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1785 Redefining AmericaExtending Beyond the Text Throughout history, writers and artists have created works about war. Following is an example that, like Brian Turner%u2019s poem, portrays an average soldier%u2019s experience. The passage here is from Atonement , a 2001 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It describes three World War II soldiers as they discover the aftermath of Hitler%u2019s invasion of France. 1. How do the pieces by Turner and McEwan characterize both the physical and psychological effects of wartime conflict on soldiers? 2. What devices or techniques do each of these pieces use to portray the trauma of war? For example, how does imagery convey meaning in each? 3. How are each of these portrayals similar? 4. Where do they differ? How do those differences reflect the attitude of the writer? from Atonement Ian McEwan There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterwards would not let him go. When they reached the level crossing, after a three-mile walk along a narrow road, he saw the path he was looking for. . . . The path he was interested in started down the side of a bombed house. . . . Scattered around were shreds of striped cloth with blackened edges, remains of curtains or clothing, and a smashed-in window-frame draped across a bush, and everywhere, the smell of damp soot. This was their path, their shortcut. He folded the map away, and as he straightened from picking up the coat and was slinging it around his shoulders, he saw it. The others, sensing his movement, turned round, and followed his gaze. It was a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee. From where they stood there was no sign of blood or torn flesh. It was a perfect leg, pale, smooth, small enough to be a child%u2019s. The way it was angled in the fork, it seemed to be on display, for their benefit or enlightenment: this is a leg. . . . The scraps of cloth, he was beginning to think, may have been a child%u2019s pyjamas. A boy%u2019s. The dive bombers sometimes came over not long after dawn. He was trying to push it away, but it would not let him go. A French boy asleep in his bed. Turner wanted to put more distance between himself and that bombed cottage. It was not only the German army and air force pursuing him now. If there had been a moon he would have been happy walking all night. Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.