The impact of war

1. THE IMPACT OF WAR
WORLD WAR I

2. PROPAGANDA
• In countries such as Britain the use of propaganda posters was readily
understandable: in 1914 she only possessed a professional army and did
not have in place a policy of national service, as was standard in other
major nations such as France and Germany.
• Yet while the use of posters proved initially successful in Britain the
numbers required for active service at the Front were such as to ultimately
require the introduction of conscription. Nevertheless recruitment
posters remained in use for the duration of the war - as was indeed the
case in most other countries including France, Germany and Italy.
• However wartime posters were not solely used to recruit men to the
military cause. Posters commonly urged wartime thrift, and were vocal in
seeking funds from the general public via subscription to various war bond
schemes (usually with great success).
• Interestingly, for all that the U.S.A. joined the war relatively late - April
1917 - she produced many more propaganda posters than any other
nation

4. War everywhere

5. HOW IT ALL BEGAN

6. THE SOLDIER R. BROOKE
• If I should die, think only this of me:
• That there’s some corner of a foreign field
• That is for ever England. There shall be
• In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
• A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
• Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
• A body of England’s, breathing English air,
• Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
•
• And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
• A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
• Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
• Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
• And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
• In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
•
•

7. DULCE ET DECORUM EST
• Wilfred Owen
• Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

8. Dulce Et Decorum Est
• 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 devilish. Note how in line 8 the rhythm slackens as a particularly dramatic moment
approaches.
• In Stanza 2, the action focuses on one man who couldn't get his gas helmet on in time. Following the officer's command in line 9, "ecstasy" (of
fumbling) seems a strange word until we realise that medically it means a morbid state of nerves in which the mind is occupied solely with one idea.
Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being compared to drowning. "Floundering" is what they're
already doing (in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his
comrade dying in agony.
• Stanza 3. The aftermath. From straight description Owen looks back from a new perspective in the light of a recurring nightmare. Those haunting
flares in stanza 1 foreshadowed a more terrible haunting in which a friend, dying, "plunges at me" before "my helpless sight", an image Owen will not
forget.
• Another aspect again marks Stanza 4. Owen attacks those people at home who uphold the war's continuance unaware of its realities. If only they
might experience Owen's own "smothering dreams" which replicate in small measure the victim's sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to
describe in sickening detail.
• The "you" whom he addresses in line 17 can imply people in general but also perhaps, one person in particular, the "my friend" identified as Jessie
Pope, children's fiction writer and versifier whose patriotic poems epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised. Imagine, he says, the
urgency, the panic that causes a dying man to be "flung" into a wagon, the "writhing" that denotes an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close
at hand with the curious simile "like a devil's sick of sin". Sick in what sense? Physically? Satiated? Then that "jolt". No gentle stretcher-bearing here
but agony intensified. Owen's imagery is enough to sear the heart and mind.
• There are echoes everywhere in Owen and with "bitter as the cud", we are back with "those who die as cattle". (ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH).
"Innocent" tongues? Indeed, though some tongues were anything but innocent in Owen's opinion. Jessie Pope for one perhaps, his appeal to whom as
"my friend" is doubtless ironic, and whose adopted creed, the sweetness and meetness of dying for one's country he denounces as a lie which children
should never be exposed to.
• A poem seemingly written at white heat. Harsh, effective in the extreme, yet maybe too negative to rank among Owen's finest achievements: those
poems in which he transcends the scorn and the protest and finds the pity.

9. On the Western Front, the war was
fought in trenches
Trenches were long, narrow ditches dug into the ground where soldiers lived all day and night.

10. LIFE IN TRENCHES
What was it like in a World War One trench?
There were many lines of German trenches on one side and many lines of Allied trenches on
the other.
In the middle, was no man's land, so-called because it did not belong to either army. Soldiers
crossed No Man's Land when they wanted to attack the other side.
Rest
Soldiers in the trenches did not get much sleep. When they did, it was in the afternoon during
daylight and at night only for an hour at a time. They were woken up at different times, either
to complete one of their daily chores or to fight. During rest time, they wrote letters and
sometimes played card games.
Dirty trenches
The trenches could be very muddy and smelly. There were many dead bodies buried nearby
and the latrines (toilets) sometimes overflowed into the trenches. Millions of rats infested the
trenches and some grew as big as cats. There was also a big problem with lice that tormented
the soldiers on a daily basis.

11. A typical day in the trenches:
• 5am - 'Stand-to' (short for 'Stand-to-Arms',
meaning to be on high-alert for enemy attack)
half an hour before daylight
• 5.30am - Rum ration
• 6am - Stand-to half an hour after daylight
• 7am - Breakfast (usually bacon and tea)
• After 8am - Clean themselves, clean weapons,
tidy trench

12. • Noon - Dinner
• After dinner - Sleep and downtime (one man per
ten on duty)
• 5pm - Tea
• 6pm - Stand-to half an hour before dusk
• 6.30pm - Stand-down half an hour after dusk
• 6.30pm onwards - Work all night with some time
for rest (patrols, digging trenches, putting up
barbed wire, getting stores, replacement of unit
of soldiers every five days)

13. A LETTER FROM THE TRENCHES
• To Susan Owen
• 25 April 1917
• A Coy., My Cellar My own dearest Mother,
• Immediately after I sent my last letter, more than a fortnight ago, we were rushed up into the Line. Twice
in one day we went over the top, gaining both our objectives. Our A Company led the Attack, and of
course lost a certain number of men. I had some extraordinary escapes from shells & bullets. Fortunately
there was no bayonet work, since the Hun ran before we got up to his trench. You will find mention of our
fight in the Communiqué; the place happens to be the very village which Father named in his last letter!
Never before has the Battalion encountered such intense shelling as rained on us as we advanced in the
open. The Colonel sent round this message the next day: 'I was filled with admiration at the conduct of the
Battalion under the heavy shell-fire.... The leadership of officers was excellent, and the conduct of the men
beyond praise.' The reward we got for all this was to remain in the Line 12 days. For twelve days I did not
wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any
moment a shell might put us out. I think the worst incident was one wet night when we lay up against a
railwav embankment. A big shell lit on the top of the bank, just 2 yards from my head. Before I awoke, I
was blown in the air right away from the bank! I passed most of the following days in a railway Cutting, in
a hole just big enough to lie in, and covered with corrugated iron. My brother officer of B Coy., 2/Lt.
Gaukroger lay opposite in a similar hole. But he was covered with earth, and no relief will ever relieve him,
nor will his Rest be a 9 days' Rest. I think that the terribly long time we stayed unrelieved was unavoidable;
yet it makes us feel bitterly towards those in England who might relieve us, and will not.
• We are now doing what is called a Rest, but we rise at 6.15 and work without break until about 10p.m. for
there is always a Pow- Wow for officers after dinner. And if I have not written yesterday, it is because I
must have kept hundreds of letters uncensored, and enquiries about Missing Men unanswered [remainder
missing]

14. Songs on the war
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Children’s Crusade