The Wars - verismilitude
...fering that the soldiers encountered. The images seem very true because the reader can vision pieces of body flying in the air and see the terror on the bleeding peoples faces. The explosions are described in a situation that could have very much so been real. In the battle of Verdun 1916 there was an “...intense artillery bombardment of the forts surrounding Verdun” (Battle). With ‘intense artillery bombardment’, it makes sense that men were ‘blown apart by the combustion’, therefore Findley created an appropriate image of the events, which sustain the realism of the novel. On the contrary, some readers might have believed that verisimilitude is not present in the novel. Unfortunately for them, there is nothing unreal about the deaths that occurred. Before Robert dies there has been “... the deaths of 557,017 people - one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died in bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits” (Wars 180). This number gives the reader a believable idea of how many people actually died from the war at that point in the book. Only three were not from the war. To the reader, the amount of deaths gives the sense of the life that used to be. The image of all the soldiers being dead is in fact real because in World War I an approximate total of “...nine million, so around one in eight of those who served had died” (Dowswell 40). Instruments of attack were the cause of most of these deaths. The use of weapons in the battle appeared to be to true because the reader can almost feel “The gas [that] was reaching down towards them—six feet—five feet—four” (Wars 139). The reader feels like they are in the position of the soldier waiting for the gas to come and kill them. This gives the reader a sense of what it might have felt like to be in a position where deadly gas was coming. Other types of weapons were plastered all over, even “The trenches [were] defended with machine guns and barbed wire, [that were] virtually impenetrable” (Dowswell 8). This shows that soldiers took drastic measures to protect themselves, which would cause many deaths to the opposing side. When analyzing various images including death, it is obvious that Findley has used verisimilitude in The Wars. If he did not describe the situations of war on the real facts, the novel would be hard to read and not believable. There would be no vivid description of images that makes the book so wonderful and most importantly makes the book seem actual. If the details of the war were not descriptive so that “... the ditches were literally piled with corpses and carcasses to a height above the level of the road” (Wars 198), it would not be the same. It would be fake. It would say something like ‘...