I don't have a good title, but Michaela's got that song stuck in my head.

I had a similar reading experience as Chris, in that as I read this book I was reminded of Graves' account of trench warfare. I found myself comparing the two, and wondering how the basic crux of "war" can be experienced in such completely different ways. Where Graves was incredibly traumatized due to the atrocities and fighting he experienced during WWI, Orwell's experiences were quiet, often frustrating. Like Michaela, I too was flabbergasted at the lack of guns. Orwell recounts how poorly supplied the militia was; they lacked not only guns but bayonets, tin hats, bombs. The supplies that they did have were laughably incompetent; on page 36, Orwell tells of the F.A.I. bomb, which was as dangerous to the thrower as to the men they were thrown at. In combination with these poor supplies, the men themselves were ill-prepared. Orwell was one of the few who even knew how to use a rifle, and when they did get guns, they got them with minimal instructions on how to use them. How can a war be fought like this?

But the lack of supplies and good soldiers speaks of the nature of this war itself; that is, there was hardly any fighting to require the need of such weapons. Orwell writes, "We were fighting pneumonia, not men." If one could visualize the utter pointlessness of war, the picture we are presented with here would be it - two sides camped out too far from one another to fight, without weapons to do so, reduced to calling insults back and forth as if words could replace bullets (and, to an extent, they could). I did find that the insult-throwing being somewhat effective was interesting, as it once again ties into the psychology of post-traumatic stress and how the conditions of war, whether there is extreme fighting or not, can get to a man. In this, I didn't find Orwell's experience so dramatically different from Graves' at all. The cold will get to you; the hunger will get to you; the frustration and the lack of sense will get to you.

To jump off of this, I enjoyed how Orwell laid out the political environment of this time and the causes of this conflict, though I also appreciated that he footnotes that he did not necessarily have these views at the time that he was involved in the fighting. I thought that was interesting because it ties into the mindset of, why do men fight in a war, why are they eager to sign up for this misery, if they do not even understand what it is they're fighting for? This is especially true in the case of the very young boys who enlisted to fight, boys less than fifteen who were likely seeking glory and adventure. What is the cost of glory and adventure or even a prolonging of every day life? Once again I think of Graves, and his motivations in joining the war to put off Oxford. What was the cost of this for him? In essence, he paid with his mental health for the rest of his life.

One last thing that really struck me was how the first time Orwell found himself under fire, he describes himself as being embarrassingly frightened; it reminded me that even in the most frustrating, slow war conditions, fear is still a very real thing.