essay on horrors of war

Essay on Horrors of War in English

Horrors of war mean the outcomes and the after-effects of war. War is a huge fight or a battle between two powers such as two countries. It always leads to destruction. It always brings death and sorrow.

War destroys peace and harmony. Today, with the development of different kinds of atomic and nuclear powers like bombs and guns, war has turned into the most horrific and destructive weapon of our society. War has become an end in itself.

There are different kinds of deadly weapons invented by science. The aim was to protect a country from any kind of external attack and not to call for war.

Modern wars are a danger to our civilization. As for instance, the two World Wars caused one of the biggest losses the world has ever experienced. The use of bombs and powerful guns are common in modern wars. However, because of the many great and horrific wars in the previous centuries, the history of the world has become a history of war.

Therefore, all the countries should be well aware of the ill impacts of war on humanity. They all should look for alternative ways to end the conflict. They should depend on discussing the problems than to involve in a war in any war. Everyone should know the value of human lives.

Related Posts:

Essay on Horrors of War

Students are often asked to write an essay on Horrors of War in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Horrors of War

The reality of war.

War is a horrifying event that brings about destruction, devastation, and loss of life. It is not a glorious adventure, but a grim reality where innocent lives are often the collateral damage.

Physical Horrors

Psychological trauma.

War also inflicts psychological trauma. Soldiers and civilians alike suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The mental scars can last a lifetime, long after the physical wounds have healed.

Social Impact

War disrupts social structures, leading to displacement, poverty, and societal breakdown. It leaves a lasting impact on the affected societies, hindering their development for years to come.

250 Words Essay on Horrors of War

The inescapable reality of war, physical destruction.

The immediate horrors of war are visible in the physical destruction it causes. Cities are reduced to rubble, and landscapes are scarred with the remnants of battles. Infrastructure, homes, and historical monuments, symbols of cultural heritage, are often demolished, leaving behind a void that is hard to fill.

Human Suffering

The human cost of war is unfathomable. The loss of life, physical injuries, and psychological trauma suffered by soldiers and civilians alike are horrific. War forces people into a state of constant fear and anxiety, disrupting normal life and leaving lasting psychological scars.

Social and Economic Impact

War also has long-term social and economic impacts. It disrupts economies, leading to poverty and economic instability. Social structures break down, leading to displacement, and the loss of community and identity. The resources spent on war could have been used for societal development, thus war indirectly hampers progress.

War’s Enduring Legacy

The aftermath of war is as horrific as the war itself. The pain and suffering continue long after the war has ended, through memories, trauma, and the struggle to rebuild lives and societies.

In conclusion, the horrors of war extend far beyond the battlefield. It is a brutal reminder of humanity’s capacity for destruction, causing physical, psychological, and socio-economic damage that lasts for generations. The need for peaceful resolution of conflicts is therefore paramount.

500 Words Essay on Horrors of War

The intrinsic cruelty of war, the human cost.

The most immediate and palpable horror of war is the human cost. Lives are lost, families are torn apart, and entire communities are displaced. The psychological trauma inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike is immeasurable. Soldiers are thrust into situations where they must kill or be killed, while civilians live in constant fear of death and destruction. The psychological scars left by war can last a lifetime, leading to mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety.

Devastation of Infrastructure

War also wreaks havoc on a nation’s infrastructure. Buildings, roads, schools, hospitals, and other essential facilities are often destroyed, leaving the survivors without access to basic necessities like food, water, and healthcare. The recovery process can take decades, and the costs are astronomical. The destruction of infrastructure also leads to economic instability, as businesses are destroyed and trade routes are disrupted.

Societal and Cultural Destruction

The environmental impact, conclusion: the imperative for peace.

In conclusion, the horrors of war extend far beyond the battlefield. They infiltrate every aspect of life, leaving a lasting legacy of pain, suffering, and destruction. As we move forward into the 21st century, it is crucial for us to remember these horrors and strive for peace. For it is only through peace that we can hope to build a world where such horrors are relegated to the pages of history, rather than the realities of our present and future.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Reflecting the Horrors of War Analytical Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Thesis revised

People learn more about the horrors of war through literature but do not infer from experience they gain; the only way they apply the knowledge about the war is the development of more sophisticated weapon to kill people.

As such, literature can be considered one of the most effective ways to reflect the war in terms of reasons, results, stories of people and their families, feelings and emotions, actions and virtues. Does the war help people to understand the values of life and demonstrate their virtues? I would like to review the works of literature the authors of which managed to show how horrible the war is so that successive generations did not want to solve the conflicts in this way.

The war is one of the most widely-spread and talked-about concepts of the contemporary society. The history should not be forgotten; it has to be reflected in literature for other people to learn the examples and know how destructive the mankind can be.

The relations between the people during the war were not clear, especially regarding the World War II when the concept of racism was advanced in terms of treating people rather than their skills, virtues, or features. In this respect, many people try to listen only to the stories about brave men who can come to rescue.

However, in the beginning of the book The Complete Maus: Maus I – A Survivor’s Tale; Maus II – And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, the father tells the author: “It would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories” (14). The images of mice use to depict Jews are bright and lively showing how horrible the war is in spite of the fact that people do not like to hear true storues.

The responsibility is a concept that has little relation to war because no one would claim that he/she started the war and made all those people suffer. Some Americans cannot still forget the horrors of the Vietnam War whereas the invasion of Iraq became another topic for literary tragedy.

As such, people suffer from the consequences of war which did not even finish because soldiers die leaving families without “Our fathers—our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas-station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics—our fathers” (Percy, par. 8).

The most horrible thing is that the representatives of the government responsible for those victims of the war including soldiers and their families do not realize how many people are affected and how damaging and destructing the entire war conflict is.

Some people think that war is romantic in some way showing us heroes that bravely fight against the enemies. However, their attitude towards war is shaped in accordance with the principles advocated and propagated in media. On the contrary, the horrors of war are the same no matter how many time have passed since the last shot.

The World War I seems to be far away though its reflections are still engraved in the world history because it affected many countries and many people died or lost people their knew and loved. The poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen was inspired by the events of this war demonstrating the horrors of military operations. The author tells about the gas and the reaction of a human organism when one can do nothing to prevent the reaction:

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime (Owen, lines 11-12). This poem ends with a statement that the famous Latin exhortation about the excitement from dying for the mother land is the lies.

Works Cited

Percy, Benjamin. “Refresh, Refresh.” The Paris Review 175, (2005): n. pag. Web.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: Maus I – A Survivor’s Tale; Maus II – And Here My Troubles Began . New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1997. Print.

Owen, Wilfred. “ Dulce Et Decorum Est .” N. pag. Web.

• History of NATO in 20th and 21th Centuries
• A Brief History of Chili
• Wilfred Owen: romanticised and tender poetry
• “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen
• Guilt in “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” by Art Spiegelman
• Decolonization or Nationalistic Self-Determination Movements
• Meaning of History
• David Birmingham’s “The Decolonization of Africa”
• Ottoman and Safavid Empire
• Historical Causes and Effects
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, June 6). Reflecting the Horrors of War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflecting-the-horrors-of-war/

"Reflecting the Horrors of War." IvyPanda , 6 June 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/reflecting-the-horrors-of-war/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Reflecting the Horrors of War'. 6 June.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Reflecting the Horrors of War." June 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflecting-the-horrors-of-war/.

1. IvyPanda . "Reflecting the Horrors of War." June 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflecting-the-horrors-of-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Reflecting the Horrors of War." June 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflecting-the-horrors-of-war/.

• Senior Fellows
• Research Fellows
• Submission Guidelines
• Media Inquiries
• Commentary & Analysis

Upcoming Events

• Past Events
• October 2021 War Studies Conference
• November 2020 War Studies Conference
• November 2018 War Studies Conference
• March 2018 War Studies Conference
• November 2016 War Studies Conference
• Class of 1974 MWI Podcast
• Urban Warfare Project Podcast
• Social Science of War
• Urban Warfare Project
• Project 6633
• Shield Notes
• Rethinking Civ-Mil
• Book Reviews

Select Page

The Five Reasons Wars Happen

Christopher Blattman | 10.14.22

Whether it is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear strikes or Chinese belligerence in the Taiwan Strait , the United States seems closer to a great power war than at any time in recent decades. But while the risks are real and the United States must prepare for each of these conflicts, by focusing on the times states fight—and ignoring the times they resolve their conflicts peacefully and prevent escalation—analysts and policymakers risk misjudging our rivals and pursuing the wrong paths to peace.

The fact is that fighting—at all levels from irregular warfare to large-scale combat operations—is ruinous and so nations do their best to avoid open conflict. The costs of war also mean that when they do fight countries have powerful incentives not to escalate and expand those wars—to keep the fighting contained, especially when it could go nuclear. This is one of the most powerful insights from both history and game theory: war is a last resort, and the costlier that war, the harder both sides will work to avoid it.

When analysts forget this fact, not only do they exaggerate the chances of war, they do something much worse: they get the causes all wrong and take the wrong steps to avert the violence.

Imagine intensive care doctors who, deluged with critically ill patients, forgot that humanity’s natural state is good health. That would be demoralizing. But it would also make them terrible at diagnosis and treatment. How could you know what was awry without comparing the healthy to the sick?

And yet, when it comes to war, most of us fall victim to this selection bias, giving most of our attention to the times peace failed. Few write books or news articles about the wars that didn’t happen. Instead, we spend countless hours tracing the threads of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the two world wars. When we do, it distorts our diagnosis and our treatments. For if we follow these calamitous events back to their root causes and preceding events, we often find a familiar list: bumbling leaders, ancient hatreds, intransigent ideologies, dire poverty, historic injustices, and a huge supply of weapons and impressionable young men. War seems to be their inevitable result.

Unfortunately, this ignores all the instances conflict was avoided. When social scientists look at these peaceful cases, they see a lot of the same preceding conditions—bumblers, hatreds, injustices, poverty, and armaments. All these so-called causes of war are commonplace. Prolonged violence is not. So these are probably not the chief causes of war.

