Bill Leadley's 'Shrapnel And Semaphore'

The men and women who served in the First World War endured some of the most brutal forms of warfare ever known. Millions were sent to fight away from home for months, even years at a time, and underwent a series of terrible physical and emotional experiences. The new technologies available to First World War armies combined with the huge number of men mobilized made the battlefields of 1914-18 horrific, deadly and terrifying places.

The Western Front, while the main focus of combat in WW1, many Australians ignore this part of the war, as they focus more on the Gallipoli campaign and its legend. However with the centenary of the First World War here, many people have begun to realise that Australia was involved in other theatres of the war, and not just Gallipoli. The focus of this essay will be on the Events leading up to Australia’s involvement, the weapons of the western front, life in the trenches, trench warfare, The Battle of Fromelles and the End of the war.

WW1 also known as “The Great War” was a brutal war that wreaked havoc upon europe.

For the seventeen Soldiers portrayed in “The Things We Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the physical pain was very minimal weight to carry compared to the emotional scars that they will carry throughout their entire life. This story does an amazing job portraying full human emotion that anyone put into a situation would feel, such as heavy guilt, sadness, anger, lack of motivation, perseverance, horror, and false security. All of these are notorious feelings that every soldier back in history, and now still feel when they are on a mission. “The Things They carried” shows a deep vulnerability of everyday human’s thought process during times of great stress, that before, wasn’t considered by the general public and media when speaking about what it

The First World War, also known as the Great War, began in about 1914 and went on until 1918. This brutal war was an extremely bloody time for Europe and the soldiers that fought in it. These men spent their days in trenches holding down bases and taking in attacks from all sides. The soldier's only free time was consumed with writing letters to those on the home front. The letters they wrote contain heart breaking stories of how their days were spent and the terrible signs of war. The War consumed them and many of them let out all their true feelings of war in their letters to loved ones. In The First World War: A brief History With Documents we can find some of these letters that help us understand what the First World War might have

War can be considered a tragedy, but war can also signify bravery. So many men and women die fighting for their country daily. What really happens behind enemy lines? In “The Things They Carried,” a short story by Tim O’Brien, he uses various rhetorical devices to explain to his readers to help them truly understand what it is like to be in war.

World War I, otherwise known as The Great War, is considered by many as the first modern war. Poison gas, heavy artillery, armored tanks, mortars, ground breaking military guns, advancement in war machinery, and shell bombardments were all newly utilized weapons that caused mass destruction that was never seen before at the time. However, a lot of deaths and conflict occurred in the man-made trenches. Both strenuous and unproductive, living and fighting in the trenches cost soldiers who endured them both severe physical and psychological injuries. Most soldiers were not even lucky enough to make it out of the trenches alive. All Quiet on the Western Front portrays an accurate picture of trench warfare and how gruesome it was.

World War I was a time full of despair, it saw courageous soldiers valiantly defend our freedom, leaving families behind to face the prospect that their loved ones may never return. Upon the arrival of ANZAC’s in Gallipoli on the 25th of April 1915, the mateship strengthened with

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a non fiction body of fiction writing. While names, characters and situations are imaginary, the circumstances encountered by the people represented in the war depicted are very much real.There is an intriguing story line beneath yet another story that is being told and with each sentence the more it resonates. There is the story of unrequited love, unabashed bravery, and unfathomable pain. Throughout all of this turmoil and what is the very essence of discomfort, the story moves forward and the reader is compelled to follow. In relating the layers of stories wrapped into the writing O’Brien masterfully uses the techniques of repetition, pattern and indirect style of writing to emphasize that no amount of physical weight compares to the mental and

As you may already know World War one was a brutal event that took place in history;

World War I was a ghastly experience for the soldiers due to what they experienced during the war. Many of the Soldiers that were drafted in the war were young and fresh out of high-school. These young soldiers left their home, away from family and friends, to fight a war not knowing if they were going to return home. These young soldiers hardly had any training before being forced to fight a war and many had lost their lives. These young soldiers were finding themselves losing their youth and innocence during the war. For those who returned from the war they came back a different person. While the outside world was living carefree lives; these soldiers were living in monstrous horror.

The human experience in war has been a common theme within military history throughout the past forty years. Many individuals have made efforts; which have gone to further impress the majority of the local soldiers who have served in the military, but not necessarily with overwhelming excitement, apart from only the generals and heroes of the war. My evaluation of this memoir is that it serves as a voice for soldiers and ex-soldiers to keep in their memory how things were like on the battlefield. Although, the memoir for war is among the oldest

The Great War, or what we now call World War I, was devastating for all participating countries, but for Australia, with its relatively small population, the suffering was keenly felt. By 1917, the honour of going to war “for king and country” had faded, and everyone knew someone whose life was lost on a conflict which had little relevance to their lives. Letters from the battlefields of Europe and North Africa conveyed the horror of the first mechanized war.

Machine guns firing overhead, artillery shells raining down, drowning out the hellish screams of soldiers as they gasp for their last breath. Boys, not quite old enough to be men, lay lifeless in the barb-wired filled No Man’s Land. Long gone are the days of traditional warfare. There is no honour, no glory there are only two things that remain: life and death. The scene in World War 1 was one of gruesome battles of attrition fought in bloody, disease ridden trenches where hundreds of thousands of troops gave their lives to simply gain a kilometer or two of land. The First World War was a culmination of technologies developed over the previous century which resulted in “an orgy of violence to which rifles, machine-guns, flame throwers, artillery

The human cost of World War I was enormous. The war was the worst war in the history of the world. It certainly was the worst for the fighting men, the men existed for four years in unthinkable conditions. Millions of troupes lived in trenches and holes in the ground only as wide as their wingspan. Millions of men died horrible deaths and many millions more were wounded physically, mentally and spiritually to which it was almost impossible to recover. Casualties in a single day of fighting often rose to tens of thousands. In France, where the worst of the war was fought, they never have fully recovered from the conflict. The French lost half a generation of young men, and memories of the conflict, along with WW2, are still deeply rooted