Part A.
Read the three excerpts. Then answer the questions on a separate sheet of paper
An English Soldier in 1917
The patrol crawled off, and Winterbourne heard an alarmed challenge
from the men working in the sap and the word "Lantern." A Very light
went up from the German lines just as the patrol were crawling over the
parapet. A German sentry fired his rifle and a machine-gun started up.
The patrol dropped hastily into the trench. The machine-gun bullets whistled
cruelly past Winterbourne's head-zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. He crouched down
in the hole. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Then silence. He lifted his head and
continued watch. For two or three minutes there was complete silence. The
men in the sap seemed to have knocked off work, and made no sound.
Winterbourne listened intently. No sound. It was the most ghostly, desolate,
deathly silence he had ever experienced.
He had never imagined that death could be so deathly. The feeling of
annihilation, of the end of existence, of a dead planet of the dead arrested
in a dead time and space, penetrated his flesh along with the cold. He
shuddered. So frozen, so desolate, so dead a world-everything smashed and
lying inertly broken. Then "crack-pingi went a sniper's rifle, and a battery
of field-guns opened with salvoes about half a mile to his right. The machine-
guns began again. The noise was a relief after that ghastly dead silence.'
A German Soldier in 1918
The months pass by. The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the
most terrible. The days stand like angels in gold and blue, incomprehen-
sible, above the ring of annihilation. Every man here knows that we are
losing the war. Not much is said about it, we are falling back, we will not
be able to attack again after this big offensive, we have no more men and
no more ammunition.
Still the campaign goes on-the dying goes on-...
Summer of 1918-Never was so much silently suffered as in the moment
when we depart once again for the front-line. Wild, tormenting rumours
of an armistice and peace are in the air, they lay hold on our hearts and
make the return to the front harder than ever....
Summer of 1918-Breath of hope that sweeps over the scorched fields,
raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing terror
of death, insensate question: Why? Why do they not make an end? And
why do these rumours of an end fly about?²
An American Soldier in 1917
The other day myself and another fellow were sent out to make a sketch
of the country occupied by the Huns, and it was very interesting, besides
being exciting. We went through country which the Germans had retreated
from, and I can honestly say that there isn't a square yard of ground which
hasn't a shell-hole in it, some of them only a couple of yards in diameter
and others that you could put a house in. Walking or crawling through
that kind of territory isn't easy. The weather is cold, but in the daytime
warm enough to be muddy, and with equipment consisting of overcoat, two
chard Aldington, "Introduction to the Trenches, in Great Short Stories of the War, ed. Humphrey Cotton.
ndon: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1930), 203-4.
ich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1929), 284-86.
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