From the outside looking in

The two drastic perspectives that are revealed to us of the boxcars at the end of chapter 3 are beyond belief to us. At least to me it was. I couldn’t imagine existing in a state like those soldiers did in those boxcars when I first read the passage. The author portrays a sense of mere existence and demonstrates the view of an unwanted hassle as he describes the boxcar from the point of view of a soldier. On page 89 he states, “To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackened bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.” The insensitive soldiers who were numb to the whole idea of caging human beings simply saw this boxcar as something they had to babysit and endure during the day. It was just a job…to feed and water these “animals” until they were passed off at the next stop. It was simply a big piece of steel that yelled and consumed their food that was starting to run scarce. From the inside looking out, it was a whole different point of view. These soldiers were cramped and in need of fresh air, exercise, and the right to be treated as a human being rather than a piece of cargo. The guards who watched over the boxcars had one of their own. Billy described it as “heaven” on page 87 and went into saying “There was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of soup.” These two different groups of people were treated extremely different. The regular reader would read this passage with sympathy for the cramped soldiers and disgust towards the guards. It affects the reader because it shows just a slight extent of what these captives had to go through and how they were treated. It just goes to show a little glimpse of what soldiers had to endure.