World War 1

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, written by Alistair Horne, All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, and the many letters written by soldiers give several different and similar views of World War 1. The letters written by the soldiers talk about his or her individual problems and how they miss and love his or her families. In The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Alistair Horne writes day to day stories about the Battle of Verdun and of soldiers discussing his or her feelings at that point. Erich Maria Remarque writes in All Quiet on the Western Front about the relationships between the German soldiers.

In The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, Alistair Horne writes day to day stories of soldiers discussing his or her feelings at that point. He describes the soldiers' terrible conditions and incorporates part of his or her letters describing what they saw. "The compressed area of the battlefield became an open cemetery in which every square foot contained some decomposed piece of flesh: You found the dead embedded in the walls of the trenches, heads, legs, and half-bodies, just as they had been shoveled out of the way by the picks and shovels of the working party." This source provides the most detail because it is like a movie script, in that it shows the life of a soldier in World War 1 talking with other soldiers and expressing his or her feelings about the war. It focuses on one battle, the Battle of Verdun, instead of the entire war.

In many of the letters, the soldiers wrote about his or her own experiences throughout the war. As a source, the letters are both useful and not. The good thing about the letters is that they show how the soldiers felt about the war and how they were able to deal with the constant fighting and the conditions they were in. "It goes on from day to day: alternately awful marches and then a whole day's inactive vegetating; heat and cold; too much to eat and then a long spell of hunger." The downside is that they do not give an overview of the war or tell the reader what is happening everywhere else at all times. These letters best convey what the soldiers experienced and felt because instead of historians writing about what they thought the soldiers experienced, it was the actual soldiers expressing what they were going through during the war.

In All Quiet on the Western Erich Maria Remarque writes about what German soldiers went through and about the relationships between one another. In his book, the narrator is a German soldier who tells the reader a very detailed story about his current days in World War 1. He writes dialogues between the troops and describes all of the other soldiers. "Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist..."