World War I

1. World War I Writing a descriptive article with the pupils of Papadopoulou Language School, Litochoro, Greece, by Lisa Murray.

2. Background Information In this short project, students wrote a narrative article on life in the trenches during the First World War. To begin their work, the students looked at images from the Internet, paintings, read the poem Dulce et Decorum Est by the famous war poet Wilfred Owen and discussed at length the different aspects of trench life. They wrote short descriptions of the trenches using three of the five senses; sight, sound and smell. These details were then incorporated into an article in which the students were asked to describe a visit to the frontline.

3. The lesson The first lesson involved a lot of discussion. Students had learnt about the First World War at school earlier in the year and already had good general knowledge. We recalled this knowledge in the class and then moved to details of trench life. A diagram of a trench helped understand its construction and images collected from the Internet also illustrated the conditions of the soldiers’ lives. http://www3.eou.edu/hist06/TrenchWarfare.html

4. Images collected form the Internet helped with visual understanding http://historyimages.blogspot.com https://trcs.wikispaces.com/WorldWarI09 Some useful information can be read on http://www.firstworld war.com/features/trenchlife

5. The final exercise before writing in this lesson, was to arrange the desks in the classroom to form a trench. All the students then hunkered down in the trench and were told to keep their heads low so the enemy wouldn’t shoot them. To add a little drama, the teacher banged a large heavy book on the desk, which made the students jump. This, they were told, was to imitate the shelling. A final summing up took place of all the conditions we had dicussed while the students were still in the trench. Working in pairs the students wrote about one aspect of trench life in relation to the senses. For example, one pair would focus on the sounds that they would hear if they were to witness the frontline: sounds of shelling, shouting, crying, gunfire, bugles etc.

6. Lesson 2 In this lesson, we discussed a particular weapon of the war, that of poison gas. The students read the poem Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, and analysed its meaning. This is a poem that helps visualise the scene of a gas attack and which uses poignantly descriptive language. In addition, the painting Gassed and Wounded by Eric Kennington helped illustrate the nightmare of gas attacks. Following this, the students were asked to act as a reporter and to write an article describing a visit to the frontline. They were to describe the conditions of the trenches and narrate an event of a gas attack.

7. Kennington, Eric Henri RAGassed and Wounded 1918 An interior scene of a field hospital showing gassed and wounded soldiers lying on stretchers. In the foreground there is a soldier with his eyes bandaged and his mouth open in pain. His stretcher is carried by an orderly. A smoking stove stands in the left foreground, and the light shines in from the right onto the faces of the blinded men. By the war poet Wilfred Owen, 1918.

8. Here are the explanatory notes for the poem, available from:http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html 8 the early name for gas masks  9 a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue  10 the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks  11 Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling  12 normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew; here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier's mouth  13 high zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea  14 keen  15 see note 1  8 October 1917 - March, 1918 1 DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country   2 rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)  3 a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer  4 the noise made by the shells rushing through the air  5 outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle  6 Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells  7 poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned  Other useful paintings of the time can be found at Imperial War Museum website http://www.iwm.org.uk For this theme, try Sargent, John Singer, The Interior of a Hospital Tent, 1918 Sargent, John Singer, Gassed, 1918-19

9. Examples of Students’ Work.

10. Example 2