A Description of Life in the Treches During WWll essays

A Description of Life in the Treches During WWll essays A Description of Life in the German Trenches during WWI In an age driven by technology, the face of war has changed so dramatically that wars can now be fought on digital battle fields from ships that volley missiles capable of devastating entire armies at distances measured in hundreds of miles. It is far cry from life experienced by soldiers in WWI whose only protection from the nearby enemy lines merely feet away were miles of cold and shallow trenches that zig zagged their way across Western Europe. Carl Zuckmayer, a writer and WWI veteran, describes his experiences in the trenches on the Western front of the war and the effect it had on his life and political views during post war years in his autobiography entitled, A Part of Myself. Born in 1896 and only seventeen at the outbreak of war in 1914, Zuckmayer was a gifted poet whose leftist political views had a major influence on his initial disapproval of the war. I will never kill anyone. I would rather go to prison (Zuckmayer 141) was his response when asked about whether or not he would join the army. However, upon returning home from his summer vacation, he was quickly swept up in the patriotic euphoria of the German people were. He writes I remember precisely what I was feeling...something was entering me-not like an infection, but rather like some form of radiation, like a completely novel, tingling current, as if I had put my hand on the grip of an electrified machine (142). This renewed sense of national pride was fueled by the mass belief that a war with France and Russia would be a quick and victorious one. As with the rest of the German people at that time, he would comes to find out in the following years that this is would not the case. However, it sparked enough of a fire inside him that in August of 1914, along with his schoolmates, he dismissed his leftist views and enlisted in the German Army. He states...