The similarities
between Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring
and Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” are very apparent. If read
consecutively, one might say that the Hemingway short story is an example of
how a soldier might cope with experiencing the events described in Ekstein’s
book.
In Rites of Spring, a very detailed description of trench warfare
during the Great War is given. The author tells of the unsanitary and gruesome conditions
that the soldiers were placed in, as well as the effects those conditions had
on soldiers’ minds, often driving them insane. Often, during the Great War, the
soldiers faced conditions so unspeakable that they had to develop different
coping mechanisms in order to survive.
For example, there is one instance
where the soldiers walked by a severed hand and jokingly shook hands with it.
In order for this to occur, the amount of fragmented pieces of human beings lying
around had to have been in very high amounts. For this gruesome sight to be so
common that a soldier could, without hesitation, and maybe even with some
comical enjoyment, walk up to the pieces of human bodies and interact with them
in a lighthearted manner, the number of dead lying around exposed in and around
the trenches must have been massive.
Other instances of coping with the mental
burden of warfare include a soldier nonchalantly continuing to eat his meal
after a soldier had fallen right next to him, and a comical-sounding letter
written from a soldier to his mother describing a situation in which decomposed
remains were embedded in sandbags which were used to lean on during the use of
a periscope. The soldier explains to his mother that he is facing a dilemma –
the remains in the sandbag are helping support the structure that the periscope
is resting on, and in turn, the soldier must debate whether to get rid of it
because of the awful smell or to keep it in order for the parapet to retain
integrity. The soldier even nicknames the remains of the fallen German soldier “Fritz.”
In the short story by Hemingway, the main
character (Krebs) is a near-perfect example of how a veteran of the Great War
might have turned out after having seen the gruesome sights and experiencing
the greatly disgusting living conditions. Krebs, after returning home from the
Great War, finds that many of the daily activities which he had partaken in
before enlisting in the military during wartime are a much different experience
after coming back home from the war. For him, everything takes on a completely
different perspective.
The experiences he went through in the
Great War, most likely very similar to what the trench soldiers experienced in Rites of Spring, are considered so
absurd, unspeakable, and unbelievable by the public that Krebs feels he has to
lie in order to be believed by anyone. Krebs develops “a distaste for
everything that had happened to him in the war” because he has to lie so much
and, in turn, he is distanced from people.
The events described in Rites of Spring that were experienced by
Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” were so intense that Krebs is no longer even capable
of loving another human being. This problem presents itself when Krebs’s mother
asks Krebs if he loves her, to which he replies a blatant, “No.” Realizing he
has upset his mother, he has to create another lie, perhaps the most disturbing
one of all – that he does love his
mother.
