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Example research essay topic: First World War Middle Class - 1,724 words

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... always refused (Mitchell. D, 1966 p. 193) The scarcity of hospitals in France meant that many men copped a Bright and were sent home as there were no facilities to treat their wounds. Many nurses grumbled that they had volunteered to serve abroad at the Front and there was a great deal of jealousy and resentment aimed at those who were posted to France. As regards nursing, they were told that England should be regarded as the Front, and the home hospitals should be regarded as an extension of it.

Nevertheless, the volunteers carried out their duties to the best of their abilities and their attitude to the task at hand can perhaps be best illustrated by the often neglected poetry written by women at the time. Her (May Sinclair 's ) testimony and that of other nurses or Vad's is fascinating since they knew, if not the fighting, at least its immediate results- the extraordinary stream of casualties... Such 'service' poems feel active- part of the action. Some positively burst with praise for the 'grit' and 'pluck' of the men, marching or wounded or dying Reilly Catherine Scars Upon My Heart 1981 Virago London preface xvii.

preface by Judith Kazantzis Christmas 1916 Thoughts in a VAD Hospital Kitchen There's no Xmas leave for us scullions, We " ve got to keep on with the grind: Just cooking for Britain's heroes. But, bless you! We do " nt really mind. We " ve scores and scores of potatoes, And cabbages also to do; And onions, and turnips, and what not, That go into Irish Stew. We re baking, frying and boiling, From morning until night; But we " ve got to keep on a bit longer, Till Victory comes in sight.

Then there's cutting the thin bread and butter, For the men who are very ill; But we feel we " re well rewarded; For they " ve fought old Kaiser Bill. Yes! We " ve got to hold on a while longer, Till we " ve beaten the Hun to his knees: And then 'Good-bye' to the kitchen; The treacle, the jam, and the cheese! . M.

Winifred Wedgwood p 124 Scars Upon My Heart. Despite the privations of the job, morale appeared to be high, and a cheerful countenance in turn kept the badly wounded soldiers in a better frame of mind than could be expected under the circumstances. The sights, sounds and smells of the wards, and some of the heart rendering stories would test the resilience of the nurses and Vad's to the limit. However, the health of the nurses was also at risk, as a septic wound could discharge into the smallest of cuts and cause major problems for the nurse herself. Given that a nurse would be working flat out, eating food of a poor standard, at irregular intervals, and getting hardly any sleep, it was no wonder that a nurse's immune system seldom worked properly, making her susceptible to all kinds of viral infections. The shortage of staff meant that she would have to carry on regardless.

Many Vad's became superstitious, in that if she did something in a particular way and the day turned out to be particularly successful, the same routine would have to be followed precisely or the day would become a disaster. A volunteer nurse, Sybil Harry, wrote to her friend, a Mrs. Cooke, from the Salles Militaires Hospital Unit at Saumur in October of 1914. It would amuse you to see some of the improvised utensils in the wards-I do n't think the hospital has more than five small basins for the two hundred wounded! As to a bucket it is unheard of, and we use anything from teapots to dustbins. Hot water is as scarce as whisky, and one only gets about one pint daily, so the cleaning has to be done cold.

There is no installed hot water system or lights of any sort. The water is heated on gas rings, and the wards by tiny oil lamps I am sure were used by Henri II who lies buried near here. Marlow. J. 1998 p. 48 It is doubtful if Ms. Harry's cheerful demeanour would have continued during the ensuing years, and it seems that the privations were similar wherever the nurses were working. Till Durieux, was a volunteer nurse in Berlin and the madness had begun to seep into her consciousness, Yes, I had given and helped wherever I could, but I had never been conscious of how many people were sacrificed on the whims and errors of those in power.

I had great difficulty in carrying out my duties without crying or running from this immense misery. My work is very hard and I fell exhausted into bed in the evenings. Because time was so short we often ate our meals standing up and in the first weeks my feet swelled so severely that I had to wrap them in wet towels at night. Marlow. J. 1998 P. 324 Perhaps the best-known book of a woman's World War I experience, is Vera Brittain 's haunting autobiography Testament of Youth, first published in 1933, it remains heartbreaking in its account of love and, wrenching loss. In keeping with a typically Victorian female upbringing, it was taken for granted that her younger brother Edward would attend Oxford, treating her own intellectual aspirations with scorn.

