Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” highlights a moment during the Crimean War where 600 British soldiers mistakenly charged heavily fortified Russian artillery forces after receiving incorrect orders. Subsequently, most of them died without having gained much during the attack. Rather than describing the pointless loss of life during that charge, Tennyson chooses to glorify the soldiers’ choice to courageously follow through with the orders without hesitation over its feasibility. Nowadays, we might refer to this as “blind obedience”, and would rarely declare it an act of valor. Instead, most of us would feel contempt towards the leader giving orders and pity for the soldiers who followed them. In the 19th century, the battlefield was considered just as much a place for nations to show off their “muscle” and military wit as it was to settle diplomatic disputes. Sixty years later, this mentality led to several European powers being eager to find an excuse to wage war with one another. When that excuse finally arrived and the First World War began, the mentality dramatically shifted as tens of thousands of people were dying every day without a clear reason as to why. War no longer seemed distant as the possibility of knowing someone who died in battle severely increased with each passing year. War became personal. Rupert Brooke describes it best in his poem “The Dead”. Brooke individualizes the perished troops and gives them a “story” to their lives. The poem consists of descriptions of very human experiences such as love and watching sunsets. He makes it very clear that all those who died in battle were not born soldiers. They shared the same experiences we have every day and would most likely continue those experiences for several more years had they not died in battle. Brooke highlights that any loss of life is cruel as it terminates the human experiences we all partake in. If anything, Brooke is trying to glorify the men who died based on how they lived rather than what they were doing when they died.