The Effects Of War Upon Individuals

“It Brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over and run and fall. A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid, and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be. They wear grey coats and trousers and boot, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders too narrow, their bodies too slight, no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements.”

Effect: Destruction of Innocence

What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life, our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”

Effect: Destroys an individual’s future

“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 bursts in our hearts. We are cut off from our activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war.

Effect: Giving up on everything a soldier ever believed in

Hanging by a thread

How fragile the soldiers life.. Metaphoric to how their life at war is.. Every moment hanging by a thread. And in any moment it may snap.. Their death

“I’ am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life bust despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over by an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

Effect: No choice, obey orders even when it is murder…

“The Children holding on to their mother’s hands, and often an older girl leads the little ones who stumble onwards and are forever looking back.. A few carrying miserable looking dolls. All are silent as they pass us by.”“A few minutes later, the air screams the earth heaves, cries ring out.”

“A few days later, we are sent to evacuate a village. On the way we meet fleeing inhabitants trundling their goods and chattels along with them in wheel barrows..Their figures are bent, and their faces full of grief and despair, hast and resignation.”

Effect: Causes innocents to become homeless and experience terror.

“We have lost all feelings for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights n the form of some other man. We are insensible dean men, who through some tick, some dreadful magic are still able to run and kill.”

Effect: Hardens one’s emotions

“We marched up, moody or good tempered soldiers – we march up the zone where the front begins and become on the instinct human animals.”

Effect: Development of a second nature

“You are at home, you are at home. But a sense of strangeness will not leave me. I cannot feel at home, amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano-but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.”

Effect: A feeling of Alienation

“Thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and convulsed and dead soldiers.”

Effect: Scarred emotionally for as long as they live