Take World War I. Historians like to explain how Europe’s shortsighted, warmongering, nationalist leaders naively walked their societies into war. It was all a grand miscalculation, this story goes. The foibles of European leaders surely played a role, but to stop the explanation here is to forget all the world wars avoided up to that point. For decades, the exact same leaders had managed great crises without fighting. In the fifteen years before 1914 alone, innumerable continental wars almost—but never—happened: a British-French standoff in a ruined Egyptian outpost in Sudan in 1898; Russia’s capture of Britain’s far eastern ports in 1900; Austria’s seizure of Bosnia in 1908; two wars between the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. A continent-consuming war could have been ignited in any one of these corners of the world. But it was not.

Likewise, it’s common to blame the war in Ukraine overwhelmingly on Putin’s obsessions and delusions. These surely played a role, but to stop here is to stop too soon. We must also pay attention to the conflicts that didn’t happen. For years, Russia cowed other neighbors with varying degrees of persuasion and force, from the subjugation of Belarus to “ peacekeeping ” missions in Kazakhstan. Few of these power contests came to blows. To find the real roots of fighting, analysts need to pay attention to these struggles that stay peaceful.

Enemies Prefer to Loathe One Another in Peace

Fighting is simply bargaining through violence. This is what Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung meant in 1938 when he said , “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.” Mao was echoing the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz who, a century before, reminded us that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Of course, one of these means is far, far costlier than the other. Two adversaries have a simple choice: split the contested territory or stake in proportion to their relative strength, or go to war and gamble for the shrunken and damaged remains. It’s almost always better to look for compromise. For every war that ever was, a thousand others have been averted through discussion and concession.

Compromise is the rule because, for the most part, groups behave strategically: like players of poker or chess, they’re trying hard to think ahead, discern their opponents’ strength and plans, and choose their actions based on what they expect their opponents to do. They are not perfect. They make mistakes or lack information. But they have huge incentives to do their best.

This is the essential way to think about warfare: not as some base impulse or inevitability, but as the unusual and errant breakdown of incredibly powerful incentives for peace. Something had to interrupt the normal incentives for compromise, pushing opponents from normal politics, polarized and contentious, to bargaining through bloodshed.

This gives us a fresh perspective on war. If fighting is rare because it is ruinous, then every answer to why we fight is simple: a society or its leaders ignored the costs (or were willing to pay them). And while there is a reason for every war and a war for every reason, there are only so many logical ways societies overlook the costs of war—five, to be exact. From gang wars to ethnic violence, and from civil conflicts to world wars, the same five reasons underlie conflict at every level: war happens when a society or its leader is unaccountable, ideological, uncertain, biased, or unreliable.

Five Reasons for War

Consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What do these five tell us about why peace broke down?

1. Unaccountable. A personalized autocrat , Putin doesn’t have to weigh the interests of his soldiers and citizens. He can pursue whatever course helps him preserve his regime’s control. When leaders go unchecked and are unaccountable to their people, they can ignore the costs of fighting that ordinary people bear. Instead, rulers can pursue their own agendas. That is why dictators are more prone to war .

2. Ideological. Consider Putin again. Most accounts of the current war dwell on his nationalist obsessions and desires for a glorious legacy. What costs and risks he does bear, Putin is willing to pay in pursuit of glory and ideology. This is just one example of intangible and ideological incentives for war that so many leaders possess—God’s glory, freedom, or some nationalist vision.

Societies have ideological incentives too. Unlike the people of Belarus or Kazakhstan, the Ukrainians refused to accept serious restrictions on their sovereignty despite what (at first) seemed to be relative military weakness. Like liberation movements throughout history—including the American revolutionaries—they have been willing to undertake the ruin and risks of fighting partly in pursuit of an ideal.

3. Biased. Most accounts of Russia’s invasion stress Putin’s isolation and insulation from the truth. He and his advisors grossly underestimated the difficulty of war. This is a story of institutional bias—a system that is unwilling to tell its leader bad news. Autocrats are especially prone to this problem, but intelligence failures plague democracies too . Leaders can be psychologically biased as well. Humans have an amazing ability to cling to mistaken beliefs. We can be overconfident, underestimating the ruin of war and overestimating our chances of victory. And we demonize and misjudge our opponents. These misperceptions can carry us to war.

4. Uncertain. Too much focus on bias and misperception obscures the subtler role of uncertainty. In the murky run-up to war, policymakers don’t know their enemy’s strength or resolve. How unified would the West be? How capably would Ukrainians resist? How competent was the Russian military? All these things were fundamentally uncertain, and many experts were genuinely surprised that Russia got a bad draw on all three—most of all, presumably, Putin himself.

But uncertainty doesn’t just mean the costs of war are uncertain, and invasion a gamble. There are genuine strategic impediments to getting good information . You can’t trust your enemy’s demonstrations of resolve, because they have reasons to bluff, hoping to extract a better deal without fighting. Any poker player knows that, amid the uncertainty, the optimal strategy is never to fold all the time. It’s never to call all the time, either. The best strategy is to approach it probabilistically—to occasionally gamble and invade.

5. Unreliable. When a declining power faces a rising one, how can it trust the rising power to commit to peace ? Better to pay the brutal costs of war now, to lock in one’s current advantage. Some scholars argue that such shifts in power, and the commitment problems they create, are at the root of every long war in history —from World War I to the US invasion of Iraq. This is not why Russia invaded Ukraine, of course. Still, it may help to understand the timing. In 2022, Russia had arguably reached peak leverage versus Ukraine. Ukraine was acquiring drones and defensive missiles. And the country was growing more democratic and closer to Europe—to Putin, a dangerous example of freedom nearby. How could Ukraine commit to stop either move? We don’t know what Putin and his commanders debated behind closed doors, but these trends may have presented a now-or-never argument for invasion.

Putting the five together, as with World War I and so many other wars, fallible, biased leaders with nationalist ambitions ignored the costs of war and drove their societies to violent ruin. But the explanation doesn’t end there. There are strategic roots as well. In the case of Russia, as elsewhere, unchecked power, uncertainty, and commitment problems arising from shifting power narrowed the range of viable compromises to the point where Putin’s psychological and institutional failures—his misperceptions and ideology—could lead him to pursue politics by violent means.

The Paths to Peace

If war happens when societies or their leaders overlook its costs, peace is preserved when our institutions make those costs difficult to ignore. Successful, peaceful societies have built themselves some insulation from all five kinds of failure. They have checked the power of autocrats. They have built institutions that reduce uncertainty, promote dialogue, and minimize misperceptions. They have written constitutions and bodies of law that make shifts in power less deadly. They have developed interventions—from sanctions to peacekeeping forces to mediators—that minimize our strategic and human incentives to fight rather than compromise.

It is difficult, however, to expect peace in a world where power in so many countries remains unchecked . Highly centralized power is one of the most dangerous things in the world, because it accentuates all five reasons for war. With unchecked leaders , states are more prone to their idiosyncratic ideologies and biases. In the pursuit of power, autocrats also tend to insulate themselves from critical information. The placing of so much influence in one person’s hands adds to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the situation. Almost by definition, unchecked rulers have trouble making credible commitments.

That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself. And it is why the world’s most worrisome trend may be in China, where a once checked and institutionalized leader has gathered more and more power in his person. There is, admittedly, little a nation can do to alter the concentration of power within its rivals’ political systems. But no solution can be found without a proper diagnosis of the problem.

Christopher Blattman is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. This article draws from his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace , published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Oles_Navrotskyi , via depositphotos.com

30 Comments

War, in the end, is about Armed Robbery writ large; whether Committing it, Preventing it, or Redressing it. It is all about somebody trying to take somebody else's stuff.

Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls. – Steven Erikson

That is the right reason, I do not know about the others, but I will give you a+ on this one

its beeches thy want Resorces

Wars often come when a group of nations (for example the USSR in the Old Cold War of yesterday and the U.S./the West in New/Reverse Cold War of today) move out smartly to "transform"/to "modernize" both their own states and societies (often leads to civil wars) and other states and societies throughout the world also (often leads to wars between countries).

The enemy of those groups of nations — thus pursuing such "transformative"/such "modernizing" efforts — are, quite understandably, those individuals and groups, and those states and societies who (a) would lose current power, influence, control, safety, privilege, security, etc.; this, (b) if these such "transformative"/these such "modernizing" efforts were to be realized.

From this such perspective, and now discussing only the U.S./the West post-Cold War efforts — to "transform"/to "modernize" the states and societies of the world (to include our own states and societies here in the U.S./the West) — this, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as capitalism, globalization and the global economy;

Considering this such U.S./Western post-Cold War "transformative"/"modernizing" effort, note the common factor of "resistance to change" coming from:

a. (Conservative?) Individual and groups — here in the U.S./the West — who want to retain currently threatened (and/or regain recently lost) power, influence, control, etc. And:

b. (Conservative?) states and societies — elsewhere throughout the world — who have this/these exact same ambition(s).

From this such perspective, to note the nexus/the connection/the "common cause" noted here:

"Liberal democratic societies have, in the past few decades, undergone a series of revolutionary changes in their social and political life, which are not to the taste of all their citizens. For many of those, who might be called social conservatives, Russia has become a more agreeable society, at least in principle, than those they live in. Communist Westerners used to speak of the Soviet Union as the pioneer society of a brighter future for all. Now, the rightwing nationalists of Europe and North America admire Russia and its leader for cleaving to the past."

(See "The American Interest" article "The Reality of Russian Soft Power" by John Lloyd and Daria Litinova.)

“Compounding it all, Russia’s dictator has achieved all of this while creating sympathy in elements of the Right that mirrors the sympathy the Soviet Union achieved in elements of the Left. In other words, Putin is expanding Russian power and influence while mounting a cultural critique that resonates with some American audiences, casting himself as a defender of Christian civilization against Islam and the godless, decadent West.”

(See the “National Review” item entitled: “How Russia Wins” by David French.)

Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:

In the final paragraph of our article above, the author states: "That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself."

