At the beginning of the 20th century, European countries suffered a great loss of their population and wealth as well as the breakdown of the government and economy for years. The book All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque is a collection of tragic stories of the German soldiers who faced the harsh battle fronts and life during the First World War. Throughout the novel, the author records the harsh experiences the soldiers underwent on the battlefield, especially the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) that affected most of the returning veterans of the war. Along with the stress and trauma from the battles, soldiers who were once guaranteed promising futures were too far from being able to adapt to society along with other citizens. Not only that, they were disillusioned by the horrors of the war and overwhelmed by propaganda and censorship. Given such financial and human costs of the battles, the detriments of World War I outweigh its benefits; the PTSD spread among soldiers, while misleading propaganda and censorship of the public gave the government power to unify society’s support towards war.
Propaganda and censorship were used to spread biased and incomplete information about enemy countries to eliminate dissent in the public and to recruit many young soldiers, eager to fight for their country. Once the war was over; however, disillusionment that war was not the heroic or victorious experience they were promised hit them hard. Remarque writes, “The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief” (Remarque 12). The soldiers believed the country that they were fighting for would support and save them, but when unable to save their comrade, the soldiers realized the likelihood of their not being saved was high. When they saw their first death, that fear that their lives were in danger took over as they came to understand that the “greater insight and [a] more humane wisdom” they believed in and followed would not be able to ensure everyone’s lives. Remarque addresses the disillusionment soldiers felt during battles when their lives were at stake. To their dismay, the wartime propaganda was full of half-truths or lies and demonized enemy countries to recruit more soldiers and eliminate dissent. Eventually, soldiers began to recognize the ones they were fighting against were the same as them. In one paragraph, Remarque writes a soldier realizing, as he lies next to the man he stabbed, that he is simply another man reeled in by his country's propaganda for recruitment. “... for the first time, I see you are a man like me… Forgive me, comrade… Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony… If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother…” (Remarque 223) The French man shows companionship to Paul while discussing the costs of the war. As both of them joined the war through enlistment, they suffered the traumatic experiences of the war they were fighting, contrary to what the government and country leaders had promised through war propaganda. Because of these experiences, the soldiers have come to fear death, fear for their futures, and worry for their families and no longer see importance or honor in dying for their country. They both come to see that they are not enemies but rather comrades, forced to do as their country wills them, which in most cases is biased and heavily disadvantaged the people who were fighting in the wars. Without their title of “soldier” or their obligation to fight for their country, the two men are more alike than different, and their similarities bring them together. An example of censorship and propaganda seen in history is Joseph Stalin’s control over the Soviet Union. People under the rule of the tyrannical leader, Stalin, were restricted from thinking for themselves, defining what held importance to them, interacting with people, not of the USSR, and carrying beliefs contrary to that of the government despite whatever disillusioned society Stalin claimed. The society was blindsided by these false hopes that Stalin had created. One of the great changes he proposed to achieve during his regime was to better the government, but he did so through brutal force and economic seizure. The Soviet government wished for its people to believe that they were doing everything in their power to improve working and living conditions while rebuilding the tarnished image of Russia as a country that backed out of the Great War. To achieve this goal, Stalin seized total control of all governmental and economic aspects of Russian society. He created and slathered a benevolent image of his ruling all over society, standing up for those people who can not act upon their wishes to better the country. Using means of terror and brainwashing to rid of any biases against him, he exploited his power to censor everything he saw as a threat. After seeing the countless horrors in battles, the soldiers coming home to their families broke the false realities of war, but even after the war ended, soldiers faced many challenges in adjusting to society due to PTSD.
