Dead Man Walking

     This week our English 132 class is required to write our blog discussing two articles the professor handed out.  We have to make a connection between an excerpts from the book Rites of Spring: The Great War and the birth of the modern age by Modris Eksteins and Soldier’s Home, a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The two stories are written from two different perspectives during World War I, the perspective of soldiers in the midst of battle and the other of a soldier’s postwar return home.
     The Rites of Spring story opens immediately by telling of the massive bombing and shelling the soldiers were experiencing.  The huge shells that were being launched in their direction upon impact created holes in the ground the size of swimming pools and men were being blown to pieces. These soldiers were seeing those around them dying every day.  The smell of death and decomposition was so thick in the air that it was permeating everything the soldiers ate and drank.  Due to all the rain fall and enemy shelling, there were body parts from deceased soldiers continuing to be unearthed.  To see other humans and especially your friends blown to pieces just messes with a person’s mind. This had to play an even greater emotional toll on the remaining soldiers to have to muck through trenches around miscellaneous body parts to hold the battle line, which brings me to Krebs in the story of Soldier’s Home.
    If Krebs were to have actually been one of the soldiers in the war depicted in the article the Rites of Spring, I can definitely see how one may have experienced the trauma of war. Upon returning home, Krebs had a difficult time finding his place in society again.  Even though other men had already come back from the war and settled in to their roles in society, not everyone handles trauma the same. The Krebs family, at first, seemed understanding.  However, it only took about a month and they were ready for him to just “snap out of it” and move on with life, especially his father.  It really bothered me when his mom compared him with the Simmons boy.  Saying that he has a good job, he was settling down, and that he was on his way to being a real credit to the community.  Wow! How is that supposed to make a person feel? It would make me feel even worse than I did already.  He lies about little inconsequential events and then feels bad about it.  It leads me to believe that he is battling his ghosts from the war along with a healthy dose of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The war just seemed to have destroyed his spirit.  Krebs was a bit hollow.  He seemed to have lost the meaning of life, his purpose, and the will to want to make any effort to make anything out of his life.  His mother made a pitiful attempt at a pep talk which goes horribly wrong.  Another example of his emptiness when he tell his mother he doesn’t love her.  The trauma of war took away is ability to love anything, including himself.