Based on the information that I provide above — which addresses the "resistance" efforts of entities both here at home and there abroad — might we beg to differ?

From the perspective of wars between nations relating to attempts as "transformation" by one party (and thus not as relates to civil wars which occur with "transformative" attempts in this case) here is my argument above possibly stated another way:

1. In the Old Cold War of yesterday, when the Soviets/the communists sought to "transform the world" — in their case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such this as socialism and communism:

a. The "root cause" of the conflicts that the U.S. was engaged in back then — for example in places such as Central America —

b. This such "root cause" was OUR determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which were taking place, back then, in OUR backyard/in OUR sphere of influence/in OUR neck of the woods.

2. In the New/Reverse Cold War of today, however, when now it is the U.S./the West that seeks to "transform the world" — in our case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as market-democracy:

“The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies,’ Mr. Lake said in a speech at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.”

(See the September 22, 1993 New York Times article “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed” by Thomas L. Friedman.)

a. Now the "root cause" of the conflicts that Russia is engaged in today — for example in places such as Ukraine —

b. This such "root cause" is now RUSSIA'S determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which are taking place now in RUSSIA'S backyard/in RUSSIA'S sphere of influence/in RUSSIA's neck of the woods.

(From this such perspective, of course, [a] the current war in Ukraine, this would seem to [b] have little — or indeed nothing — to do with "Putin's twenty-year concentration of power in himself?")

It’s easy to put the whole blame on Putin himself with his unchecked power . But this is a gross simplification of the reality in case of the Ukraine war. NATO expansion everywhere and especially into the very birthplace of Russia was a huge irritator , perceived as unacceptable, threatening, arrogant with no regard to Russia’s interests. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear warning, that was completely ignored. Without NATO’s ambitions there would be no war in Ukraine. Or Georgia .

When the Soviet Union installed missles in Cuba , the democratic and presumably the country with all checks and balances in place almost started a nuclear war with the Soviets. It was a reckless gamble that could end the world Why expect anything less from the modern Russia that feels threatened by NATO encroachment?

In the end, whether it's about committing, preventing, or rectifying, war is all about armed robbery. The main plot is around a thief trying to steal from another person.

One of the main causes of war is nationalist garbage. This nationalist site conveniently omits this as they push their preferred chosen nationalist enemy(cold war leftovers in this case) on the reader. What do you expect from OVRA/NKVD reruns?

In addition to the reasons explored to further explain the cause of war, there are also self-defeating schema in thought structures that deteriorate over time. They become compromised by the wear-and-tear grind of life of individuals seeking natural causes and solutions collectively and apart. This is particularly relevant to the matter of war dynamics. When energies used to pursue peace are perceived as exhausted, unspent warfare resources appear more attractive. Particularly in the instances of deteriorating leaders who are compromised by psychopathy, war can quickly become nearly inevitable. Add a number of subordinated population that are unable to resist, and the world can quickly find itself following in the footsteps of leaders marching to their own demise. On the broader sociopolitical battlefield, with democracy trending down and the deterioration in global leadership increasing, the probability of both war and peaceful rewards increase. The questions that arise in my mind point to developing leaps forward to the structures of global leadership, particularly for self-governing populations, leveraging resources that mitigate the frailties of societal and individual human exhaustion, and capping warfare resources at weakened choke points to avoid spillovers of minor conflicts into broader destruction. Technology certainly can be used to mitigate much more than has been realized.

Wow, I could say all those things about the U.S. and its rulers.

We don't have a dictator.

Trump came pretty close to being a dictator, what with the way people were following him blindly, and the ways that all parties, (Both republicans AND democrats) have been acting lately I wouldn't be surprised if a dictator came into power

War happens because humans are predatory animals and preditors kill other preditors every chance they get. The 3 big cats of africa are a prime example. We forget that we are animals that have animal insticts. There will always be war.

As in, "SOme of us are carnivores and some of us are herbivores?" Hitler was a vegetarian….

The cause of war is fear, Russia feared a anti Russian Army in Ukraine would come to fruitinion in the Ukraine threatening to invade Moscow!

But did the USA really have anything to fear from Iraq? From Afghanistan? From Vietnam?

it takes one powerful man in power to start war and millions of innocence people to die, to stop the war . / answer!,to in prison any powerful person who starts the war , and save your family life and millions of lives, / out law war.

The biggest cause of war is the demonstration of weakness among democratic nations facing a well-armed dictator with irrational ambitions. In the case of Russia, the democratic world turned weak on Vladimir Putin at a time when both democratic institutions and peace might have been preserved. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first-ever freely elected president, had given the newly democratic Russia a real chance to enter the community of free nations in 1991. But when Putin was elected in 2000, we saw the warning signs of trouble. Putin already was undermining democracy. In Russia’s transition from socialism, he used his old KGP connections to buy up all the political parties (except ironically the Communist Party, which now was tiny and unpopular). He also declared he yearned for the old greater Russia, with those Soviet Union borders. The U.S. and NATO didn’t take Putin’s greater-Russia statements too seriously. After all, once their economy stabilized after the transition from socialism, the Russian people were pleased with their new and free Russia, the removal of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, and the new openness to the West. There was no popular call for retaking old territory. But Putin had his own plans, and as Christopher Blattman’s article observes, when you’re dictator (and even with ‘elections’ you are dictator if you own all the political parties) you can go your bloody way. Then came America’s ‘Russian re-set.’ As Putin consolidated his power, and forced the parliament, the Duma, to give him permission to run for several unopposed ‘re-elections,’ the U.S. decided to go gentle on Putin, in hopes he’d abandon his authoritarian course. This was the fatal mistake. When the U.S. should have been publicly encouraging Putin to commit himself to international borders and to democracy in Russia, the U.S. leadership instead was asking what it could do to make Putin happy. Putin saw this as weakness, an opening for his insane territorial desires, which focused mainly on Ukraine. He let a few more years go by, prepared secretly, and then in 2014, he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, killing about 14,000 people and claiming Ukraine’s Crimea for Russia. The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia, but the terrible damage had been done. Because the Free World’s leaders had let down their guard, an awful precedent had been set. A new Russian dictator had murdered to steal territory. To him, the price was low. That told him he could do it again someday. And in 2022, again sensing weakness from the West, Putin invaded Ukraine once more. Not only have tens of thousands of Ukrainians been killed in this new war, but the Russian people themselves are now locked in an even tighter, more brutal dictatorship. Peace through Strength is not just a slogan. It’s as real as War through Weakness. My father, who fought in Europe in World War II, said an American soldier’s first duty was to preserve America’s rights and freedoms, as described in the Constitution. He said an American soldier also has two jobs. A soldier’s first job, he said, is to block the tyrants. Just stand in their way, he said, and most tyrants won’t even try to pass. That’s Peace through Strength. A soldier’s second job, he said, is to fight and win wars. He said that second job won’t have to be done often if we do enough of the first job.

I hope there will be no more wars in the world

This, pandemic of wars will soon make us realize and accept the fact that the global society’s compassion towards its individuals is numbed and will eventually be completely absent as it is transformed into a human super-organism, just as one’s body is not concerned about the millions of cells dying daily in it, unless it affects the body as a whole like the cancer cells where we consider them to be terrorists and actively kill them.

Boghos L. Artinian MD

I hope there is no more war in this world

war it not good for all humans

Ultimately, be it engaging in, averting, or resolving, war can be likened to organized theft. The central theme revolves around a thief attempting to pilfer from someone else.

In the end, whether involving, preventing, or resolving, war can be compared to organized theft. The core idea centers on a thief attempting to steal from someone else.

No nation would wage a war for the independence of another. Boghos L. Artinian

And I will give you one word that sums up and supersedes your Five Reasons: Covetousness James 4:2, ESV, The Holy Bible.

Christopher Blattman offers a comprehensive analysis of the five key reasons wars occur, shedding light on the complexities underlying conflicts and peacekeeping efforts. Blattman emphasizes the importance of understanding the incentives for peace and the institutional mechanisms that mitigate the risk of war. By examining factors such as accountability, ideology, bias, uncertainty, and reliability, he provides a nuanced perspective on the decision-making processes that lead to conflict. Blattman's insights underscore the significance of promoting dialogue, minimizing misperceptions, and strengthening institutions to preserve peace in an increasingly volatile world.

Excuse me, but why all the Russia focus? Also, can all these "reasons of war" be applied to Israel also – autocratic rule, biases in information, etc? Finally, most wars in the last 70 years have been started by the US (either directly invading, or by supporting a nationalist faction in bloody coups and civil wars) – do the same reasons apply to those wars, as in the US has essentially autocratic leadership which has biased views and fears competition?

This article offers a crucial reminder that while the threats from nations like Russia and China are real, war is usually a last resort due to its ruinous costs. By focusing not just on conflicts but also on the many instances where peace is maintained, we can better understand how to prevent escalation and foster stability. The analysis of the five reasons wars occur—unaccountability, ideology, bias, uncertainty, and unreliability—provides valuable insights for building stronger institutions that promote peace.

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The articles and other content which appear on the Modern War Institute website are unofficial expressions of opinion. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

The Modern War Institute does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Rather, the Modern War Institute provides a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas. Comments will be moderated before posting to ensure logical, professional, and courteous application to article content.

Announcements

• We’re Looking for Officers to Join the Modern War Institute and the Defense and Strategic Studies Program!
• Call for Applications: MWI’s 2024–25 Research Fellows Program
• Join Us Friday, April 26 for a Livestream of the 2024 Hagel Lecture, Featuring Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary Jeh Johnson
• Announcing the Modern War Institute’s 2023–24 Senior and Research Fellows

• Teaching Resources
• Upcoming Events
• On-demand Events

The Brutal Realities of World War I

• Human & Civil Rights
• The Holocaust
• facebook sharing
• email sharing

Combat and the Colonies: the Role of Race in World War I

In August 1914, both sides expected a quick victory. Neither leaders nor civilians from warring nations were prepared for the length and brutality of the war, which took the lives of millions by its end in 1918. The loss of life was greater than in any previous war in history, in part because militaries were using new technologies, including tanks, airplanes, submarines, machine guns, modern artillery, flamethrowers, and poison gas.

