Online Comparative Study:
Changing Attitudes towards the war in Britain and Germany 1914-1918
Introduction
Introduction_Document | |
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Sources
Source A
August 1914: London volunteers for "Kitchener's Army" await their pay at St. Martins-in-the-Fields.
Source B
Much has been written about the ‘generation of 1914’, the young men who joined the armies at the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm and high hopes. They were conscripted in France and Germany, though there were many volunteers among them who joined up before they were called. However, whether young men in 1914 were conscripted or volunteered, most of them in their enthusiasm stood in the tradition of earlier volunteers... patriotism, the search for a purpose in life, love of adventure, and ideals of masculinity... The rush to the colours of this generation has been ascribed to the fact that they no longer knew the reality of war; the Franco-Prussian War was fought long before and had been a short war in any case, an easy triumph for Germany over France. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why these recruits believed that the war would be short, a belief that was shared by all the warring nations. The last long wars were those of Napoleon one hundred years earlier.
Mosse, G.L., Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, 1991, p.54
Source C
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
RUPERT BROOKE
1914
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
RUPERT BROOKE
1914
Comparative_Study_1 | |
File Size: | 15 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Source D
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
WILFRED OWEN
1917
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
WILFRED OWEN
1917
Comparative_Study_2 | |
File Size: | 15 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Source E
Casualties in Battle of the Somme: July - November 1916
Britain: 420,000
France: 200,000
Germany: 650,000
Britain: 420,000
France: 200,000
Germany: 650,000
Ringer, R. (2000). Modern History. Sydney, Australia: Pascal Press.
Source F
I had taken the addresses of two German soldiers, promising to write to them after the war. And I had, vaguely, a childlike idea that if all those in Germany could know what the soldiers had to suffer, and that both camps believed the same things about the righteousness of the two national causes, it might spread, this truce of Christ on the battlefield, to the minds of all and give understanding where now there was scorn and hatred.
Henry Williamson, a soldier near Ypres, cited in History of the First World War, 1969, p.556
Comparative_Study_3 | |
File Size: | 15 kb |
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Extra Materials
HSC Directives
HSC_Directives | |
File Size: | 13 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Source Analysis: COMBAT
Criteria
Marking_Guidelines | |
File Size: | 20 kb |
File Type: | docx |