Aphorism
* “No soldier outlives a thousand chances.”
* “. . . terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”
Symbolism
* “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this—here he is.”
* “I pass over the bridge, I look right and left; the water is as full of weeds as ever.”
Foreshadowing
* “‘I can sleep enough later,’ she says. . . . Her face is a white gleam in the darkness.”
* “On the landing I stumble over my pack, which lies there already made up because I have to leave early in the morning.”
Doggerel
* “Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay.”
* “And the war would be over and done in a day.”
Short utterances
* “It is not fear.”
* “Thirty-two men.”
* “Life is short.”
Cause and effect
* “Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual; they are not more tense nor more flabby—and yet they are changed.”
* “They have taken us farther back than usual to a field depot so that we can be re-organized.”
Irony
* “The shells begin to hiss like safety-valves—heavy fire—. . . .”
* “. . . a high double wall of yellow, unpolished, brand-new coffins. They still smell of resin, and pine, and the forest.”
Appositive
* “Thus momentarily we have the two things a soldier needs for contentment: good food and rest.’
* “I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval.”
Caesura
* “It is all a matter of habit—even the front-line.”
* “The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the year at the Front behind us—against whom, against whom?”
* “Pen-holders, a shell as a paper-weight, the ink-well—here nothing is changed.”
Onomatopoeia
* “The man gurgles.”
* “. . . smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace.”
* “‘Heathen,’ she chirps but shuts the door all the same.”
