Void of Emotion

It is commonly viewed that soldiers are heroic and courageous. They have either fought or are fighting for a just cause and are the truest form of patriotism. These images are what people have chosen to see. There is no way to know what horrors a soldier has seen while in combat. And there is no way to know how they are going to handle it upon returning home. Modris Ekstein and Ernest Hemingway both wrote stories about World War I.

In “Rites of Spring” Ekstein describes the living conditions and emotions of the soldiers while fighting in Verdun. He explains how soldiers have a void of emotion when it comes to death. He wrote that when soldiers were digging up trenches, they would find decaying bodies and would simply shovel them out of the way as if they were just dirt. He also described how the men were desensitized by all the gruesome images they were forced to see during battle. One soldier explains how he watched a master marksman was shot in the head and they carried him with brain matter running down his face and fully conscious back to a tunnel.
These horrible circumstances leave emotional scars on soldiers for the rest of their lives. In Ernest Hemingway's story he tells of a young man who has returned from war and has lost touch with his emotions. He can no longer feel love and is caught in a constant rotation day in day out. Probably suffering from PTSD, Harold rarely found himself out of bed. The war had hardened him and his family did not understand the extent of his sadness and depression. They wanted him to find a job and find a woman to settle down with. But when he returned home he had lost his interest in relationships. Women were too complicated and he was tired of telling lies.

Ekstein and Hemingway's stories are similar in the way that they describe the loss of emotion their characters had to suffer. Ekstein wrote that some men were lucky enough to not lose their sense or love and adventure because they were on the calmer parts of the front-line. But others were not so lucky and were forced to be a part of a different war that was not kind to them. The men faced hostile living conditions and witnessed so much death that they became immune to its effects. This was shown in the way Harold acts when he returned home. The way Hemingway described him made him seem cold just as the soldiers in Ekstein’s story.

War forced the men in both stories to void themselves of all emotion to survive war. The way both authors write their stories is chilling and insightful into the hard lives of men during the First World War. Emotions are what make humans human and these men had to give up a part of them to make it through terrible experiences.