Death of a Hero

The extract under analysis is ‘Death of a Hero’ by Richard Aldington.   The theme of the extract is ‘war’ or ‘a man of war’. The main idea is ‘there are no winners in war’, and the main problems are ‘the futility of human life’, ‘the different behavior of people at war’, ‘the artist and war’, ‘the destructions of war’.
The story begins with the description of the present state of things at the time, described in the extract(during WWI) – Three more nights passed rather more tranquilly. Both sides quieted down (the German and the British), and on the third night Winterbourne, the main character of the story, got to bed fairly early and fell into a deep sleep.   But then suddenly, Winterbourne was waken up by a terrific rumble and roaring, that meant the beginning of the bombardment. And then, till the end of the extract, the author describes Winterbourne’s feelings and thoughts about the things happening around him. At first, when he was suddenly waken up, he was confused, because when he’d gone to bed   everything was quiet, and then unexpectedly the bombardment started and the ‘whole earth was shaking as if beaten by a multitude of flying hoofs’. Then he took a look of what was happening outside, he understood that the British started the bombardment, and he saw that the German lines were ‘a long, irregular wall of smoke, torn everywhere with the dull red flashes of bursting shells’.   For some time Winterbourne stood there and watched the battle in action, but then, when he couldn’t bare it anymore, he ran, with his hands clutched together, and tears in his eyes.
The story is the 3d person narration with elements of description. The whole extract can be divided into 5 parts:
We can call the first part ‘everything goes asleep’, because at the beginning of the extract it is described that everything was quiet, the fights stopped, both sides quieted down and the main character, Winterbourne, got to bed early and fell into a deep sleep.   We have an epithet ‘deep...