Antithesis
* “A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.”
* “It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.”
Parallel construction
* “My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run.”
* “The wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces.”
* “No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.”
Simile
* “Like a big, soft jelly-fish, [gas] floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.”
* “He had collapsed like a rotten tree.”
Metaphor
* “When Kat stands in front of the hut and says: ‘There’ll be a bombardment,’ that is merely his own opinion; but if he says it here, then the sentence has the sharpness of a bayonet in the moonlight, it cuts clean through the thought, it thrusts nearer and speaks to this unknown thing that is awakened in us, a dark meaning—‘There’ll be a bombardment.’”
* “Immediately a second [searchlight] is beside him, a black insect is caught between them and tries to escape—the airman.”
* “I don’t know whether it is morning or evening, I lie in the pale cradle of the twilight, and listen for soft words which will come, soft and near—am I crying?”
Liturgical prose
* “Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!”
* “The evening benediction begins.”
Apostrophe
* “. . . dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the chequered bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can become the object of desire.”
* “Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child—why can I not put my head in your lap and weep?”
Allusion
* “The gun emplacements are camouflaged with bushes against aerial observation, and look like a kind of military Feast of the Tabernacles.”
* “The guns and the wagons float past the dim background of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting.”
Hyperbole
* “They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting things there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.”
* “In the evening we are hauled on to the chopping-block.”
Rhetorical question
* “Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled?”
* “If one wants to appraise it, it is at once heroic and banal—but who wants to do that?”
