Before this, Jim "had been merely drifting." ... "Abos," the girls said with cool disgust, as if the rituals being enacted, however violent were ordinary and not to be taken note of." ... During "a long afternoon unloading ammunition-boxes," the men in "D company" learn the cruel lesson that "even an invisible enemy could kill." ... A few days later Jim goes to visit Eric in hospital, where he is confronted with the truth that not everything "has a place in the world," as he believed before the war. ... They are born, they flourish for a moment and then die. ...

• Word Count: 1373
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

A private who was aboard one of the first few gliders to reach Normandy expresses his feeling: I experienced an interesting psychological change in the few minutes before and immediately after take off. ... I remember thinking, 'you've had it chum, its no good worrying anymore - the die has been cast and what is to be, will be, and there is nothing you can do about it.' ... Yet, despite its frightful cost, the Dieppe raid taught the Allies a valuable lesson. ... In the two months before the assault, the allied airmen had set out to wreck the railroads the German army would need ...

• Word Count: 3362
• Approx Pages: 13
• Grade Level: High School

The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. ... Before 1914, English literature and ideas were in many ways still harking back to the nineteenth century: after 1918, Modern begins to define the twentieth century. ... Poetry to 1945 Queen Victoria died in 1901, but most of the certainties of the Victorian age had disappeared long before. ... Yeats himself quickly drew the lesson that 'We must purify poetry', which was to continue, through movements like Imagism and Vorticism, up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the period when the Modern mov...

• Word Count: 10566
• Approx Pages: 42