The War : A Short Story

Many people say that the metal of a man is found in his ability to keep his ideals in spite of anything that life can through at you. If a man is found to have done these things he can be called a hero. Through a lifelong need to accept responsibility for all living things, Robert Ross defines his heroism by keeping faith with his ideals despite the betrayal, despair and tragedy he suffers throughout the course of The Wars by Timothy Findley.

Into this atmosphere of spiritual paralysis the boy bears, with blind hopes and romantic dreams, his encounter with first love. In the face of ugly, drab reality-"amid the curses of laborers," "jostled by drunken men and bargaining women"-he carries his aunt's parcels as she shops in the market place, imagining that he bears, not parcels, but a "chalice through a throng of foes." The "noises converged in a single sensation of life" and in a blending of Romantic and Christian symbols he transforms in his mind a perfectly ordinary girl into an enchanted princess: untouchable, promising, saintly. Setting in this scene depicts the harsh, dirty reality of life which the boy blindly ignores. The contrast between the real and the boy's dreams is ironically drawn and clearly foreshadows the boy's inability to keep the dream, to remain blind.

She seems untrustworthy because she is sneaking behind her husband’s back and it seems like she is purposefully trying to get him mad.

“A Splendid Little War” was an alternative title to the Spanish American War named by Ambassador John Hay to his good friend Theodore Roosevelt. This war was one of the shortest wars of all time, lasting only about four months. Surprisingly, the main cause of death in this war wasn’t by being shot, but by dying of diseases such as Yellow Fever, Malaria and other diseases. Only 9,413 Spaniards were killed by wounds and combat and 53,540 were killed by many diseases. In this “Splendid Little War” America was able to free Spain's overseas empire which included Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The United States was also hungry for foreign good that weren’t available to them in the homeland. After an easy victory over Spain, American was able to control islands in the seas such as Cuba, The Philippines and Guam. After this war, Spain was no longer a world power and the United States was on its way to the top.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

     According to the author Tim O’Brien, people tend to readily accept the ‘facts’ presented of what happened during a war. People do not consider the existence of fallacies regarding the actual stories of what happens in wars, few consider that the ‘facts’ of an incident often change through people’s words. The film ‘Saving the Private Ryan’ by Steven Spielberg features both facts and seemingness part of the war story. Since it is so difficult to fully describe a war using human language, Spielberg ended up revising his stories to make sense out of it. Spielberg included parts that did not occur or exclude parts that did occur in order to make their stories seem more credible. According

Joseph Conrad once observed that “a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” As a result of the violence that is necessary during wartime, soldiers are permitted to engage in savage behavior that is normally forbidden in society. In The Wars by Timothy Findley, however, soldiers act in violent ways even when they are not actively engaged in battle. The inherently savage nature of humankind is evident when Robert Ross kills the German soldier after the gas attack, when Robert is raped in the baths, and when Robert kills Captain Leather. These violent events that occur outside the direct action of the war demonstrate the evil inherent in

Remembering a Forgotten war by Donald R. Hickey 2012, an academic journal, talks about the military history where by people were subjected to a difficult and different lifestyle than the one they were used too at that time.

At first he is overjoyed with the way things are turning out, but soon he feels the harsh reality life away from society. While with Rainy and the other hippies, he finds joy in the bonds he builds and the pain of everyday trifles is more easily bearable when shared. But once he is off again on his own, he truly suffers with every happening, all the more intense with no one to assist him or even to speak to. When he kills a moose, flies and maggots battle to destroy all the meat before he can get a chance to cook it for himself, and he’s furious, but with no one to rant to. As he tries to cross the river to get away from the wilderness, it nearly drowns him, and he’s stuck by himself, scribbling down, “lonely, scared” in his journal. When he mistakenly eats inedible sweet peas and is faced with inevitable death, nature is suddenly perceived as the enemy, unable to assist him, and he writes, “have literally become trapped in the wild”. The brutality of nature and pains of solitude truly show the downside to his transcendental ways, and seem to make him realize that nature isn’t all beauty and

Between the four years of 1861 and 1865 the United States was engaged in a Civil War. This involved a division between the free North and the slave holding South, where eleven southern states split from the Union, altogether refusing the idea of a single American nation. Abraham Lincoln, who was the president at the time, disapproved of this revolt and had “500,000 soldiers to crush what threatened to be an aggressive rebellion.” In April 1861, the first shots were fired, and what followed became an unthinkable tragedy of gigantic proportions. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers were killed and millions more wounded; large areas of the South were engulfed by aggressive battles almost resulting in a Union defeat under determined Confederate forces. Focusing on the major turning point battle of the war, the Battle at Gettysburg, the confederate Army was led by General Robert E. Lee, and the Union Army was led by General George G. Meade. This battle lasted for three days - July 1st through the 3rd, 1863, and ended when the Confederates had failed to break up the main Union line.

The soldiers were forced to endure the burden of war that affected them emotionally and mentally. The Things they carried by Tim O'Brien was about soldiers who were impacted to hold the burden of the vietnam war and brought things emotionally and physically to the front lines which affected their mentality. Tim O’Brien used many literary techniques in this book but the ones that stood out to me were listings and point of view he used these literary techniques very often. Tim O’Brien used listing to explain why the soldiers carried a variety of certain things and how all of them mostly have the same main things to survive but other than that they have unique things that relate to the soldiers for example a quote from chapter

“The Tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst” wise words from Henry Fosdick. When it comes down to the time where an individual hits rock bottom, a man either do its best or do its worst. Although, Man can do its best and do its worst at the same time. There are many reasons how man’s best can result to man’s worst. Henry Fosdick statement is both true and false.

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.

The Experience Of War Many authors have written about war themes, some extracts of the stories and poems that I have read and researched are The Upturned Face by Steven Crane .It is about a fictional war being fought in an imaginary Europe. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell describes his senses and feeling of getting shot in the neck during battle. Exposure by Wilfred Owen,describes the horrors and reality of being in the trenches of the First World War. And The Making of Me by Robert Westall is about a shell-shocked grandfather who has the responsibility of looking after his grandchild.

War has been a part of human culture since it's birth. It has led to a great many massacres and has shown us the evil that exists within the souls of humanity. Some have even gone as far as saying that war is human nature. To better understand the reasons behind war and how it affects others, I've examined several different societies and cultures so as to better understand the necessity of war and see the cause of their external war attitude. To do so, different variables from two topics (military institutions and external war attitude) were matched up and crossed so as to look into the answers to these questions. The variables were then calculated and through these graphs, I was able to find different societies in which