The map below shows the farthest advances of Central and Allied forces on the fronts to the west, east, and south of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Most of the war's major battles took place between those lines of farthest advance on each front. Germany’s initial goal was to knock the French out of the war by occupying Belgium and then quickly march into France and capture Paris, its capital. German troops could then concentrate on the war in the east. That plan failed, and by the end of 1914, the two sides were at a stalemate. Before long, they faced each other across a 175-mile-long line of trenches that ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border. These trenches came to symbolize a new kind of warfare. A young officer named Harold Macmillan (who later became prime minister of Britain) explained in a letter home:

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all. . . . Nothing is to be seen of war or soldiers—only the split and shattered trees and the burst of an occasional shell reveal anything of the truth. One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk (like moles or rats, it seems) thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death. Never showing themselves, they launch at each other bullet, bomb, aerial torpedo, and shell. And somewhere too . . . are the little cylinders of gas, waiting only for the moment to spit forth their nauseous and destroying fumes. And yet the landscape shows nothing of all this—nothing but a few shattered trees and 3 or 4 thin lines of earth and sandbags; these and the ruins of towns and villages are the only signs of war anywhere. The glamour of red coats—the martial tunes of fife and drum—aide-de-camps scurrying hither and thither on splendid chargers—lances glittering and swords flashing—how different the old wars must have been. The thrill of battle comes now only once or twice in a [year]. We need not so much the gallantry of our fathers; we need (and in our Army at any rate I think you will find it) that indomitable and patient determination which has saved England over and over again. 1

The area between the opposing armies’ trenches was known as “No Man's Land” for good reason. Fifty years after the war, Richard Tobin, who served with Britain’s Royal Naval Division, recalled how he and his fellow soldiers entered No Man’s Land as they tried to break through the enemy’s line. “As soon as you got over the top,” he told an interviewer, “fear has left you and it is terror. You don’t look, you see. You don’t hear, you listen. Your nose is filled with fumes and death. You taste the top of your mouth. . . . You’re hunted back to the jungle. The veneer of civilization has dropped away.” 2

Unlike the war on Germany’s western front, the war on the eastern front was a war of rapid movement. Armies repeatedly crisscrossed the same territories. Civilians were frequently caught in the crossfire, and millions were evacuated from their homes and expelled from territories as armies approached. On both sides of the conflict, many came to believe that what they were experiencing was not war but “mass slaughter.” A private in the British army explained, “If you go forward, you’ll likely be shot, if you go back you’ll be court-martialed and shot, so what the hell do you do? What can you do? You just go forward.” 3

The carnage was incomprehensible to everyone, as millions of soldiers and civilians alike died. Historian Martin Gilbert details the loss of life:

More than nine million soldiers, sailors and airmen were killed in the First World War. A further five million civilians are estimated to have perished under occupation, bombardment, hunger and disease. The mass murder of Armenians in 1915 [see reading, Genocide Under the Cover of War ], and the [Spanish] influenza epidemic that began while the war was still being fought, were two of its destructive by-products. The flight of Serbs from Serbia at the end of 1915 was another cruel episode in which civilians perished in large numbers; so too was the Allied naval blockade of Germany, as a result of which more than three-quarters of a million German civilians died. 4

The chart below provides estimates of the number of soldiers killed, wounded, and reported missing during World War I. Exact numbers are often disputed and are nearly impossible to determine for a variety of reasons. Different countries used different methods to count their dead and injured, and some methods were more reliable than others. Records of some countries were destroyed during the war and its aftermath. Also, some countries may have changed the number of casualties in their official records for political reasons. The numbers of civilians from each country killed during the war are even more difficult to estimate. The numbers in the chart reflect the estimates made by most historians today (see reading, Negotiating Peace in Chapter 3).

World War I Casualties

• 1 Quoted in Mike Webb and Hew Strachan, From Downing Street to the Trenches: First-hand Accounts from the Great War, 1914–1916 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2014), 180–81.
• 2 Quoted in Jasper Copping, “Unseen interviews with WW1 veterans recount the horror of the trenches,” The Telegraph , March 6, 2014, accessed May 4, 2016.
• 3 Quoted in Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century , 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 157.
• 4 Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), xv

World War I in Europe and the Middle East

World War I was fought between the Central powers and the Allied powers simultaneously on several fronts in western Europe, eastern Europe, and the Middle East. 

Connection Questions

• How was war different in World War I? Why did this war result in so many casualties?
• How did the reality of combat in World War I compare to the beliefs and attitudes many Europeans had about war before fighting broke out?
• What did Richard Tobin mean by his statement, “The veneer of civilization has dropped away”?
• How would you describe the mood and tone of the voices of soldiers quoted in this reading? 

Get the Reading

• document The Brutal Realities of World War I – PDF
• document The Brutal Realities of World War I – Doc

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ The Brutal Realities of World War I ”, last updated August 2, 2016.

You might also be interested in…

Americans and the holocaust: the refugee crisis, dismantling democracy (uk), the holocaust - bearing witness (uk), the holocaust - the range of responses (uk), how should we remember (uk), justice and judgement after the holocaust (uk), kristallnacht (uk), race and space (uk), the rise of the nazi party (uk), the roots and impact of antisemitism (uk), the weimar republic (uk), youth in nazi germany (uk), inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

Essay On The Horrors of War

• Post category: Essay
• Reading time: 4 mins read

War is a great evil. It brings only misery and unhappiness to human beings.

War deprives people of their peace of mind. They live in constant suspense. War also leads to destruction of human life and property. Many soldiers are killed on the battle field. But civilians too are not safe. When bombs are thrown civilians die and houses, bridges and important installations are blown up. There is personal and national loss of property.

War brings about a disruption in the normal life of the people. Most of the young men join the army. Few are left to do civilian jobs. Few normal Occupations can be carried on in war time.

War is a waste of man power and national funds. Countless young men lose their lives in a war. Women and children too are killed in bombings. National funds which could have been used for public welfare are diverted to the war effort. They are used to purchase arms and ammunition. A country cannot improve and progress during a war.

War is shattering in yet another way. It ruins the lives of those who are crippled or maimed in the battle field. Those who have lost their arms or legs, have to start life all over again. They have to be rehabilitated. The battlefield itself is a gruesome sight. Some of the soldiers are blown to bits by shells and machine guns. Others lie wounded and helpless. There are moans and groans coming from all directions.

War is bad even in its after effects. Innumerable families become homeless, many lose their breadwinners. Others become neurotics or nervous wrecks. War imposes an additional burden on the country. People have to pay extra taxes to make up for losses suffered during a war. Considering all these horrors and disadvantages, we realise that war is a foolish thing.

• Essay On We Live In Deeds not In Years
• Essay On The Profession I would like to Follow
• Essay On Would You Prefer Wisdom or Wealth
• Essay On Patriotism and Nationalism
• Essay On Superstitions
• Essay On Importance of Trees
• Essay On Pollution
• Essay On Problem of Population
• Essay On Water must not be Wasted
• Essay On Time is Precious

Please Share This Share this content

• Opens in a new window

You Might Also Like

Essay on a brief past of printing.

Essay on My School

Essay on The Zebra

Essay on a visit to a village.

Essay on The Arctic Tern

Essay on a visit to the docks, leave a reply cancel reply.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Japan

Good Example Of Essay On The Horrors Of War

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Japan , City , Iraq , Hiroshima , War , Violence , Middle East , America

Words: 1100

Published: 03/10/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

HIROSHIMA AND THE ISIS

The Horrors of War: Hiroshima and the ISIS Hiroshima The Eyewitness Account of Fr. John A. Siemes

Events and damage

The day, August 6, 1945, started like any other sunny and pleasant. At about 8:15 in the morning, however, things changed. The atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. Nobody knew that what kind of bomb it was. Given the intensity of the damage and explosion, the residents of the novitiate, which was about two kilometers away from the city proper, thought that a bomb exploded only nearby. After the explosion, Fr. Siemes and his companions went out to check and saw the devastation. They decided to go farther and rescue their father superior in the city. As they moved toward the city, they discover the extent of the damage. The city seems to have been decimated. Few structures were left standing and many were burning. Even the trees and plants had been uprooted and thrown away by the strong whirlwind that followed the explosion. Dead bodies were scattered all over the place. Many of the survivors suffered from severe burns. Many were stunned and sat not moving in their places. People were trying to help themselves; no rescue seems to be coming from anywhere. Survivors were all trying to leave and go farther away from the city. There were no hospitals and aid left in the city. They found the injured priests they were looking for and needed to get a stretcher for one of them. On their return home, the dead remained were they were. Some people still sat at the same places. Mercifully, it was dark. Because of the damage on the road, it took them longer to go to and back from the city. The images that met them were mere shadows. They could not see much of the suffering and pain. The next few days were spent trying to help and provide first aid and treatment to the survivors at the novitiate. Even when they ran out of medical supplies, they continued to provide care, food and rest to survivors passing by the novitiate. They spent the few days also watching endless funeral processions. Bodies had to be quickly cremated at makeshift mass graves.

The Japanese view of Americans

Before the bombing, the Japanese did not seem to blame the Americans for their suffering. Although many people outside the country may not know, Japan had continually been bombed by the Americans during the war. Hiroshima did not suffer much though from those bombings. Fortunately for Americans, after the bombing, the Japanese Fr. Siemes encountered did not seem to harbor hatred for them. A few though expressed anger and wariness. Some soldiers they met along the way wanted to shoot them. They, the Jesuits, were mistaken for Americans. A member of their party who spoke the language explained to the Japanese that they were Germans, an ally of Japan. Death and suffering were consequences of war. The Japanese were very well aware of that.

A second bomb in Nagasaki

The US should not have dropped the second bomb. More 100,000 people died in Hiroshima . Japan would have already surrendered.