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After the war had ended, the veterans of the war who returned home to their families were unable to readjust and adapt to daily life due often to PTSD. “‘The war has ruined us for everything.’ [Kropp] is right. We are not youth any longer... We are fleeing… From our life. We … had begun to love life and the world, and we had to shoot it to pieces... We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” (Remarque 87-88) Being able to proudly fight for their country, the soldiers went into war, considering it as a way of “giving back,” but as time went on, the war became a grim and dire existence not only to the people fighting, but also to the whole country. The war had “ruined us for everything,” and the soldiers knew and dreaded the fact that they could not go back to their lives before the war, and despite that they were “fleeing...from [our] their life. The “love life and [the] world” they knew of before no longer exist in their minds, and they came to think “We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” From the exhaustion and pain they experienced in fighting battles, the war gave them such a transformative experience both mentally and physically. Wilfred Owen addresses the horrors soldiers felt while fighting the war in his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” This kind of revelation of war conditions was not understood by the general public until years after the wars and was a shock to people who weren’t originally aware of all the suffrage. Owen states, “If, in some smothering dreams, you too could pace… And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;...” Agonizing dreams suffocate the soldiers post battles and Owen interprets the trauma of seeing the passing of fellow soldiers as he “watch(es) the white eyes writhing in his face... like a devil’s sick of sin...” Creating vivid sensory through sibilance and diction such as “sick of sin” and describing the soldier's faces as having “white… writhing” eyes emphasizes the PTSD soldiers experience from witnessing hundreds of deaths every passing day. Later in the stanza, Owen writes, “Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues… you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory…” This juxtaposes someone believing in “glory” and “victory” versus the true “vile incurable sores” that come to the soldiers. Owen’s use of figurative language to exemplify the trauma and stress caused by the war shows just how heavy and agonizing the war experiences were. From these stanzas, Owen denounces the evils of the war which conclusively reveals the true weight of PTSD on the veterans of the war.
Along with the mental toll the war had on the soldiers fighting, there was just as much physical toll on them. From the trenches to the no man's land, soldiers were in constant exposure to dangerous weaponry. Some people support and claim that the war led to many revolutionary technological and industrial developments after the war, as it paved the way for newer technological innovations. Though the technology created during the WWI was indeed much more advanced and useful on the battlefield than the traditional horse and sword, they were, in another sense, killing machines. While admittedly, the technology introduced during WWI proved to be useful as some of the machinery and transportation across no man’s land, with it has come mass terror, the ability to kill mercilessly within minutes, and the exploitation of the public money to create such technologies. In a quote by Elliot White Spring, a British soldier describing his view of tanks after the war in “Fed Up” in Great Stories of War. (pg. 28) “Now that awesome roar was all around them and dark, ghostly shapes seemed to be moving through the foggy mantle shrouding… huge, terrible, dark monsters, sprouting flame and smoke, were upon them... blasting machine gun positions into cratered ruins draped with mangled bodies of German soldiers.” Tanks are strong and effective in overrunning the German trenches and are overwhelming giants. They caused mass destruction, obliterating and bogging down the battlefield. Also, not only was it costly to produce, it destroyed everything it went over, which led to “cratered ruins draped with mangled bodies of German soldiers.” Another innovation used to terrorize soldiers during the war was poison gas, and in the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen addresses the horrors soldiers felt while amidst poisonous gas. Owen states, “Gas! Gas! Quick boys! -An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling/And floundering like a man in fire or lime.../...As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. This stanza conveys the frenzy, delusional experience of asphyxiation by describing the nightmarish poisonous gas that deprived them of air whenever one bomb was thrown into the field. Most used as a weapon of terror, Owen describes the effects of poison gas, which strangled and suffocated the soldier who wasn’t quick to put on his gas mask. Though poison gas took only around 4% of the casualties, it was most effective in contributing to severe PTSD and asphyxiation. Because it was often subject to changing wind patterns, the poisonous gas used in battlefields often spread further/away from the intended area, causing death to those without protection. As much as the technology of WWI provided soldiers with protection and weapons to attack successfully, the drawbacks that came along with it were far more severe and significant than its benefits.
Detriments such as PTSD tyrannical government through propaganda and censorship, and disillusionment outweigh the benefits of WWI as they were much more significant and impactful to the countries both during the war and postwar. Through the use of propaganda/censorship governments and leaders effectively brought their countries to war, thus creating a lost generation of veterans suffering from great shell-shock and PTSD. Subsequently, the war costs not only taken a toll on the economy but he t also caused discrepancies between the government and the general public.
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