preview

Comparing War Horse And A Raid Night

Decent Essays

The novel “War Horse” by Michael Morpurgo published in Great Britain in 1982, and the short stories “A Raid Night” by Henry Major Tomlinson (1922), “The French Poodle” by Wyndham Lewis (1916) and “Introduction to the Trenches” by Richard Aldington (1929) have views of traditional warrior values in a mechanized war. The authors use characters that possess at least one traditional warrior value; the authors show us how these traditional values interact with the war. The authors of the novels and short stories have a clear image of the traditional warrior values and when these traditional values are present in the war only bad things happen because of the conflict between warrior ideals of previous wars and mechanized warfare. Morpurgo shows us how courage and bravery could not prevent the slaughter of the cavalry unit which charged towards the German machine guns. In “A Raid Night” the speaker is disgusted by soldiers who kill innocent civilians, these soldiers are loyal to a fault. Lewis has a protagonist who is brave but he is also insane, the protagonist goes back to war and dies. Aldington makes fun of how of how the soldiers were fighting …show more content…

In fact he makes fun of the situation the soldiers are in. The soldiers rarely fight and instead battle Mother Nature. “Both sides were chiefly occupied in having pneumonia and trying to keep warm” (Aldington 97). This quote is effective because it gives us an insight into what the soldiers actually do, which is battling disease. Hardly any fighting takes place and this shows the irrelevance of traditional warrior values, both sides are not concerned with victory, honour or glory. The reader can see that there is no honour in sitting around and surviving diseases. The soldiers also dig holes, this activity is something more suited to a civilian, the promises of old wars does not transfer into the WW1 and Lewis pounces on this by showing how the war is

Get Access