Adrian Barlow Writes of Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting: “at the Time of Its Publication, to Write a Novel About Intense Relationships Between Men in the First World War Was Considered an Ambitious Risk for a Woman Writer.”

The structure of Part 2, 4 and 6 was interesting as most of the chapters begin in Jack’s point of view of Stephen which is a narrative technique Faulks has used to show the relationship being conjured and that the lives of these two men are bound. Jack’s admiration for Stephen is further shown on page 372 where he cannot remember what his son, John’s, face so he has ‘taken to drawing Stephen instead’ which also shows his importance in his life. After Michael Weir’s death he and Stephen become closer, as one relationship breaks down another solidifies as they have both lost so many people so they gravitate towards each other. When Stephen and Jack are the only ones to survive a blast underground Jack shows he feels guilty when he says ‘The one supposed to get you back safe’ he feels he has doomed Stephen by escorting him underground. On page 451 their relationship has come so far they abandon the hierarchy and Jack starts to call him Stephen. This links back to Part 2 where ‘they were allowed to speak without deference to the officers’ while they were underground to help cope with how difficult the conditions were, Stephen and Jack are just two human beings trying to survive, the side of the war you are on doesn’t matter underground when you have ‘several hundred thousand tons of France above’ your head. When Jack dies moments after they hear a ‘rescue party’ Stephen feels ‘bitterly alone’ as he was powerless to stop Jack’s death and now has no

“You were just babies in the war- like the ones upstairs! // “…You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

Imagine you’re lying on the muddy, damp Earth and all around you can hear the screams of people you know dying. Shells explode, bullets race through the air, and poisonous gas seeps around you, all with the intent to harm you in some way. Yet, you willingly put yourself in that position day after day, year after year. The question surrounding this situation is, why? Who would be masochistic enough to choose to put their lives in danger and live in the most perilous environment possible? Two very different books give us insight into the thoughts of the soldiers who continuously put themselves in these environments. Your Death Would Be Mine by Martha Hanna and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque lets us into the minds of Paul Pireaud and Paul Baumer as they try to survive life as a soldier in the Great War. I argue that Pireaud and Baumer had very different reasons for continuing to fight despite having suffered beyond belief. In this paper I will analyze how the varying degrees of patriotism, brotherhood, family life at home, and age affected how these two men endured the treacherous life on the front of World War I.

War requires a lot out of soldiers. They give themselves wholly to their country, including their mind, body, and soul. However, one thing that seems to vary among these men is their sense of duty. In Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” three Irish soldiers form an unlikely friendship with their British prisoners of war. However, things take a turn when they are given orders to execute their new-found friends. When the order reaches the men, the three of them interpret their new duty in various ways. Through the orders of execution, “Guests of the Nation” emphasizes how people react to a sense of duty in varied ways from embracing it with pride, carrying out their duty with confusion and regret, and disobeying by limited participation.

In ‘The Manhunt’ the poem explores the costs of war on those who serve in it. Throughout this poem it is clear to the reader that the husband is unable to connect with his wife, therefore their relationship is affected. Simon Armitage allows the wife to speak of how hard it is to connect with her husband. “Every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.” This reflects how emotionally traumatised he has become due to the war.

These two men were at one time friends. Again during the war, officers make a realization about the war.

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

“They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--...They carried their reputations. … carried the soldier 's greatest fear,which was the fear of blushing. It

O 'Brien illustrates to us the necessity for each man to be connected to their old life, telling a story of Mark Fossie flying in his girlfriend to ease his loneliness (104-05). Each soldier found himself facing insurmountable barriers throughout the war, and these small effects and coping mechanisms were often the only necessity that would give them reason to return home again. They needed personal methods of coping with the war, and this primeval survival was the only way to remain a man.

Since the beginning of time, humans have sought after power and control. It is human instinct to desire to be the undisputed champion, but when does it become a problem? Warfare has been practiced throughout civilization as a way to justify power. Though the orders come directly from one man, thousands of men and women pay the ultimate sacrifice. In Randall Jerrell’s “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”, Jarrell is commenting on the brutality of warfare. Not only does Jarrell address the tragedies of war, he also blames politics, war leaders, and the soldier’s acknowledgement of his duties. (Hill 6) With only five lines of text, his poems allows the reader to understand what a soldier can go through. With the use of Jerrell’s poem, The Vietnam War, and Brian Turner’s “Ameriki Jundee”, the truth of combat will be revealed.

An overarching social paradox is inherent in the way Canadian citizens internalize the notion of civic duty; while violent participation in the Great War is lauded as personal and national achievement, post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from significant trauma, physical or social, is also recognized as an integral part of the military consciousness. Veterans experience grief as a result of the expected ownership of this psychological binary, and the ability to communicate grief among groups of veterans becomes problematic due to other binaries existing as part of the Great War experience, namely notions of male camaraderie. Groups of males, particularly soldiers, are forged and cultivated based on pre-existing masculine values, and the analysis of the ramifications of imposed masculinity in relation to group dynamics and individualism is as significant as the depictions of violence in the narrative of war. If the Great War alters conceptions of pre-war and post-war male groups due to trauma, then the war period offers an effective analysis for the deconstruction of pastoral male camaraderie prevalent before the devastating physical and social violence that ensues. Eve Sedgwick’s text, “Between Men” (1985), defines homosociality as the “social bonds between persons of the same sex … it is applied to such activities as ‘male

A recurring comparison between soldiers and animals strips the men of individuality and depicts them as helpless and vulnerable, a significant contrast to the public perception of troops as ‘heroic’ and ‘patriotic’. Jim and his fellow soldiers are driven in a cattle truck where there is a notice that says, “Eight horses or forty men”. This juxtaposition provokes the reader to associate the men with animals and the author

This extract shows that when someone dies, or gets so injured they cannot keep on fighting, there is not a lot of respect given to them. The word ‘flung’ indicates this, illustrating the fact that they are not provided a lot of care; and that they are just one person in about 20,000,000 who will not survive the war.

In the beginning of the book you are introduced to the antagonist Jack , who is in the middle of killing the

Pat Barker explores the comradeship in her novel by presenting different aspects of the term, some being explicit and others being implicit, or identifiable by comparing a situation to the one that is omnipresent in 'Regeneration': the war. Comradeship is mostly associated to the army, it is a term for a companionship between several person in a group, each member helping and bonding with the others. The letter written by Sassoon is our first evidence of comradeship between men. Barker's use of affective terms such as “fellow soldiers” and “enduring the suffering of the troops” create the image of a caring superior. The subject of the letter is also a proof of Sassoon's good intentions for his soldiers' as he is going out of his way and