Wars are like car accidents. The outcome can be tragic, yet there is this creepy fixation, like you cannot look away. Everyone has experienced this phenomenon as they pound frustratingly on his/her steering wheel, hoping someone finally starts moving, but knowing exactly why no was is. I had this same odd, tragic, and frustrating attraction to the Bataan Death March. The Death March was completely comprised of death and despair yet, the very inhumanity of it was seducing.
Unfortunately for me, the Bataan Death March is not a person. Thankfully, General Jonathan Wainwright is. General Wainwright is the humanity masked by the mass cruelty of the Death March; the shining star overshadowed by the blackness and despair. He is the person that makes me stop morbidly staring at the disaster, but stop and contemplate what is actually happening. He had to face challenges and obstacles that no one else in the military could, or had to; challenges that I cannot even begin to fathom.
It was the juxtaposition between the evil of the Bataan Death March and the inhuman heroism of General Wainwright that drew me to the general. I wanted to study something so unlike my daily life, my daily normalcy, the boring monotony that greets me everyday, something that didn’t fit into my schedule of waking up, going to school, doing homework, eating, breathing, and sleeping, and this definitely didn’t fit in any of those categories.
Again, a slight disadvantage of mine in this project, was that I knew as much about General Wainwright as I know about the mating habits of the beluga whale; almost nothing. This must inevitably confuse people. Why would I choose a person I know nearly nothing about? I merely knew enough to realize why he inspires me; he ris...
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The war had a lot of emotional toll on people it destroyed their personal identity, their moral/humanity, the passion to live was lost and the PDS they will suffer post war, resulting in the soldiers to understand what war is really about and what is covered up. There are scenes that support the thesis about the war like "As for the rest, they are now just names without faces or faces without names." Chapter 2, p. 27 which show how the soldiers have emotional detached themselves from life. Also, when the novel says “I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.” Which to me again shows how the soldiers are change throughout the war losing the moral and humanity. Lastly what he says “ I’m not scared of death anymore and don 't care whether I live of die” is the point where I notice Phillips change in
Even visual media, which has improved remarkably over the last several decades, cannot express these feelings accurately. Today’s movies, photography and other digital media about wars are considerably more visual and realistic than in the past. They are capable of portraying events very close to reality. However, these photos and movie scenes still cannot make a person experience the exact feelings of another person who actually fought in a war.
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"A general who wears down 180,000 of the enemy by expending 400,000 men...has something to answer for." This idea from military historian C.E.W Bean is the main line of argument from traditionalist historians. They represent General Douglas Haig, British Commander-in-Chief of the BEF from 1915 to the end of the war in 1918, in a critical, damning light: a hopelessly incompetent general with a willingness to sacrifice the men of Britain for a few metres of muddy ground. On the converse of this interpretation is a revisionist perspective of Haig as a caring ‘architect of victory’, bringing long-term achievements with his perceptive strategies. With an examination of these two seemingly polemic perspectives and primary evidence, judgement, albeit a complex and multifaceted one, can be reached on both these smaller debates and of Douglas Haig’s role in World War One: villain or vanquisher?
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What is war really like all together? What makes war so horrifying? The horror of war is throughout All Quiet on the Western Front. For example Albert says the war has ruined them as young people and Paul agrees. “Albert expresses it: "The war has ruined us for everything." He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” (Remarque, Chapter 5). The way the war has affected each soldier has changed them forever. The boys who were once school boys will never be the same.
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