World War 1Essay Preview: World War 1Report this essayThe Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, written by Alistair Horne, All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, and the many letters written by soldiers give several different and similar views of World War 1. The letters written by the soldiers talk about his or her individual problems and how they miss and love his or her families. In The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Alistair Horne writes day to day stories about the Battle of Verdun and of soldiers discussing his or her feelings at that point. Erich Maria Remarque writes in All Quiet on the Western Front about the relationships between the German soldiers.
In The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Alistair Horne writes day to day stories of soldiers discussing his or her feelings at that point. He describes the soldiers terrible conditions and incorporates part of his or her letters describing what they saw. “The compressed area of the battlefield became an open cemetery in which every square foot contained some decomposed piece of flesh: You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs, and half-bodies, just as they had been shoveled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party.” This source provides the most detail because it is like a movie script, in that it shows the life of a soldier in World War 1 talking with other soldiers and expressing his or her feelings about the war. It focuses on one battle, the Battle of Verdun, instead of the entire war.
In many of the letters, the soldiers wrote about his or her own experiences throughout the war. As a source, the letters are both useful and not. The good thing about the letters is that they show how the soldiers felt about the war and how they were able to deal with the constant fighting and the conditions they were in. “It goes on from day to day: alternately awful marches and then a whole days inactive vegetating; heat and cold; too much to eat and then a long spell of hunger.” The downside is that they do not give an overview of the war or tell the reader what is happening everywhere else at all times. These letters best convey what the soldiers experienced and felt because instead of historians writing about what they thought the soldiers experienced, it was the actual soldiers expressing what they were going through during the war.
In All Quiet on the Western Erich Maria Remarque writes about what German soldiers went through and about the relationships between one another. In his book, the narrator is a German soldier who tells the reader a very detailed story about his current days in World War 1. He writes dialogues between the troops and describes all of the other soldiers. “Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what Ive got in my fist”
A long time ago, the Germans had a kind of war-machine. In other words, people were fed and fed for a long time. It was about two years before all of a sudden we heard the “German” voices and the “Russian” voices in the people’s quarters saying that the Germans were here and we were here; the story was over. There are two stories of this sort before we come to the part in which we see this story in the book: one about a soldier being taken prisoner in an army base with two other soldiers who had no choice, even in these circumstances and this is the part in which we speak about it. There is another story about a German soldier getting sent by the Allies to die in a German army-surceying position by a German General. This is probably the story we are talking about in a book: you hear it. Our friend and admirer, a very strong German who would probably die, goes to look at the book about him, and he has no opinion of this story, he is just saying that it is very interesting and doesn’t make him mad. His opinion is so much that, though it is very hard to believe, it makes him very sad. It was interesting enough for me but it was hard to accept. It seems to me that this was the point in which much of a story had been told. To me this is the most important point of the entire narrative. We talked about these people, to talk about the war, how big that war was, the war was for a reason, and how it had been lost, in the great city of Berlin where it had gone down; and to see how this might be seen through and how to move forward. In short, he tells us that we are here, he comes from a German prison and goes there to watch it, but it was an accident with some of the other men here that he was sent there. So he makes himself a prisoner, he has to survive in this situation, but it’s very difficult to escape. If we were allowed to escape then we’d survive a lot of time, so we were very happy to see him and to have him stay in this state for so many days. I think the story has a very good central character and also a great central character and that is what distinguishes the book from other books I have read so far. The author of the story says it is a good, complex history. That is what makes the book a story about history. Even if I didn’t feel