Seventy years after World War II, people would see again similar images of suffering and pain, of man’s inhumanity to man. There is no world war this time. However, people in Iraq and Syria suffer atrocities from the religious conflicts and from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Eyewitness in Iraq

An eyewitness in Iraq shares a similar story as that of Fr. Siemes. He recalls that they heard an explosion nearby. When they checked they saw structures and vehicles burning. Many were injured and brought to the hospitals. The damage and casualty in Iraq may not be as terrible as in Hiroshima. However, the pain and suffering may be the same for those affected. The disturbing thing about the violence in Iraq is that they are being inflicted to Iraqis by fellow Iraqis as a result of religious differences. The brutalities are even being inflicted by hand.

Eyewitness in Syria

An eyewitness in Syria reported violence similar to those in Iraq. Syrians are killing fellow Syrians. The Syrian army are opening fire at the population. The greater tragedy is that some of the atrocities in Iraq and Syria have degenerated into barbaric ways. People are being beheaded. The violence is a form of religious and political persecution. The propagators are succeeding in casting fear all over the world.

Fr. Siemes at the end of his report said that there may be occasions that violence in war may be tolerable. Those who support the war will have to be accept the consequence of war. The situation in the Middle East may somewhat be different. The violence is not the result of war in the sense of World War II. Rather, it is a political and religious war waged by extremists. The “war” there may be harder to justify. Like Fr.Siemes, Pope Francis—also a Jesuit—lamented all the crimes being committed in the Middle East as many of these are being done in the name of God. “All this gravely offends God and humanity. Hatred is not to be carried in the name of God. War is not to be waged in the name of God.”

Bibliography

BBC. "Iraq Violence: Eyewitness Describes Basra blast." BBC News, May 20, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22593135. Hooper, John. "Pope Francis: ISIS Violence against Minorities in Iraq Must Be Stopped." The Guardian, Aug 10, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/10/pope-francis-iraq-isis-islamic-state-religious-minorities-violence. J.A. "The Nightmare Returns." The Economist, Jul 17, 2013. http://www.economist.com/blogs/pomegranate/2013/07/violence-iraq. Mayer, Andre. "Is ISIS Violence Expanding Worldwide?" CBC News, Sep 18, 2014. from http://www.cbc.ca/news/is-isis-violence-expanding-worldwide-1.2770413. McCoy, Terrence. "ISIS, Beheadings and the Success of Horrifying Violence." The Washington Post, Jun 13, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/13/Isis-beheadings-and-the-success-of-horrifying-violence/. Siemes, Fr. John A. "Eyewitness Account of Hiroshima." In The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by The Manhattan Engineer District, 94–117. New York, NY: Public Domain, The Manhattan Engineer District of the United States Army, 1945. Kindle, Web. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mp25.htm. Zalewski, Piotr. "Syria: Eyewitness account of violence in Jisr al-Shughour." The Telegraph, Jun 11, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/13/Isis-beheadings-and-the-success-of-horrifying-violence/.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 1086

This paper is created by writer with

ID 267286171

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Lecture term papers, value term papers, wife term papers, poor term papers, instance term papers, determination term papers, board term papers, permission term papers, sonnet argumentative essays, business plan on advertising objectives, free essay on interview institutional issues, the bay of pigs a leadership failure essay examples, example of personal statement on medicine university, post 1 essay example 3, methods article review, an essay on essay, free essay about effectiveness of the coca cola hierarchical and structural business communication, memorandum essays example 3, good argumentative essay on world literature, good example of literature review on literary analysis, health law and ethics essay samples, good example of le corbusier the architect of the future research paper, free essay about forensic science, free research paper about hand washing adherence, good cultural analysis of media of israel research paper example, essay on the puritans left a good legacy after all, theoretical perspective essay samples, sect essays, opec essays, arterial blood essays, millenarianism essays, systems analysis essays, virtual experiences essays, thunderbird essays, important things essays, biotic community essays, aldo essays, aldo leopold essays, ten commandments essays, fleetwood essays, nutritional value essays, canteens essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Wilfred Owen — Depiction Of The Horrors Of War In Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen

Depiction of The Horrors of War in Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

• Categories: Dulce Et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen

About this sample

Words: 1180 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 1180 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1393 words

3.5 pages / 1498 words

3 pages / 1362 words

2 pages / 1022 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, a war poet, uses a great number of linguistic and structural devices throughout his poems in order to express his anger at the war. In this essay I will focus on three of his works: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, [...]

Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” explores an extraordinary meeting between two enemy combatants in the midst of battle. Owen forgoes the familiar poetics of glory and honor associated with war and, instead, constructs a balance [...]

Soldiers deserve the utmost respect, but they deserve it for the right reasons. They give up their lives to protect their country. Giving up their lives means that they are giving up time to spend with families, giving up [...]

The manifestation of war within a society is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that elicits a wide array of emotions and reactions among individuals. War, as a socio-political event, exerts profound influences on the lives [...]

Owen effectively conveys the emotions of a hopeless soldier, through the development and progression of thought in ‘Wild With All Regrets’. He uses various parallel trains of thought simultaneously, such as the past, present and [...]

Much of Charles Dickens' representation of morality in his most famous of Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, is derived from "the wisdom of our ancestors." (1) From the beginning of his narrative Dickens explains his usage of [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• Why was Adolf Hitler significant?
• How did Adolf Hitler rise to power?
• Why did Adolf Hitler start World War II?
• Who were Adolf Hitler’s most important officers?
• How did Adolf Hitler die?

World War II: The horror of war in pictures

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

The deadliest and most destructive war in human history claimed between 40 and 50 million lives, displaced tens of millions of people, and cost more than $1 trillion to prosecute. The financial cost to the United States alone was more than $341 billion (approximately $4.8 trillion when adjusted for inflation ). Nearly one-third of homes in Great Britain and Poland were damaged or destroyed, as were roughly one-fifth of those in France , Belgium , the Netherlands , and Yugoslavia . In Germany ’s 49 largest cities, nearly 40 percent of homes were seriously damaged or destroyed. In the western Soviet Union , the destruction was even greater.

The human cost of the war can hardly be calculated. Civilian population centres were intentionally targeted by both the Axis and the Allies . Planes of the U.S. Army Air Forces burned scores of Japanese cities to the ground with incendiary bombs before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed with atomic weapons . Japan’s troops in Asia enslaved some 200,000 women to act as sex workers (“ comfort women ”) and often acted with a general disregard for human life, especially toward prisoners. Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army carried out horrific medical experiments on thousands of prisoners of war and civilians; men and women were subjected to chemical and biological agents and vivisected to survey the results.

After agreeing to a partition of Poland with Germany, the Soviets slaughtered as many as 20,000 Polish prisoners of war at Katyn . The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact guaranteed Soviet hegemony over the Baltic states , and tens of thousands of people were killed or unjustly imprisoned after the Soviets invaded Estonia , Latvia , and Lithuania . The troops of the Red Army used mass rape as a terror tactic as they advanced into Germany; using medical records and written requests for abortions as data points, experts estimated 100,000 women were raped in Berlin alone. Claims of war crimes carried out by the Red Army were generally dismissed by the Soviets as Western propaganda, however. When these actions were acknowledged, the Soviets professed that they were justified given the treatment of Soviet civilians by the Wehrmacht and SS troops.

The institutional scale of the Third Reich ’s crimes against humanity makes it clear that the Holocaust was not merely a by-product of the Nazi war effort but a goal in itself. Hitler laid the bureaucratic groundwork for the mass destruction of European Jewry with the T4 Program , a targeted “ euthanasia ” campaign that sought to purge Germany of the infirm or disabled. These people—who ranged from newborns to the elderly—were deemed nutzlose Esser (“useless eaters”) possessing lebensunwerten Lebens (“life unworthy of life”), and they were murdered by the tens of thousands. The T4 Program proved the efficacy of gas chambers as implements of mass murder, and they became a key element of the “ final solution ” proposed by SS official Reinhard Heydrich at Wannsee on January 20, 1942:

Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Führer gives the appropriate approval in advance. These actions are, however, only to be considered provisional, but practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question. Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved in the final solution of the European Jewish question…

It was understood by all attendees that “evacuation of the Jews to the East” was a euphemism for the Vernichtung (“annihilation”) of millions of people. That Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann , and the genocidal apparatus they constructed fell short of their goal of “11 million Jews” was due to advancing Allied armies and not to any lack of effort on the part of the Nazis.

Essay on Horrors of War with Quotations in English

This post contains an Essay on Horrors of War with Quotations in English for FSC 2nd Year students. The essay has been taken from Sunshine English (comprehensive-II). The vocabulary of this essay is very good. If you are students of the Second year of F.A, FSC, Icom or ICS and looking for English Essays, you can visit English Essays with Quotations for FSc . You will find a wide range of essays with quotes. Soon we will share posts which will contain only quotations for English essays .

The Horrors of War Essay with Quotes for FSC Students – 2nd Year English Notes

“there is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it”. (havelock ellis).

War is an armed conflict between two or more states. When such conflicts assume global proportions, they are known as world wars. The war between different parts of factions of the same nation is called civil war.

After analyzing the whole history of war, it can plainly be said that war had always been full of horrors, It ever resulted in death, devastation, and disease. Even then when warriors used to fight face to face, the destruction of war was dreadful.  People where slaughtered or wounded. The after-effects of war were even more horrible.

The World of today is the world of science and technology. Man has invented and discovered astonishing instruments and tools to make life comfortable and secure. But, paradoxically, he has also invented most deadly weapons for his total extinction. Now many countries of the world possess nuclear warheads, germs warfare, and chemical bombs.

“I know the horrors of war: no gains can compensate for the losses it brings”. (Adolf Hitler)

The world has become a global village. Now the various countries are linked together economically, socially and politically. If a war breaks out, the other countries cannot be neutral. They will have to intervene for their own benefits. If this happens, any war would be a world war.

War is, in fact, man’s massacre on a massive scale. Death falls from firmament or erupts from the earth. It spares no one. The innocents expire, the soldiers suffer, and the population perishes. Starvation and fatality are the ultimate upshot of war. War leads to tears and fears.

