Before Charles Hamilton Sorley was unexpectedly shot by a sniper at the battle of Loos on the 13th October of 1915, at the age of 20, he wrote the poem When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. Charles Hamilton Sorley wrote this poem right before he had died in the war to show his thoughts on the brutal conditions and immoral lifestyle they lived in. He was an average student who had taken classes and had an optimistic point of view of life who had joined the war to be a part of his country; like many other fools. In the war they went against all human dignity and the dead had no respect, which is described in, When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead.
Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in Aberdeen in 1895 and 18 years later he decided to live in Germany and went to college at University College, Cambridge. Once war was declared in August 1914, Sorley unexpectedly went back to England to enlist in the British Army. He joined the Suffolk Regiment and went through multiple months of training; soon after he was sent to the Western Front for war. Then at the age of 20 he was unexpectedly shot by a sniper at the battle of Loos on the 13th October of 1915. When he died, he had only 37 finished poems to share with the world; including the poem he had just finished, When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. His most popular …show more content…
The soldiers should avoid giving any pity or praise the dead because when they died they became a ghost and the conversations between the living and the dead are meaningless to the world. The poem shows the cruel environment of WWI and this can be seen by the title of the poem itself, When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. There is a secret meaning behind the title and the key word is “mouthless”. This is because the voices of the ones who died could not be heard by those around the world and were