Complete 6 page APA formatted essay: World War I Poems.Ellis's second section deals with combat conditions. Soldiers described the shelling in numerous ways, all of them unpleasant.What could have mad

Complete 6 page APA formatted essay: World War I Poems.

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