Eye in Deep in Hell by Ellis - Book Report/Review Example

Number In is book, Eye in Deep in Hell, Ellis concerns himself with how the men survived on a day-to-day basis, in those times between the grinding offensives. What quickly emerges in Ellis's book is a vivid picture of the utter despair of life in the trenches, lives mired in rampant disease, hunger, violent death, misery, and inclement weather. How anyone survived this war with their sanity intact is a mystery for the ages. First, he describes the type of trenches built along the front such as the purpose of the first trench line. He then describes the activities often took place in the dugouts where it is conducted in deep mud, standing water, and piles of poorly buried corpses. Ellis's second section deals with combat conditions. Soldiers described the shelling in numerous ways, all of them unpleasant. What could have made those soldiers stand 'eye deep in hell' can be derived from Ellis third and last section of the book. "A Lighter Side" - the third one -was about entertainment and recreation in the trenches. They had a variety of different activities, including sporting matches, plays, and concerts. There were also the time-honored forms of recreation for soldiers of gambling and visiting prostitutes. As in all wars, letters from home were a great diversion for soldiers. All these could have lighten up the bleak the situation for the battle worn and death seeking soldier. Another factor that could have helped maintain the soldier's sanity was the knowledge that they were sharing the same wretched conditions with their line officers and other common soldier. This was described in the last section of Ellis. 2. The stereotypical battle scene of World War One is infantry emerging from its trenches and being slaughtered by machine gun and artillery fire in futile attacks. Trench warfare was only the norm on the Western Front, as well as the fairly short line between Italy and Austria-Hungary (most of their borders being mountainous and impassible to large formations). This was due to the large concentration of soldiers packed into a relatively small space. (A front of 475 miles, bordered on one side by the ocean, and on the other by the armed neutral Switzerland, with each side having a density of roughly 1 man per foot.) On the Eastern Front., there were not enough soldiers to hold a solid line in force. The war there was more characterized by scattered outposts, flanking maneuvers, and large advances and retreats, and even by the use of cavalry, which proved all but worthless in the west. We hear more about the Western front for several reasons. For one thing, it is where all British, French, Italian, and American forces fought, as well as the majority of German forces. At the start of World War I, most armies prepared for a brief war whose strategy and tactics would have been familiar to Napoleon. Indeed, a number of horse cavalry units were brought to the front by train, commanded by officers who did not imagine the factors that would render them useless. Most of these units were never deployed. However, as war broke out, German and Allied (mostly French and British) forces soon learned that with modern weapons even a shallow scrape in the soil could be defended by a handful of infantry. To attack frontally was to court crippling losses, so an outflanking operation was essential. Soon after the "race to the sea", German and Allied armies dug what was essentially a single pair of trenches from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium. The basic misunderstanding that was at the heart of the tragedy of World War I was that with the support of artillery fire, numerous soldiers could break a hole in the trench system. Basically, the idea was that entrenched soldiers could be overwhelmed by making them get their heads down and hide in the trench with the attacking soldier taking the opportunity. There were indeed cases where soldiers were able to make a gap only to be faced by another line of trenches and encirclement by the soldiers at both sides of the gap. What made it futile was that the defending army could order an artillery barrage as well and that machine guns could provide rapid fire which could kill a person instantly. With increase vigilance, surprise attacks also became worthless and futile. As a surgeon attached to the Canadian 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae had spent sixteen days treating injured men - Canadians, British, Indians, French and Germans - in the Ypres salient where the bloody battles raged. Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the bloody Boer War in South Africa, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here in Flanders, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime. This frustration of his led him to write the "In Flander's Field" where he describes the poppies growing the ever increasing rows of crosses where dead comrades, some of whom were his patients, lay buried. Nonetheless, the poem has been seen as a tool for propaganda for enlisting soldiers but it was essentially a poem of futility of the war. Wilfred's Owen painted the war as a world of dugouts, shellfire, bloody bodies, dead friends and damaged intellects. Wilfred Owen said he was witnessing the "deflowering of Europe," as the Great War raged in France and abroad. He felt that the only way to properly condemn the War was to enter into it, speak for the dying as he spoke for himself. This feeling is most evidently shown in his revisions to the poem "Strange Meeting," Owen's foray into Inferno. Line three was, before Owen edited it, "Through granites which the nether flames had groined." Again, Owen is making an illusion to Inferno, and giving this mysterious place he's found himself in the decorations of Hell. This line allows personal embellishment, petty thieving by the reader. Hell, in literature, takes many forms, be it in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, the Summoner's Prologue in The Canterbury Tales, or Woody Allen's Hell in Deconstructing Harry. Needless to say, everyone has his version of Hell, despite the descriptions posited by Dante. But to Owen, this is not a subjective hell to be offered up to scrutiny and invention by the readers, but rather a specific mortal hell residing in the consciousnesses of all the soldiers doing the fighting. It is a live, a very dynamic hell Owen speaks of. Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" spoke of the imminent death that faced soldiers during World War I. War, according to him, sends the soldier a rendezvous with death. Seeger was able to immortalize the horror of the war which, according to his poem, is a certain road to death. In this poem, Seeger also exposed the brutalities of the war fought on battered hills and resulting to flaming towns. 3. The First World War brought the conflicts, which were usually localized, into a global scale. For the first time in the whole known history of humankind has soon nay nations been involved with a war. It is this event where warfare took a new form - more strategic, deadlier and technologically intensive. Contemporary conflicts today have taken such form especially during the Second World War where radars, submarines and atomic bombs shaped the events of that period. Conflicts before World War I had men arranged in columns firing at each other face to face backed up by sword wielding cavalry. In World War I and the ensuing wars waged, battles became a hide and seek game which are deadly and which gave importance to stealthy attacks to improve the chances of success and lower fatalities on the attacking side. World War I essentially changed the rules of warfare - one which characterized conflicts and the ways it is being resolved today. The intensity of the fighting, the irrationality of it all and the number of lives and limbs it took struck deeply into the consciousness of human society. With all the horrors associated with the war, human society started to think about ways of avoiding such. Aggression was beginning to be castigated as it is now. War became to be regarded not as an adventurous and chivalrous affair as before but a sordid one to be avoided. Battles were viewed as a blood stained, murderous event. The October Revolution in Russia, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, is traditionally dated to October 25, 1917. This event was actually the second phase of the overall Russian Revolution of 1917, after the February Revolution of the same year. The October Revolution overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to Bolsheviks. It was followed by the Russian Civil War (1917-1920) and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. It is this event in history that would later make Russian immortalized in the annals of History because of its significance in the formation of the communist bloc through out the globe. The success of the October uprising completed the phase of the revolution started in February and transformed the Russian Revolution from liberal to socialist in character. Such an event is modern in the sense that it was the first time were political thoughts combined with action/practice. In the past, conflicts were inspired by revenge, religion, land disputes and greed. However, in this revolution, we see a populace animated by the "the land is for all the people" thinking which gained prominence in the teachings of Karl Marx. This event would later serve as a precursor to the contemporary major wars such as the Vietnam War, Korean War and the Chinese Revolution which saw the rise of Mao Zedong to power. References: Ellis, John (1989). Eye Deep in Hell. The Johns Hopkins University Press; Reprint edition Read More