College of War Papers by Ian F. Sanderson

College of War Papers by Ian F. SandersonAs part of a small-group of university students, I'm required to complete an English composition class called College of War Papers, taught by Professor Ian F. Sanderson. A group of five of us are assigned the same text, and we're expected to read it through and organize it in some way as a unit; this class is known as War Papers.It's an interesting process: one week, we read the text in its entirety, presenting a debate based on arguments; the next week, we read the same text, but organized into paragraphs to 'show the reader what we see, rather than tell them.' Those are the sections of the reading course that I've found most intriguing; each section requires you to look at a document as it's being read, either by others or by you, and then draw conclusions about the content, interpretation, or direction from those observations. The questions you may ask yourself are always different from the questions other students ask, but the process is always the same.As a conclusion to the readings for our COW, I've written and published some of the reading assignments that I have encountered in War Papers. Here, I've compiled these items into a single document, which I've named 'The War Papers.' For readers interested in this class and related documents, this is a comparative reading assignment. For readers who aren't, these are side-by-side comparatives of the sorts of reading assignments that I faced in War Papers.War Papers, the first section of the first reading, consists of a biography of Alexander Malan, a military commander in the English Civil War. The argument in the course is that the war Malan fought in was the first significant British military engagement of the First World War, and one of the war's most significant battles.Following the biography, the reading of War Papers continues with a survey of events following the Battle of Amiens. This section concentrates on the Treaty of Versailles, and how it affected the British Army and its foreign policy. This brief portion of the reading is straightforward in approach. The concluding section of the reading focuses on the book and film 'The Battle of Britain,' which examines the impact of the war on Winston Churchill's career and his attempt to regain lost glory following the Armistice.In The Second Reading, we begin by reading a text-book essay and then go on to read three more texts. This text, The Paths of Ruin, by C. R. George is an account of a war-time mission undertaken by a commando unit. One of the soldiers, Colonel Campbell, is written about in his own words, and we can see the effect this war had on him and his colleagues. One of the text passages I particularly liked has Campbell recounting the atrocities he witnessed while serving in Vietnam:An inch of our men died, our so-called heroes of the South and North toil away, blanketed in mould, their eyes red and bulging like a carpet of dried blood on a steam-heated slab, beating an ice-b ucket by way of a clarion. Young boys put up their hands to fight, are burned alive with gasoline or drowned, and soiled and hung by their clothes with the seeds of grass and the melting flesh of maimed bodies. Nobody ever made the difference.In College of War Papers, 'The Paths of Ruin' is followed by a second passage, which is entitled 'The Howling Fog.' This passage reports the experiences of Colonel John 'Woodchuck' Wilkins, who, following the Boer War, went to Africa to fight against the Berbers. He explains his psychological reaction to the death of a soldier from an African village:The first time I killed a man, a beast his heart seemed a prize. The second time I killed a Berber for sport, my blood ran hotter, my knife was a gleam, and my brain savored the effort it would take to get the blood out of my teeth. The third time the crowd's shouting and the bloody knuckle cracking in the wood convinced me I could hide nothing and so I wound up the man and hacked off his head.