Generalisation 1Ivor Gurney really enjoyed the first world war. | Too simple! True, there is a lot of evidence to show that he was healthier and happier than ever before, but there is also a lot of evidence to show that he found the war disturbing and terrifying. One example is… | Generalisations 2Ivor Gurney hated being in the trenches. | Too simple! True, his poems captured the horror of it, but there were many times when he found happiness that he had never known before. For example… | Generalisation 3Ivor Gurney’s letters and poems can only tell us about Ivor Gurney. | Too simple! True, they are probably most reliable for the attitudes and views of Ivor Gurney, but go back to each of your Steps. Gurney’s letters …show more content…
and poems also tell us about… |
Generalisation 1
Ivor Gurney really enjoyed the First World War:
Although there is a lot of evidence supporting the generalisation, it is not necessarily true; we do not know how he really felt, but it could not have been very different from his home sick soldier friends.
Ivor sent many letters to his very good friend: miss Marion Scott; he tries his best to impress her with his courage, when he is in training and is mostly optimistic. Ivor says in one of his letters to Mrs Voynich (his novelist friend): “Well, here I am, soldier of the King! The best thing for me at present. I feel nowhere could I be happier than where I am”. In this quotation, Ivor Gurney is rejoicing that now that he is at war, his mind is distracted from his troubles, fears and depression: he is not happy to be at war, but happy to be getting cured from neurasthenia. When Gurney first joined the unit, he got “such a thrill such as” he had “not had for a long time” but little did he know of the consequences of his acts. When he wrote to Miss Scott on June 16th 1915, Gurney cursed irritatedly the armies ways of teaching and admitted his disgust and regrets: “Take ‘em for a route march, stand ‘em on their heads […] They are mad as hatters here.”. This is only the beginning of his exhausting stage in the army, but still, he remains relatively positive even after describing that due to the cold weather, they can obtain an average of only three hour sleep: he says, “the life is grey as it sounds, but one manages to hang on to life by watching the cheerier …show more content…
spirits-wonderful people some of them; after all, it is better to be depressed with reason than without. Ivor Gurney mainly depends on his friends to keep his spirits up: 7th June 1916, “But O what luck! Here am I in a signal dugout with some of the nicest young men I have ever met.” And again, Gurney repeats that: “These few days in the signal dugout with my welsh friends are the happiest for years…War’s damned interesting. It would be hard indeed to be deprived of all this now, when my mind is becoming saner with more outside things, another reference to his happiness of the improvement of his mental condition due to the outside distractions. That same day, he began to write about how he missed his home slightly, how a cuckoo (often used to describe mental problems) reminded him of Gloustershire, his hometown: “Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts of home”. An evidence that agrees with one of his generalisations is surprisingly in the poem he wrote on his return from the war, but by then, his mental illness had deteriorated rapidly: “ Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys are sung-but never more beautiful than there under the guns’ noise. By that, Gurney explains his sadness from parting with his welsh friends he met at the dugout, and how they used to sing beautifully under the guns noises. I believe that the person Ivor Gurney missed the most was Will Harvey whom he thought dead; I think they had a special relationship. Gurney says in one of his letters to Miss Scott in August: “He is my friend, and nothing can alter that. If I have the good fortune ever to meet with such another, he as a golden memory to contend with”. His later poems: Pain, Near Vermand, and Strange Hells describe his distress and pain. Ivor Gurney was wounded by a bullet in the arm on Good Friday, and stayed in a hospital for six weeks, but a gassing followed shortly after. In conclusion, Ivor Gurney did not greatly enjoy the war and certainly not the deaths, he merely enjoyed his experience with his friends and the sudden happiness from forgetting his past and depressions: he had once tried committing suicide.
Generalisations 2
Ivor Gurney hated being in the trenches.
It is true that he hated being in trenches; in many of his poems, he describes his horror but even so, he found joy he had never experienced before, with some Welsh friends he made; they shared their past and war experiences which fascinated Gurney greatly.
Never before, had he experienced such happiness; but we are not sure if he chooses not to write of his sadness to not distress his friend Marion Scott. He writes mostly about his friends and only vaguely about the conditions in the trenches: “Where and How, I may not say; bang in the front seat we are…But O what luck! Here I am in a signal dugout with some of the nicest young men I have ever met”. In his poem “Pain”, Gurney inspires his work from what he sees: such descriptions cannot be made up: they can only be seen; the title also depicts how Ivor Gurney felt during the war in February 1917. “An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows […] Till pain grinds down, or lethargy numbs her” from the poem “Pain” greatly expresses Gurney’s feelings at that time. Gurney also feels like a child at school, he writes to a friend at the start of February 1917 and explains the cleaning-up inspection: “When the R.S.M. came around, he chuckled and said, ‘Ah Gurney, I’m afraid we shall never make a soldier of you;’ “. We also know that the trenches weren’t nice at that time, as the book describes it: “they would had noticed a big contrast with the trenches”, “In places, there was no sign of organised trenches, just shell holes
joined up to one another”. Although the 2nd/ 5th Gloucesters (including Ivor Gurney) missed the slaughter of Somme, they still were unfortunate to have to live in the remains. When they were “in the line”, Gurney wrote to Marion: “we suffer pain out here, and for myself it sometimes seems that death would be preferable to life”; he obviously is anxious to leave the trenches and his moral seems very low. I think that we can deduct again that Gurney only liked being with his friends but did not like the trenches, probably nobody did!
Generalisation 3
Ivor Gurney’s letters and poems can only tell us about Ivor Gurney.
This may be true, but it is very possible that the other soldiers alongside Ivor Gurney shared his views and opinions. We cannot be sure that the other militaries thought and acted the same way: some entered the war for different reasons, some were even used to those conditions. If so, the war wasn’t such a great shock and they may have enjoyed it. Unfortunately it is possible that maybe a few entered the war because they were bloodthirsty and enjoyed the sight of dead and injured people. Even so, we can probably rely on the letters to portray the feelings of the other men in the war as well as Gurney’s. Many of the men sent letters to their wives, girlfriends, mothers and women they were friends with so they probably didn’t want to scare them with the horrors of the war, therefore didn’t describe fully how bad it was. So I think that Ivor Gurney, like the other soldiers felt the same way about the war.