Personal experience in the war in Counter- Attack Essay Example for Free

Personal experience in the war in Counter- Attack EssayBy considering unmatchable of the numberss that you have read, explain how the poet presents their view of the involvement Counter-AttackSiegfried Sassoon presents his personal experience in the war in Counter- Attack with raw brutal imagery of the battlefield, the numerous sensory feelings provoking terror and outrage at the war, coupled with the stark line of business of report-like statements to ultimately gestate the futility of the conflict, and the massive waste of life.Sassoon immediately establishes the sense of turned on(p) detachment in the conflict the opening lines hardly state that they had gained (their) first objective hours before, provoking crime at the fact that soldiers were labored to fleck in inhumane conditions and ultimately were made to detach themselves from the terror of watching their friends being murdered. A semi-omniscient storey is maintained to establish the collective horror of the war, the fact that all(prenominal) soldiers would some always face the alike(p) ordain as the previous had and remains set throughout the poem as the contrast to the emotional detachment presented. The poet describes how at first even before the attack begins the soldiers ar already blind with throne, yet they are made to continue to work as soon as dawn begins all the soldiers are immediately forced to join in with the clink of shovels, a sign of the hard conditions of support in the trenches, while the militaristic onomatopoeia coincides with the perceived orderliness, such(prenominal) as the bombers posted and Lewis guns strong placed.The poet accordingly establishes the horror of the almost methodical methods to which the war was fought, and that the death that would come later made to seem almost mechanical. Sassoon excessively emphasises that these soldiers are simply normal men, many whom are young and forced to fight when he describes how prior to the counter-atta ck, there was a yawning soldier kneeling across the bank in order to handgrip their morale up, they are forced to become sardonic, sarcastically describing the weather as the jolly old pelting, yet serving to reinforce the message that the conflict has forced people to become detached from their emotions and feelings.The horror of the battlefield is also clearly defined Sassoon describes the average life in the trenches even before the counter-attack to be one rotten with exsanguine green clumsy legs. The use of rotten inherently suggests that the battlefield is undecomposed of bodies, many of which are likely to be decomposing which solitary(prenominal) heightens the horror in which these soldiers must live their insouciant lives. They are in effect also forced to separate themselves from the sights death is a normality in warfare, and the raw description of various soldiers sprawled and grovelled along the trenches defines the sheer brutality they face.The men are reduced fro m strong, competent men who were previously high-booted to being helpless in the face of war, some even described as eventually dying face downward, a possible reference to the conflict only pitch doom to their lives. The battlefield is not only strewn with countless bodies, but also described as perfidious itself the mud is personified as sucking the fallen soldiers down into it with little remorse, creating a sense of the indignity of the soldiers deaths. The soldiers that are fluid alive are simply wallowing like trodden sand-bags, indication of the hopelessness and lack of control in the circumstance they face. They are also metaphorically loosely-filled, hinting possibly that these men are also physically as well as mentally exhausted, hence the soldier having knelt against the bank.The emergent switch from the collection of soldiers to the single one in the second stanza points towards Sassoons idea of the wrongs of war the stark existentity that war costs numerous lives and apiece soldier is in effect a whole life, the one about to be lost in the war is as just as important. To describe the intensity of the conflict, the poet describes how this single soldier responds with such dismay in that he becomes mute in the clamour of s netherworlds, simply reduced as he recoils from the initial shock of warfare.Yet rather than recovering from his initial shock, ultimately the soldier is described by Sassoon as helpless, as he crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, reduced almost to primal instinct when faced with such a large strangled horror. The battlefield along with its weaponry spouts dark earth and wire with gusts from hell the poet explains the terrible nature of the war, likened to hell wrecking its destruction onto the battlefield, and in the remnants of the carnage the soldier can only hear the butchered, frantic gestures of the dead an oxymoron to establish the fact that death on the battlefield is so sudden and brutal it is liter ally incomprehensible.Sassoons view of the conflict is described as being ultimately uneffective the first stanza already indicates that there are numerous bulged, clotted heads scattered throughout, grotesque imagery that also provides an ominous undertone to the counter-attack. These bodies are also described as sleeping rather than the stark reality that they are dead, pointing to the normality of the situation. To add further to the futility, even the officer of the trench is blundering, somewhat dark comedy in the face of terrible times, and he continues only by gasping and bawling in shock. In contrast to the dead lifeless nature of the soldiers, it is the ammunition that is fully alive in this case bullets spat at them, traversing legitimate as fate, and never a dud, adding to the certainty of death in the conflict.The soldier Sassoon describes ultimately meets his fate in a spout of confusion indicated by the sudden ellipses in his thoughts and he remembered his rifle rapi d fire Notably the soldier himself cannot remember to hold onto his own rifle shock is combined with futility in that the soldier cannot arm himself and is therefore helpless, akin to almost all the other soldiers in the trenches. His fate is one that ends with him having bled to death. Heavy consonants throughout the line along with repetition emphasise the futile nature in which he dies Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned.The poem establishes Sassoons opinion of the conflict being one filled with horror, forced emotional detachment and ultimately the underlying futility of the war in the soldiers confusion and the mechanical killing presented. The poem never aligns with any set line structure in order to add to this confusion, and the poem is unopen with the simple factual statement the counter-attack had failed, in line with the opening line to create a contrast and show the real brutal nature of war people become numbers rather than the real human beings presented in the second stanza.