I think that The Deserter by Winifred Letts has made the biggest impact on me out of all of the WWI readings we have covered in this unit. I think it impacts me the most because I can kind of relate to it. I don’t think I’m a brave person and I think that if I was a soldier, I would probably abandon the fight. The man the poem describes attempts to desert the fighting, as we know from multiple lines in the poem: “He could not face the German guns and so he turned and ran away.”, and “The shots rang out and down he fell, an English bullet in his heart.”. He was shot by his own side because they saw that he was fleeing. The part of this poem that elicits the most emotion from me is the ending.
But here’s the irony of life,-
His mother thinks he fought and fell
A hero, foremost in the strife.
So she goes proudly; to the strife
Her best, her hero son she gave.
O well for her she does not know
He lies in a deserter’s grave. (p. 23 of our packet)
The soldier’s mother believed him to be a heroic man that would fight for his country but he was actually just a scared man in a war, in the end. This reminds me of a part of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
May I never come back if he wasn’t killed instantaneously. (p. 181)
In this part of the book, the main character is visiting the mother of one of is comrades who died. The soldier that died, Kemmerich, died in enormous pain that lasted a long while. Paul, however, swears to Kemmerich’s mother that this was not the case, and that he died instantly and he felt no pain. I am making this connection because it seems that the same theme of hiding things from soldiers’ mothers to make them feel better comes up in both of these pieces of literature. In the poem The Deserter, the mother does not know that her son was a deserter shot by his own side. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the mother does not know that her son died brutally.