first in WWI. In Wilfred
Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est, he described a poison gas attack: “Dim,
through the misty panes and thick green light. As under a green sea, I saw him
drowning.” “He plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning.” [9]New
weapon’s using make war more and more like a meat grinder, high casualty rate
shocked people. In the end of the poem, Owen wrote: “the old Lie: Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori.” This is a Latin declaration of patriotic duty
that English students repeated as a lesson means sweet and proper it is to die
for one’s country. This is a query of patriotism about this war, this war is
not necessary, this is the war that people have to die but nothing to win. Also
it is an accusation to the “false” patriotic propagandize.
These
three author are normal people so they don’t know that the war really fight
for. For most of soldier and people at WWI, they thought they fight for
country, for glory. But the war’s ruthless and horror made them doubt about it
after millions of people dying, the propagandize beautify the war, but the truth
is desperation. New technique, new weapons, new warfare, this war we could say
that it is the first modern war in history, but nobody prepared for it. WWI has
already ended for one hundred years, but the wounds still exist and left a huge
scar in human’s history.
Work Cited
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Translated A. W. Wheen. (New York: Grosset and Dunalp, 1930), in Stuart B.
Schwartz, Linda R. WImmer, and Robert S. Wolff (eds), The Global Experience.
Volume Two. (New York: Longman, 1998), 214-217.
Siegfried Sassoon, "Counter-Attack," in
Stuart B. Schwartz, Linda R. Wimmer, and Robert S. Wolff (eds.), The Global
Experience. Volume Two. (New York: Longman, 1998), 217-218.
Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est," in
Kevin Reilly (ed.), Worlds of History. Volume Two (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2013), 939-940.
Robert Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin,
Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Micheal Tsin. Worlds Together Worlds Apart,
Fourth Edition, Volume Two. (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010), 707-709.
[1] Robert Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen
Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Micheal Tsin. Worlds Together
Worlds Apart, Fourth Edition, Volume Two. (New York: WW Norton & Company,
2010), 707-709.
[2] Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Translated A. W. Wheen. (New York: Grosset and Dunalp, 1930), in Stuart B.
Schwartz, Linda R. WImmer, and Robert S. Wolff (eds), The Global Experience.
Volume Two. (New York: Longman, 1998), 215.
[6] Siegfried Sassoon, "Counter-Attack," in
Stuart B. Schwartz, Linda R. Wimmer, and Robert S. Wolff (eds.), The Global
Experience. Volume Two. (New York: Longman, 1998), 217-218.
[9] Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est," in
Kevin Reilly (ed.), Worlds of History. Volume Two (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2013), 939-940.
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