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`` Glory Of Women `` By Walter Benjamin

Decent Essays

In exploring the growing loss of shared exchanges, Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” specifically touches upon the silence of soldiers returning home after war. These men, “...not richer, but poorer in communicable experience” (Benjamin 84), are unable to fully express themselves, the horrors seen on the battlefield too much to accurately convey through words alone. Veterans are therefore alienated as a consequence, with civilians lacking the proper understanding needed to connect with their country’s supposed “heroes.” Further expanding upon this emotional disconnect, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” compares the praises from civilians with the realities lived by soldiers, in turn exemplifying the divide in perspectives:
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant arduous while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud. (Sassoon 5-14)
With these lines in particular, he attests that the glorification of war by those on the homefront is a result of their inability to comprehend the grave realities lived by those on the battlefield. Taken from the point-of-view of a soldier, Sassoon’s critique on civilians—and women

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