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left”. (Bertrand Russell)

War brings about irreparable devastation of material assets. Property is wrecked. Buildings are ruined. Skyscrapers, plazas, huge factories, roads, hospitals, houses, gardens, crops, railways, runways, markets, are galleries all are changed into debris.

War is also the worst foe of culture and civilization. Cultural assets, splendid paintings, matchless manuscripts, unique historical heritage and priceless antiques, all are demolished. War extinguishes beauty, smothers morality and razes reason. Man behaves like animals. The paragon of beauty, the crown of the universe is burnt into ashes.

“It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible”. (Thomas Jefferson)

The after-effects of war are even more horrible than war itself. It is said that those who perish in war are less unfortunate than those who survive. Life becomes a misery. The infants weep for mother, the mothers cry for their infant babies. The houses are razed to the ground. The young girls survive homeless. Some are crippled, some are mad, and some widows with their infants in their arms wail and weep. What a human misery appears after a war.

War is human folly. Let the world think about it. They must take solid and sincere steps to stop the war. No problem can be solved by war. Let the world come to the table of negotiation for the settlement of their disputes. The UNO must realize its duty and be earnest in its efforts to resolve the disputes among different nations.

You May Also Like:

• Essay on Pollution with Quotations in English – Kips Notes
• Information Technology Essay with Outline for Students
• Essay on Terrorism with Outlines and Quotes
• Essay on Wonders of Science with Quotations and Outline
• Essay on Kashmir Issue with Outline and Quotations
• More In English Essays

Essay Writing 101: The Basics That Every Writer Should Know

Students and Social Service Essay with Quotations

Load Shedding in Pakistan Essay – 1200 Words

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Privacy Policty
• Terms of Service
• Advertise with Us

• Website Inauguration Function.
• Vocational Placement Cell Inauguration
• Media Coverage.
• Certificate & Recommendations
• Privacy Policy
• Science Project Metric
• Social Studies 8 Class
• Computer Fundamentals
• Introduction to C++
• Programming Methodology
• Programming in C++
• Data structures
• Boolean Algebra
• Object Oriented Concepts
• Database Management Systems
• Open Source Software
• Operating System
• PHP Tutorials
• Earth Science
• Physical Science
• Sets & Functions
• Coordinate Geometry
• Mathematical Reasoning
• Statics and Probability
• Accountancy
• Business Studies
• Political Science
• English (Sr. Secondary)

Hindi (Sr. Secondary)

• Punjab (Sr. Secondary)
• Accountancy and Auditing
• Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technology
• Automobile Technology
• Electrical Technology
• Electronics Technology
• Hotel Management and Catering Technology
• IT Application
• Marketing and Salesmanship
• Office Secretaryship
• Stenography
• Hindi Essays
• English Essays

Letter Writing

• Shorthand Dictation

Essay on “The Horrors of War” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

The Horrors of War

3 Best Essays on “The Horrors of War” 

Essay No. 01

       With the development of science a d technology, the modern man is facing a great threat of an impending war everywhere. All the states are spending enormously for war preparedness to make them capable of facing the challenge of war. There is a continuous effort going on in all the countries to obtain the most sophisticated weapons of warfare including the deadly missiles capable to be directed at a target at a distance of hundreds of kilometers, carrying the most deadly bombs to make devastations beyond measure. Not to speak of the nuclear warheads, which many countries boast of having added to their weaponries, have put humanity at the brink of devastation. On one hand, the world is making rapid strides in its development in all the fields of technology making man more and more comfortable and aware but on the other the horrors of war the increasing at an incredible speed. But this also does not guarantee any peace. No doubt, humanity has been able to avoid a world war after the two world wars created havoc worldwide but still the common man has suffered the impact of wars every time and we do not imagine a future without war. World War II, was supposed to be fought to end wars for all times. But if any armed clash could end wars for all times, there would have been no conflicts after the initial ones fought thousands of years ago. The harsh reality is that each war has become more ferocious and m0re destructive than the previous one. The causes of international strifes are many. One of the causes in the olden days was religion. The religious fanatics fought wars to prove their upper hand as they thought that the principles and thoughts for which they fought would from then onwards be universally accepted. It is also said that the wars fought for the propagation of religion and issues related to it have caused bloodshed far more than any other reason. Although the issues concerning religion have now receded to the background but still they have an impact on many issues which cause wars. India has suffered three wars with Pakistan since its partition on the basis of religion. The terror sponsored and activated by Pakistan in Kashmir on the basis of religion is gaining momentum day by day and the border between the two construes is always hot causing damage to many lives. Both the countries are spending millions on their masses of the developmental process. The other vital cause for their military hardware which they are manufacturing in their factories and if there is peace and issues between nations are settled for good, they will have to close their production of sophisticated arms, and their supremacy over the world will be no more which they will never like.

            The ambitious politicians and warmongers in certain countries try to engage their people in strife with some neighboring country on the pretext of settling a non-issue. By doing so they succeed to continue in power wit bout solving or looking into the problems faced by the people of their country. Their economies continue to be in shambles and their people continue to suffer extreme poverty but the witty administrators continue exploiting the emotions of the people and deprive them of their moral right to advancement. Lots of people are sacrificed on the borders or inside their territories and properties worth millions is dashed to the ground.

            The lesson of history is that, instead of settling anything, wars create more problems and generate greater hatred between nations. At best, a war may decide one issue, which party or participant is militarily stronger and capable of causing more destruction than ever. Thus the causes of war are many and varied, some major, some minor, but each time the destruction of life and property a war causes, is colossal; it is all the price of human foolishness, insanity or fulfillment or certain selfish motives or the price of the blood of lots of innocent lives.

            Another obnoxious face of modern warfare is terrorism. It is a secret warfare which can target the strongest of the strong and cause damages beyond the control of anyone. The terrorists strike in the heart of cities causing causalities on innocent people and damaging property. The recent terrorist blitz on the United States on September 11, 2001, will remain fresh forever in the minds of people. The only superpower in the world was caught off guard, totally defenseless against the well planned, well-coordinated and most massive suicide terrorist attack ever as two high jacked planes one after another guided by terrorists slammed into the prestigious twin towers of the World Trade Centre in the heart of New York City. The horrors of war have expanded their wings everywhere. In the olden days, the ground wars were fought on borders and it was exclusively a matter to be dealt with by the military forces on the border. The civilians suffered no direct impact except certain restrictions imposed and the indirect after-effects of the damages of war. The threat of nuclear and chemical warfare is already looming large on the world a nuclear war may mean global destruction. Who knows when a warmonger will turn his head and commence this wholesale destruction as there will be nobody to stop in them, as counterattacks are bound to take place? The preparations are enormous and more is lagging behind.

            Now it is, where the saner elements can work worldwide, to avoid troubles. Humanity is becoming a single entity as a result of the efficient communication system as such the developments at a place are having influenced worldwide, and any effort to avoid strife can be effective on people to people level. The common man has no scores to settle between nations. Their interests and problems are common. They can share problems with each other and help in making a conducive environment between nations. The times of expanding borders into each other territory have gone. No one is interested in digging out the old graves. Everyone likes to live peacefully at its own place and take the maximum advantages of the nature’s bounty. Live and let live should be maximum to be followed by all. There is no dispute between nations which cannot be settled on the table. The advanced countries should let the weaker and developing nations grow naturally and provide them all possible help and aid. The arms race can benefit none; neither the manufacturers of those weapons nor those who want to make a show of their improved war preparedness to harass their so-called enemies. Terrorism can be curbed by exposing the secret designs of some countries for others territories and by international efforts these nations can be singled out very easily so that they stop interference in other matter and learn to live peacefully and let other also live in peace.

            The world today cannot bear any war, neither between any two countries nor a global one. It will be the end of everything, the doomsday, which no one would lie to befall.

Essay No. 02

Horrors of War

It is admitted on all hands that war is a terrible thing. In olden times, wars were fought with bows and arrows and clubs and spears. Then wars were not so dangerous.

Then came guns, cannons, rifles, pistols, and small bombs. Then wars became more horrible. With the manufacturing of warplanes, warships, gunboats, torpedoes, and missiles wars became even more destructive. There was more loss of life and property in the first and second world wars than perhaps in all human history taken together prior to that.

With the making of the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and innumerable other destructive explosive things including nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the destructive power of the war machinery has assumed unimaginable proportions.

Now a number of countries like the USA, the UK, France Russia, China, India, Pakistan, etc. have nuclear weapons and missiles of various categories on which nuclear warheads can be mounted.

The destruction which modern wars cause is immense. Crops are destroyed. Cities are leveled. Even educational institutions and hospitals are not spared. Thousands of women become widows. Millions of children become orphans.

May God forbid, if nuclear war takes place, the whole of mankind may be wiped -off the face of the earth. So, effective steps must be taken to banish war altogether.

Essay No. 03

Body- Consequences of the war-destruction of the nation’s wars of today-war as an instrument to kill innocent people-war for the superiority of the race.

The conclusion- Changing face of the modern warfare.

Wars have always been fought since the advent of mankind. During ancient times, the reasons for one city going to war with another were usually the cattle or land. But slowly three main factors namely—wealth, women, and land became the main causes of war. Such conquests meant more jobs and prosperity back home to these nations.

In the process of their conquests, these nations destroyed the defeated nation’s craft, natural wealth, and the pool of talented workmen. This was done in order to curb any resistance that might be there in the local people.

War is no longer restricted to the fighting armies. War became an instrument of total destruction of a civilization. It killed and maimed innocent people who were in no way linked with the causes of war. Invading armies targeted women and children, sick and the old. Indiscriminate firing and bombardments reduced to rubble hospitals, blood banks, schools, and residential areas.

Instead of a battle on a battlefield, war is today fought on the street of cities and towns. Tanks and artillery fire no longer fight in formations instead they move as independent units inside the city. Thus destroying all that comes in their way. Soldiers fight from rooftops and behind the windows and not while charging straight at the enemy.

