Depiction Of The Horrors Of War In Literature
Susan Sontag, the author of Regarding the Pain of Others remarks “We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. ” Sontag is correct: war is truly understood only by those who fight it. War literature may have the ability to inform people of the horrors faced by soldiers and how such unimaginable experiences become regular occurrences, but it cannot cause even the most empathetic reader to fully comprehend the hardships endured by those who experience war firsthand. War is dreadful. War is gruesome. War is tortuous. War is Hell on Earth. War has the ability to destroy anything and anyone in its path. It is capable of ruining lives forever.
In Laura Hillenbrand’s novel Unbroken, Olympic runner Louie Zamperini is tormented by his evil captor, the Bird: “he was condemned to crawl through the filth of a pig’s sty, picking up feces with his bare hands. ” Louie had been brutally tortured by the Bird countless times, but of all the abuses inflicted upon him, “none had horrified and demoralized him as did this” (291). The time Louie and his fellow captives spent in the Japanese concentration camps was truly agonizing. Although Louie’s experience seems utterly incomprehensible, it did in fact happen. In “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen describes watching a fellow soldier’s violent death from poison gas: “As under a green sea… He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (ll. 14-16).
As gruesome as this is, the brutality becomes forgotten and hidden by patriotism: “Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori” (ll. 27-28). Witnessing fellow soldiers die in combat is a dreadful, unimaginable experience, but eventually, it becomes a regular occurrence. Soldiers have to come to the realization that death is unavoidable and that they have no choice but to persist. The horrors of war eventually become normalized in the daily lives of soldiers and other eyewitnesses. Owen explains in “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” soldiers grow so incredibly tired that all they can do is mindlessly persevere: “Men marched asleep, many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod” (Owen ll. 5-6). Not only is physical anguish an everyday reality of war, but also mental anguish as a result of witnessing indiscriminate slaughter. In “Death of a Turret Ball Gunner,” Jarrell suggests that death is just a reality of war.
Soldiers are not allowed the time to grieve those who have perished. “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (Jarrell l. 5). While visiting an Albanian village in Kosovo, Chris Hedges, the author of The Destruction of Culture, recalls waiting for a truck transporting fourteen corpses: “I pulled back the cloth to uncover the faces. The gouged out eyes, the shattered skulls, the gaping rows of broken teeth, and the sinewy strands of flayed flesh greeted me” (par. 13-14). Hedges admits that after a while, seeing the lifeless civilians no longer bothered him. He adds that “It was not an uncommon event for me. I have seen many such dead” (par. 16). Some people may argue that incidents of war will never become normal; they believe that man will never stop finding new ways to destroy one another. Technology is constantly advancing, as well as the creativity of violent extremists. Terrorism and drone warfare have created a new level of fear that regularly targets civilians. Those who have not experienced war firsthand cannot truly understand the hardships endured by soldiers.
In Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Louie Zamperini’s family is unaware that Louie was forced to record Japanese propaganda during his imprisonment. After Louie arrives home from the war, his sister Sylvia eagerly shares his broadcast: “Louie was suddenly screaming. Sylvia turned and found him shaking violently, shouting, ‘Take it off! Take it off! I can’t stand it!’ As Sylvia jumped up, Louie swore at the voice, yelling something about propaganda prisoners. Sylvia snatched up the record, and Louie yelled at her to break it. She smashed it and threw it away” (342). Sylvia did not upset her brother intentionally, but because she lacked knowledge of the circumstances in which the broadcast was made, she sent Louie into a chaotic state of mind. Many people who have witnessed war have a difficult time sharing their experience with others.
In Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, Chris explains to Ann that he feels responsible for the deaths of the men in his company: “One time it’d been raining several days and this kid came to me, and gave me his last pair of dry socks. Put them in my pocket. That’s only a little thing… but… that’s the kind of guys I had. They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other” (35). Chris, like many surviving soldiers, feels guilty for living through the war when so many others did not. This is often a hard concept for soldiers to explain to those unfamiliar with war. Soldiers are burdened by repeated trauma that can eventually lead to feeling misunderstood by those who cannot relate. As Sontag says, it is impossible for those who have not fought a war to fully comprehend what soldiers go through. While serving in the war, soldiers bear hardships that will subconsciously affect them for the rest of their lives.