Nevertheless, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford in 1914, and at this time, she re-met Edward's school friend, Roland Leighton. Despite conventions that dictated a constant chaperone, they fell in love. At the outbreak of the war, Roland was called to the front, followed by Edward and his two friends, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson. Fearing that the war would leave "a barrier of indescribable experience" between her and Roland, Brittain left Oxford, much to her tutor's disgust, to volunteer as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, first in England and then in Malta and France.

She performed the most menial tasks in a redeeming glow of patriotic emotion. She felt somehow worthier of her fianc. (Mitchell D. 1966 p. 197) Whilst Roland was on leave from France, he and Brittain became engaged. He was killed by a sniper's bullet in December 1915; his death was followed by Thurlow's death in April 1917, and Richardson's blinding at Arras. Brittain returned from Malta intending to marry him but was forestalled by Richardson's death in June 1917. The final blow was her brother Edward's death in action in June 1918. After the war, suffering from what is now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, Brittain returned to Oxford.

As a result of her war experiences, she decided to read history instead of English. "It's my job, now, to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening to other people in the days to come" Brittain V. 1933 (p 471) Vera Brittain was very much the daughter of an upper middle class family whose sons were recruited into the officer corps in the British army, as indeed, they were in all the other major armies. The officer corps had a social composition that was elitist, and the mode of trench warfare dictated that the officers were at greater risk than the men that they led. The heaviest incidence of loss in the First World War, was amongst the social elites whose men -- brothers, husbands, fathers, sons -- fell in disproportionate numbers, throughout the war, and Vera Brittain's entire male company, her social world was stripped from her because of her social situation, where she was and who she was. As in the case of many daughters of her social class and convention, her experience of men was limited and she felt grateful that her knowledge of the masculine body was increased and thus she was released from the sexual inhibitions that beset her contemporaries.

As the War ground on, the nurse's initial wave of patriotism ebbed, to be replaced by a hardening of attitudes and the feeling of the helpless futility of it all, when in effect all that they were doing was to patch up their charges in order to send them back to an uncertain fate. Lesley Smith, the eldest daughter of a middle class Scottish family worked as a VAD wrote that on the day of the Armistice, I was dressing a man who was covered with painful boils, and he looked at me dully and said, It's over then? (Mitchell D. 1966 P. 201) This quote encapsulates the weariness felt by the whole of Europe who were sick of the death, destruction and futility of the conflict. It is noticeable that he did n't say Did we win? because in effect, nobody won.

In fact, it could be argued that the millions who died in the conflict were probably better off out of it, those who survived carried the mental, physical and emotional scars for the remainder of their lives, not to mention the bereaved families who struggled to come to terms with the senseless loss of life. Perhaps a mixture of emotions kept the Vad's at the makeshift hospitals on the front, the hope that somewhere one of her nursing sisterhood was tending to the needs of her own wounded husband/ boyfriend. Perhaps there was a feeling of guilt, in that they had cheerily waved their loved-ones off to the front in the early months of the War, they had taken part in recruitment drives and had liberally button-holed seemingly able-bodied young men with a single white feather. They simply had to make up for it now that they learnt of the horror of the situation.

When it was all over, the aftermath was distinctly unappealing. No-one could go back and pick up where they left off, that world did n't exist anymore. Bibliography French, Lord 1914 (London, 1919) p. 11 in Marwick p 41 Macdonald, L. The Roses of No Man's Land (London, Penguin, 1993 Marlow. J. The Virago Book of Women and the Great War (London, Virago, 1998) Marwick, A. The Deluge (London, Pelican, 1967) Mitchell, D.

Women on The Warpath (London, Jonathan Cape, 1966) Reilly, C. Scars Upon My Heart, - Women's Poetry and Verse of The First World War (Virago 1981)


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Research essay sample on First World War Middle Class

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