Air force planes do not bomb the enemy tanks and cannons as done previously. Instead, they carpet-bombing civilian residential areas. In the process killing children and other innocent people. They destroy homes and separate people from each other. Moving armies rob and plunder homes, shops, and banks as was done by the Iraqi army during its invasion of Kuwait

There was a time when to fire on a retreating enemy was against the rules of the war. Today countries like the USA do it often as was done by it on the retreating Iraqi army during the Gulf war. Big nations like the USA cover this act of cowardice by clever media publicity.

And lastly, ethnic conflicts and selective killing of a particular race are common. Be it they then the Tamils or Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, or the Bosnian Muslims in Serbia.

Unlike yesteryears, wars are more violent and more full of the blood of innocent people. They leave behind more unhappiness and tears. And it takes a nation many years to rebuild its economy and infrastructure that has been destroyed during the war.

About evirtualguru_ajaygour

commentscomments

This was best for me It is very nice

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Quick Links

Popular Tags

Visitors question & answer.

• Jayprakash on Hindi Essay on “Aitihasik Sthal ki Yatra” , ”ऐतिहासिक स्थल की यात्रा” Complete Hindi Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.
• Diksha on Official Letter Example “Write a letter to Superintendent of Police for theft of your bicycle. ” Complete Official Letter for all classes.
• Anchal Sharma on Write a letter to the Postmaster complaining against the Postman of your locality.
• rrrr on Hindi Essay on “Pratahkal ki Sair” , ”प्रातःकाल की सैर ” Complete Hindi Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.
• Mihir on CBSE ASL “Listening Test Worksheet” (ASL) 2017 for Class 11, Listening Test Audio Script 1

Download Our Educational Android Apps

Latest Desk

• Contemporary Indian Women-English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11 and 12 Students.
• Privatisation: Strengths and Weaknesses-English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11 and 12 Students.
• Greater political power alone will not improve women’s plight-English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11 and 12 Students.
• Casteism and Electoral Politics in India-English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11 and 12 Students.
• Wither Indian Democracy?-English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11 and 12 Students.
• Do Not Put Off till Tomorrow What You Can Do Today, Complete English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 9, 10, 11, 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.
• Shabd Shakti Ki Paribhasha aur Udahran | शब्द शक्ति की परिभाषा और उदाहरण
• Shabd Gun Ki Paribhasha aur Udahran | शब्द गुण की परिभाषा और उदाहरण
• Example Letter regarding election victory.
• Example Letter regarding the award of a Ph.D.
• Example Letter regarding the birth of a child.
• Example Letter regarding going abroad.
• Letter regarding the publishing of a Novel.

Vocational Edu.

• English Shorthand Dictation “East and Dwellings” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Haryana General Sales Tax Act” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Deal with Export of Goods” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Interpreting a State Law” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.

The Horrors of War Essay Example

• Pages: 4 (1054 words)
• Published: November 2, 2017
• Type: Essay

The horror of war is a very important theme that people nowadays should understand. I chose this theme to portray different scenarios during war. The four texts that I chose were the book, Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magician; the short story, "The Sniper" by Lima Flattery; the non-fiction novel, Going Solo an autobiography by Royal Dahl; and the film, "Saving Private Ryan" directed by Steven Spielberg. There is a good variety of perspectives of horrors during war.

At the beginning of the book, Goodnight Mister Tom, a young evacuee is sent from his home in London to a small village, Weirdo. Throughout the text, Michelle describes to us the abuse that the young evacuee gets from his mother. Will, the evacuee, starts to settle int

o the village and although he has been separated from his mother, it seems as though it is better for him, because Mr.. Tom cares for him and shows him a loving home, rather than his dark home where he is abused and is badly cared for.

Close to the end of the story, the horror of war is clearly shown, when Wills' best rend is killed from an air raid while visiting his injured father during World War II. Will was "finding it painful to sit down next to an empty chair, he would scatter papers untidily over the two desks to hide Coach's absence. " He was feeling like he was alone and there was a space missing in his life. This would be very upsetting for any person, let alone a young child. From this tragic incident we can see one of the horrors of losing

a friend in the war.

In the short story, "The Sniper", Lima Flattery suggests the horror of war not only by resenting its physical dangers, but also by its psychological effects. O' Flattery tells us a story about a sniper during the Civil war in Dublin. The sniper "reaches the Langley on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed". Because of the nature of war the sniper thinks he may know his enemy, "... The sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face".

He suffers an injury to the soul and heart, not only from being physically injured, but because someone that he loves dearly is shot and not only hat, he himself was the one who shot him. The way that this short story is finished leaves us to think about how horrible this would be to have killed your own brother. We aren't actually told anything after he looks at his brother's face, but it is clear that this would have been a very dreadful thing to go through and emotionally distressing.

Lots of people would have gone through similar things during a civil war, having families split apart and going off to different allies of war, then having to face one another at gun point. There is a clear connection to the horrors of war in "Saving Private Ryan", when three rooters are killed while fighting in the Second World War. A group of American soldiers are sent out to save and bring home the last brother to his mother, not knowing of his whereabouts.

align="justify">The soldiers had no idea who the person that they were saving was, yet they had to risk their lives in order to bring him home. "This Ryan better be worth it. He better go home and cure some disease, or invent a longer- lasting light bulb, or something". On their Journey, there are many examples of the Norris Tanat were Teach, Eternal Deluge Keller Ana navels to tell Tamales Tanat t Ovid ones have been killed. One example is when a soldier in the group is killed and the other soldiers got upset and start having arguments with one another.

The soldiers watched their friend die in front of them. This showed that one horror of the war can be that it can and does break apart friends and families. In the non-fiction story, Going Solo, Royal Dahl tells about his life during World War II as a RAFF fighter pilot, sent to war with hardly any experience. In the book, Royal Dahl tells us about a time when he crashes his plane in the desert and is seriously injured. He has his SSE pulled out and it has to be reshaped; he also sustains a head injury.

It took a few months for him to get better, but from his injuries we are shown how horrible it would be having been injured in the war and having to recover from different things, like having to learn to walk again or adjusting to losing your sight. Also it would be very unpleasant to see others injured seriously or even being killed, or hearing that "... Out of 16 trainee pilots, 13 were killed within

two years". The injuries that Royal Dahl experiences during the war help to show us the horrors of being in the war. All these stories show us horrors of war; however, there are differences between them.

The soldiers in "Saving Private Ryan" experience the war and have to fight in the Second World War, watching people being shot at and being shot at themselves, whereas in Goodnight Mister Tom, Will is not fighting in the war but he is evacuated from his home in London and has to try fit into a new place where he knows no one, all due to the war. There is a similarity between these two stories, in both stories the main characters lose a friend at war, whether they had been shot while fighting, or embed while visiting injured family members.

Similar article about  Why We Crave Horror Movies

These texts all bring together the horrors of war from the different perspective through the experiences of the characters. They show us that the horrors that were faced would have been awful to go through. War was a horrible experience not only for the soldiers but also for the families left behind because they were left without family members, children evacuated from their homes, families being split because of civil war, and the horrors of being at war and seeing people being killed or seriously injured.

• All Quiet on the Western Front and Saving Private Ryan Essay Example
• How does Wilfred Owen present the horror and reality of war in his poems Essay Example
• How is the horror of war, and the poets'criticism of war conveyed in the war poems Essay Example
• Saving Private Ryan - the war D-Day Essay Example
• Was Mussolini's Economic Policies a Complete Failure? Essay Example
• Santa Fe Trail Essay Example
• Chesapeake Dbq Essay Example
• Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden Essay Example
• French Aid in American Revolution Essay Example
• Encountering Conflict Analysis Persuasive Essay Example
• The Send-Off Essay Example
• How World War 1 significantly contributed to the fall of the Romanov Dynasty Essay Example
• Can War Bring Peace Essay Example
• The Nashville Sit-Ins Essay Example
• The Book The Killer Angels Essay Example
• World War I essays
• World War Ii essays
• Atomic Bomb essays
• American Civil War essays
• Attack essays
• Cold War essays
• Crimean War essays
• Emilio Aguinaldo essays
• Iraq War essays
• Korean War essays
• Nazism essays
• Nuclear Weapon essays
• Philippine Revolution essays
• Trench Warfare essays
• Vietnam War essays
• Western Front essays
• Diplomacy essays
• Emperor essays
• Rwanda essays
• Tribe essays
• Revolutionary War essays
• War of 1812 essays
• Mexican American War essays
• Hitler essays
• The Spanish American War essays
• League Of Nations essays
• Battle Of The Somme essays
• Treaty Of Versailles essays
• Fascism essays
• D-day essays
• Atomic Physics essays
• Atomic Bombings Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki essays
• Electron essays
• 12 Angry Men essays
• A beautiful mind essays
• A Separation essays
• Alfred Hitchcock essays
• American Beauty essays
• American Films essays
• Animation essays
• Avatar essays
• Blade Runner essays
• Bollywood essays
• Bond essays
• Bridge essays
• Cinema Of The United States essays
• Comedies essays
• David essays
• Dead Poets Society essays
• Do The Right Thing essays

Haven't found what you were looking for?

Search for samples, answers to your questions and flashcards.

• Enter your topic/question
• Receive an explanation
• Ask one question at a time
• Enter a specific assignment topic
• Aim at least 500 characters
• a topic sentence that states the main or controlling idea
• supporting sentences to explain and develop the point you’re making
• evidence from your reading or an example from the subject area that supports your point
• analysis of the implication/significance/impact of the evidence finished off with a critical conclusion you have drawn from the evidence.

Unfortunately copying the content is not possible

Tell us your email address and we’ll send this sample there..

By continuing, you agree to our Terms and Conditions .

Sample details

• Literature,
• Words: 1664

Related Topics

• The Woman Warrior
• Clash of Civilizations
• Short Story
• Character Analysis
• West Side Story
• Tuesdays with Morrie
• Edward Scissorhands
• man's search for meaning

Horror of War in Literature

Explore the ways in which Sherriff’s Journey’s End present the horrors of war. Compare and contrast your finding with Sebastian Faulks’ treatment of the same theme in Birdsong, ensuring that your response is informed by interpretations of other readers. Both Sherriff and Faulks depict the horrors of war through the various dramatic and linguistic techniques used. Some of these horrors can be perceived as the separation from loved ones, the responsibilities and expectations men faced in the trenches and the deaths of innocent men despite class, status and beliefs.

