OPVL Exercise: World War I # 5 the Arts and Society

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1 OPVL Exercise: World War I # 5 the Arts and Society You will first divide yourselves into groups of 3-4 students apiece. Your assignment to prepare Origin, Purpose, Value and Limitations Document Analysis (OPVL Analysis) for each of the following documents. You are expected to consult the handout: Document Source Types: Values and Limitations. You will then produce an analysis: What the Document Says, Relevant SFI, and Inferences Which May Drawn from the Document. Be prepared to discuss your document analysis with the entire class. The analysis will be structured as follows: Origin Purpose Value Limitations What the Document Says Relevant SFI Inferences At home, you will write an essay which will answer the following question: Using your own knowledge and the following documents, what were some of the social consequences of World War I? While I assume that everyone will draw upon their group s analysis (and upon the class discussion as well), each individual s essay must be his / her own, and not the product of the entire group! Group Analysis (W=4) Essay (W=3)

2 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 2 Document A Rupert Brooke, English poet ( ) [died of blood poisoning] 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; Her laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Document B John McCrae, ( ), English poet [Physician, served with artillery before being appointed to run a military hospital. Died of pneumonia] In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That marks our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high, If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

3 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 3 Document C Erich Maria Remarque, German Novelist, ( ) All Quiet on the Western Front, [The most famous novels from World War I, and considered one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front was an immediate best-seller, and turned into an Oscar winning movie in The Nazis banned both the book and the film when they seized power.] Dedication: This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped the shells, were destroyed by the war. "It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." Document D Gilbert Frankau, British Soldier (invalided out in 1918 with shell shock) But War, as war is now and always was A dirty, loathesome, servile merder-job;-- Men, lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid, Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime That wrenches gum-boot down from bleeding heel And cakes in itching arm-pits, navel, ears; Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering: Men driving men to death and worse than death; Men maimed and blinded; men against machines Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame and wire: Men choking out their souls in poison gas: Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet: Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away, Cursing, with their last breath, the living God Because He made them, in His image, men... Gilbert Frankau

4 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 4 Document E Ernst Jünger, ( ) from Storm of Steel, ( Jünger, who was described by his commanding officer as a recklessly courageius officer, was wounded 7 times and awarded the Ordre Pour le Mérite, Imperial Germany's highest decoration for valor. [After the war, he refused a seat in the Reichstag from the Nazis in order to concentrate on his novels. He served as a staff officer in France and the Soviet Union, becoming disillusioned with the atrocities committed by the SS. Jünger was dismissed after the July plot to assassinate Hitler. His son was convicted of subversion [criticizing the Nazis] and assigned to a penal battalion, where he was killed in Italy.] Combat during the World War also had its great moments. Everyone knows that who has ever seen these princes of the trenches in their own realm, with their hard, set faces and blood-shot eyes; brave to the point of madness, tough, quick to leap forward or back. Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all warfare and it produced its own type of men--men who grew into their Hour--unknown, crazy fighters. Of all the stimulating moments of war, none is so great as the meeting of two Shock Troop Leaders in the narrow confines of a trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then. Blood wrings forth from their shrill war cries which are wrenched from the heart like a nightmare.... This is the New Man, the storm soldier, the elite of Mitteleuropa. A completely new race, cunning, strong, and packed with purpose. What first made its appearance openly here in the War will be the axis of the future around which life will whirl faster and ever faster... The glimmering sunset of a declining period is, at the same time, the morning light of another day in which men are called to new and harder battles. Far behind them await the mighty cities, the hosts of machines, the nations whose iner foundations will be torn asunder by the attacks of the New Man--of the audacious. the battle-proven, the man merciless both to himself and to others. This war is not the end. It is only the call to power. It is the forge in which the world will be beaten into new shapes and new associations. New forms must be molded with blood, and power must be seized with a hard fist..... War, the Father of all things, is also our father. he hammered us, chiseled us, hardened us into that which we now are. And forever, as long as the wheel of life still turns in us, War will be the axis on which it revolves. He trained us for war, and warriors we will remain as long as we draw the breath of life.

5 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 5 Document F Wilfred Owen, English poet, [Owen is generally regarded as the greatest poet of World War I. He was killed in action on 4 November, 1918] Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows? Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish Baring teeth that leer like skulls teeth wicked? Stroke on stroke of Pain but what slow panic, Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? And from their hair and through their hands palms Misery swelters. Surely we have perished Sleeping, and walk in hell; but who these hellish? Document G Wilfred Owen, English poet, [Regarded by many as the greatest poem from World War I. The Latin phrase dulce et decorum est pro patria mori it is sweet and decorous to die for one s country was well known to every British school boy] 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 our 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. 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,

6 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 6 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.

7 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 7 Document H F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Tender is the Night p. 57 [American novelist, member of the Lost Generation ] "This Western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it again, but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes.... Why this was a love-battle--there was a century of middle-class love spent here.... All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself here with a great gust of high explosive love.... " Document I T. S. Eliot, from "The Hollow Men" 1925 [American expatriate poet; The Hollow Men broke new ground poetically] Mistah Kurtz he dead A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. V Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear

8 OPVL Exercise # 5 Page 8 Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.