Perhaps nothing is more common in the pages of history books than wars. Since the beginning of time, humans have fought to maintain their position and conquer more. Yet the images of war are not always the honking, flag-waving, fresh-faced recruits they are portrayed as. The reality of war is dark, bleak and harrowing, with conditions harmful to the mind, body and spirit. The reality of the war and the terrors experienced there are documented and told by authors over time, including All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, the graphics of Tardi Goddamn This War! and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. What the three men are alluding to is the idea that perhaps the true brutes are not those who defend themselves, but those who attack, and that the disease of imperialism and the contagion of power is what ultimately turns men into savages . plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The most graphic and crude representation of war is that told by Jacques Tardi, who in his collection of drawings portrays a bitter and brutal state of perpetual violence. His short captions are paired with images of dismembered men and bloody faces, the worst of the quotes being "I would have liked to see the wise men right there in the heart of hell: Joffre, the president, the Kaiser, the ministers, the priests and to the last general and even my mother for giving birth to me” (Tardi 18). that the comic sends combines the horrors of war with the mental scars of the men who witnessed it approaches the war from the point of view of Paul Baumer, young, promising, full of the fire of his fellow friends and soldiers as they fight for theirs. homeland, Germany. Filled with patriotism and nationalism, Paul and his friends soon realize that the war is not what they expected, nor what they wanted; it is what they feared; shows them that patriotism and nationalism are nothing more than myths, clichés to mask the true terror of war. The excerpt provided portrays a scene in which Paul and his friends visit Kemmerich, an old classmate and now amputee. Muller, a "really quite sympathetic" character, asks Kemmerich for his boots, which he will obviously no longer need (Remarque 20). This bitter but realistic scene painfully shows the loss of emotional morality through brutality on the front. While Muller meant no harm in asking for the boots, the scene simply demonstrates the survivalist nature of men and the "dog eat dog" mentality they must have to survive. Corporal Himmelstoss, brutal, tyrannical and severe, forces them to perform petty and humiliating tasks, such as making and remaking beds, plowing snow, crawling in the mud on all fours and bayonet fighting with heavy iron bars (Remarque 23- 25 ).Although Himmelstoss is cruel, he teaches naive men the realities of war without the rose-colored glasses of nationalism they learned in school. Kemmerich's scene in the hospital is particularly poignant in showing the man's moral position still in the face of terror; Paul refuses to leave him alone and holds him until he dies. This heartbreaking scene is immediately dampened by the doctor, who says: "You know, today alone there have been sixteen deaths, yours is the seventeenth. There will probably be twenty in all" (Remarque 32). Paul is disgusted by the carelessness of the.