Question

war engulfs all-the warrior and the common man. Justify the statement from the poems a small pain in my chest and doctors journal entry

Answer 1

The poem records briefly the narrator’s experience when he meets a dying soldier. The young soldier was smiling at its best to hide his pain and asks the narrator if he could help him. He says he needs a sip of water as he had been fighting all night without rest and is having a small pain in his chest. The narrator finds a large reddish-brown stain of blood on the soldier’s shirt. The stain is a mixture of his blood and the local dirt. The soldier consoles the narrator that his wound is not a big one and he considers himself luckier than his fellow soldiers as they have already died whereas he had survived with only a small pain in his chest. The soldier then describes his experience of the battle which took place at night. He says that he along with a troop of two hundred soldiers was climbing a hill and as they reached the top, there was an explosion and then he felt this small pain in his chest. Finally,the soldier dies from the pain in his chest. The narrator feels that because of the heavy pain from such fatal wounds, the soldier was losing his senses and was seeing darkness all around him. The narrator cannot recall what happened after that. The narrator had put his arms around the dead soldier and as he pulled him towards himself, the narrator could feel their wounds pressed against each other- the large one in the narrator’s heart against the small one in the soldier’s chest. The narrator was deeply agonized by the suffering of the soldier who finally dies from the small pain in his chest.