Your Task:
After you have read the passages and answered the multiple-choice question, write a unified essay about how the soldiers' view of life has changed due to their personal experience at war as revealed in the passages. In your essay, use ideas from Both passages to establish a controlling idea about how the soldiers'  view of life has changed due to their personal expereince at war. Use evidence from both passages to develop your controlling idea, and show how each author used specific literary elements or techniques to convey ideas.

Guidelines:
•Use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about  how the soldiers'  view of life has changed due to their personal expereince at war, as revealed in the passages
•Use specific and relevant evidence from both passages to develop your controlling idea
•Show how each author uses specific literary elements (for example, theme, characterization, structure, point of view) or techniques (for example, symbolism, irony, figurative language) to portray  how the soldiers'  view of life has changed due to their personal expereince at war.
. •Organize your ideas in a logical and coherent manner
•Use language that communicates ideas effectively
•Follow the conventions of standard written English 

CHRIS:        Annie, we're going to live now!  I'm going to make you so happy. (he kisses her, but without their bodies touching.)

ANN:           (a little embarrassed). not like that you're not.

CHRIS:        I kissed you...

ANN:           Like Larry's brother.  do it like you, Chris. [He breaks away from her abruptly.]  What is it, Chris?

CHRIS:        Let's drive some place... I want to be alone with you.

ANN:            No... what it it, Chris, you mother?

CHRIS:          No... nothing like that...

ANN:            Then what's wrong? ... Even in your letters, there was something ashamed.

CHRIS:        Yes.  I suppose I have been.  But it's going from me.

ANN:          You've got to tell me---

CHRIS:        I don't now how to start.  [He takes her hand.  He speaks quietly, factually at first.]

ANN:            It wouldn't work this way.  [Slight pause.]

CHRIS:        It's all mixed up with so many other things... You remember, overseas, I was in command of a company?

ANN:            Yeah, sure.
 
CHRIS:          Well, I lost them.

ANN:            How many?

CHRIS:        Just about all.

ANN:            Oh, gee!

CHRIS:          It takes a little time to toss that off.  Because they weren't just men.  For instance, one time it'd been raining several days and this kid came to me, and gave me his last pair of dry socks.  Put them in my pocket.  That only a little thin.. but ... that's the kind of guys I had.  They didn't die; they killed themselves for each other.  I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they'd've been here today.  And I got an idea-- watching them go down.  Everything was being destroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made.  A kind of... responsibility.  Man for man.  You understand me? -- To show that, to bring that on to the earth again like some kind of a monument and everypne would  feel it standing there, behind him, and it would make a difference to him. [Pause.]  And then I came home and it was incredible.  I ... there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a--bus accident.  I went  to work with Dad, and that rat-race again.  I felt ... what you said ... ashamed somehow.  Because nobody was changed at all.  It seem to make suckers out of a lot of guys I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator.  I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you've got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you've got to be a little better because of that.  Otherwise what you have really loot, and there's blood on it.  I didn't want to take any of it.  And I guess that included you.

---

Text 2: A Poem by  Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.