Reality Check

Reality Check 

It’s almost like you’ve been personally hit with one bombardments, when you see this picture it puts everything we have been reading about into perspective. Okay not literally, but seeing this photo is truly a smack in the face. This picture highlights the factual horrors of the war, where over the past 6 chapters we have read about it and took the words into our own imaginations. You can relate this picture to the book in many ways, with the constant commotion and sickening actions of the war. In the book, the diction allows us to visualize a lot of what Paul Baumer sees “beside me a lance-corporal has his head torn off. He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain.” (page 115) With gruesome and immense detail the book is able to showcase the raw information. When you see this picture, it is understood that the men are running away from an explosion, with has masks and bayonets in their hand correspondingly to a scene from All is Quite on the Western Front when teer gas hits the soldiers, when reading about Pauls experience “Inside the gas-mask my head booms and roars--it is nigh bursting. My lungs are tight, they breathe always the same hot, used-up air, the veins on my temples are swollen. I feel I am suffocating” readers are able to relate to their senses and connect the pain that we aren’t able to witness when just looking at the picture. In contrast to what we are visually seeing in both the book and image, we are not able to connect the emotional side of things by just viewing a picture or getting descriptions of actions in the book. There is an underlying sense of comradeship that is displayed throughout the book “But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war-- comradeship.” Readers saw this in the earlier chapters of the book, where the only thing the soldiers had was each other. However, as the you carry on reading it is shown that during bombardments the soldiers feel completely alone. We are not able to see this side of the war when viewing a picture nevertheless by reading we can get a sense of the emotional pain that goes into the war as well, “We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.” (page 116) The ability to be aware of the emotions that the soldiers are going through helps anyone get a better sense of the war rather than just viewing a picture. Both the text and image allow readers the get a better understanding of the horrors of war however one allows you to visualize things while the other helps you connect everything and gives readers the bigger picture.