Faulks however, portrays the horrors of war in a different way, focusing on the graphic imagery, experiences of the characters and landscapes to convey the horrors. Early on in the first Act of Journey’s End, the horrors of war are revealed to the audience through the stage directions, “yellow candle-flames light the other corner”. The meaning could be ambiguous as it holds both a literal and metaphorical connotations; Sherriff symbolises how the unnatural conditions the characters exist in-the trench lit by artificial light-represents how the world men survived in, is one that is unnatural and one mankind should not be compelled to live in.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

Towards the end of the play, Sherriff uses vivid depictions in the stage directions to recreate, in a detailed way, the setting in which the soldiers are in. This makes the audience feel like they are there as the “Flying fragments of shell whistle and hiss and moan overhead”. The alliteration and personification in the first two words create a harsh and graphic representation of the horrors as the sibilance builds up a vivid nightmarish atmosphere. This represents to the audience a realistic depiction of the true horrors.

Similarly, Faulks uses linguistics to create a vivid portrayal of the landscape, deaths and injury; “The trench you started from is just a mass of bodies. ” This suggests that the degree of lost individuality and lives was astronomic, as Faulks not only shows the dehumanisation of the war but also how the masses of bodies left uncared for was normality during the war. The vivid imagery is needed to recreate what happened, in order to make it possible for the reader to picture in their mind the horrors of the described scene.

Faulks’ novel enables the reader to have a visual insight and can reveal the direful truth of how soldiers are left lying in foreign land alongside men’s corpses, with their identity unrecognisable. Birdsong is a fiction novel which uses imagery to express the graphic horrors of war in comparison to Journey’s End-restricted in terms of duration-uses auditory imagery to enable the horrors of war to be accentuated. On top of this, Journey’s End has a lack of characters that enables the audiences to relate to them portraying the horrors of war to the audience as they see what the characters experiences.

Throughout the play, Sherriff not only looks at how British soldiers were affected by the war but also the humanity that German soldiers had. This enlightens the audience about how men on both sides are compassionate despite their conditions; “the German officer fired some lights for them to see by”… “Next day we blew each other’s trenches to blazes. ” The striking difference between Osborne’s reminiscences implies the seemingly absurd nature of the warfare. It tests what men believed in, exposing to the audience how futile the war was as neither side wanted to be on unfamiliar land where killing is required of them to stay alive.

Both Sherriff and Faulks show how men’s fear of their surroundings can reduce a soldier to despair. Sherriff portrays this through Hibbert, and the terror he faces in the trenches, “I’ve tried damned hard; but I must go down”. Sherriff‘s dramatic techniques accentuate Hibbert’s fear as he acts “hysterically. ” Hibbert’s manner stresses to the audience the psychological effects that can occur as he “bursts into a high pitched laugh” and “breaks down and cries. It can be seen that the extremity of the horrors Hibbert faces were not just the physical injuries suffered but also the psychological effects that petrify and irrevocably alter men. On the other hand, Faulks shows the extent of the horror faced through landscape when “the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded” and “it was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long. ” The size of the horror is reflected in the sound that the men produce, “It was a low, continuous moaning…it sounded…as if the earth itself was groaning. Faulks emphasises the horrors of war through the figure of speech such as the personification of the landscape as he implies the land has been causes extreme disturbance by the wounded men and the use of simile to reinforce it was not just the men altered but also the landscape. On top of this, it could be seen that Faulks’s choice of words holds religious connotation of the resurrection of the dead, portraying God’s dominance over life and death yet also reminding those who believe, that they are alive, which predictably leads to the breakdown of Weir who cries out, “Oh God oh God – what have we done”.

In the same way as Journey’s End, it can be seen by the reader how the extremity of the horrors seen, were not just physical but psychological too. It is apparent that Stanhope has a lot of pressures placed upon him as he is in charge of his company, has to seem ‘normal’ in front of Raleigh and his comrades and he has to be able to cope with the pressure of war. Sherriff portrays this through Stanhope as he is forced to grow up too soon; “Despite his stars of rank he is no more than a boy. The stage directions reveal that Stanhope was only just an adult when he joined up, resulting in him having to mature early on as power was delegated to him. This therefore meant that Stanhope had to look after the lives of men at the age of twenty one and the childlike qualities he once possessed not long ago have been stripped away. To deal with the pressures, he turns to alcohol- “Drinking like a fish as usual? ”-suggesting to the audience it is a coping mechanism in order to escape the world in which he was bound to.

This portrays how men cope with the innocence they once felt that is no longer present portrayed through Raleigh who knew Stanhope from before the war where he was a ‘skipper’ at rugby, showing how the alteration of life meant that men needed a way to survive with the pressures and horrors of the war and in Stanhope’s case, abusing alcohol. Sherriff and Faulks look at how the death of soldiers devastatingly affects the men through the key protagonists.

The death of Osborne very violently affects Stanhope: “To forget you fool-to forget! D’you understand? To forget! You think there’s no limit to what a man can bear? ” Stanhope has lost his closest friend and to try to forget, he turns to abusing alcohol in order to escape from the world of bereavement, damage and destruction he now faces. However Faulks shows how Stephen faces a range of emotions to cope with the death of Weir, from trying to cry, to wanting revenge as “Now he would kill with a light heart. This implies to the reader that Weir was the only person in whom Stephen could confide and that although, at times, Stephen would appear to have had no compassion for Weir, the reality is that Weir was the only person Stephen could get close to, which led him to want to kill for revenge. The juxtaposed words expose the reality of war, as the killing of the enemy was what made men feel the lives taken were just. This may well suggest how the views of society changed within a short space of time; the death of a soldier had become ordinary.

Both the play and novel suggest that men in the trenches have a close bond that has been built up, as they are united in the appalling conditions. The war took masses of lives and the psychological effects, had a huge impact upon the well-being on men, revealing the horrific realities of the war. Sherriff explores the patriotism of young men who have not had any experience of trench life, represented through Raleigh. Whilst still at school, Raleigh witnessed the return of his hero, Stanhope, who is a serving soldier and believed him to have “looked splendid”.

Raleigh arrives at the trenches with a sense of optimism, being “frightfully keen” to join the man he admires. Sherriff enables the audience to see that Raleigh is clearly unprepared and naive of life at the front, which makes the horrors of war come to life for the audience as Raleigh is extremely youthful and his death symbolising not only the majority of the younger generations, who were more than keen to enlist to fight for their country, yet knew little of what they would witness but also how regardless of background, death can happen to anyone.

It can be seen, therefore, that the audience and the reader of both texts would find it difficult to imagine the horrors of serving and living in a trench without the writer’s use of dramatic and linguistic techniques.

Both Sherriff and Faulks create a compelling image in both the play and the novel: Journey’s End explores the relationships that formed, the views upon war and the claustrophobic conditions men live in whereas Birdsong focuses on using graphic imagery to expose death, loss, injuries, and the alteration of men’s lives. Both Sherriff and Faulks convey to the audience and the reader a glimpse of the horrors faced by men during the war and how these affected and irrevocably altered their lives.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/horror-of-war-in-literature/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

• Protagonist
• Pearl Harbor
• Lamb to The Slaughter
• the wife of bath's tale
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find
• War on Terror
• World War I
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• The Hunger Games

Check more samples on your topics

Heart of darkness: the horror the horror.

Book Review

With Kurtz’ dying words being “The horror! The horror!” the readers are left with the question as to what he meant by that statement. And as one of those readers, I could only come to the conclusion that he was referring to the horror being a form of emptiness, a profound nothingness that lies at

How Does Wilfred Owen Present the Horror of War in Exposure? Analysis

In this poem, the writer shows the reader the horrors of war from a first-hand perspective. He uses many words linking to the weather in the poem, to show that the weather is just as bad as the Germans. He shows us this by saying that the army “attacks once more in ranks on shivers

How Does Wilfred Owen Explore the Horror of War Through the Power of Poetry? Analysis

Throughout the several poems Wilfred Owen wrote throughout his experience during the First World War, he explores many themes in relation to the war and the emotions associated with these. One of the most prevalent ideas Wilfred Owen chooses to emphasise in many of his poems is that of the sense of horror associated with

The Vietnam War – Perspective of War (How the war is viewed)

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War can be viewed in two different perspectives.  One of them is a struggle by the local population against a foreign (imperialist) power, assisted by their locally-installed puppet leaders. In its history, Vietnam has been the battleground of conquerors, particularly its powerful to the north, China.  Yet, despite being invaded several times, the

Horror films: Fear Psychology

 I remember there were so many times my mother called for me, she used to make me sit and watch horror movies with her, just because she was so scared. One of them is called, a horror movie named I Know What You Did Last Summer was on TV, my mother asked me to watch

Rocky Horror Picture Show

It was a cool, sharp November eventide, while five adolescents were hustling and hustling around my house excitedly acquiring ready for their very foremost screening of the unrecorded version of their all clip favourite film. They knew it would be the best dark of their lives. The dark of my 15th birthday party, my friends

Horror Creative Writing

Rio started to make his way through the wood at which he had been unwillingly led to by his friends, he stepped over the stray branches and circled the particularly muddy areas which were covered with red and brown leaves from the slowly withering trees.Why he had agreed to this Rio would never know, the

Nazi Death Camp Horror in “Night” Masterpiece by Elie Wiesel

In Night by Elie Wiesel, the horror of war is displayed through a terrifying account of a Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family, his innocence, and his God. Night is similar to All Quiet on the Western Front in a number

Trading Horror for Hope

Stephen King

Stephen King’s newest novel Elevation lacks his trademark horror, but it makes up for it in hopefulness. Scott Carey is going weightless. Determined, stubborn and caring Scott knows his end is near but commits himself to helping others while suffering his affliction mostly alone. Dr. Bob Ellis is Scott’s first confidant. While Dr. Bob is concerned

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.