All Quiet on the Western Front Speech

Big Idea: The futility of war

Text: All Quiet On The Western Front, Jessie Owens Poem

Purpose: to show that war does no good and is nothing except a futile exercise

Word Count: 878

Hi I am Alex Haladjian senior and it is my pleasure to be speaking in front of you about a subject that I feel is very close to my heart. My views on war have changed dramatically over these 70 long years. I thought it would have been an experience of a lifetime, especially because I had never been overseas before. I could just imagine myself traveling all over the world and fighting for my country like I was told any honourable young adult would do. All of my best friends were going, I knew that my parents were proud of me and my older and younger sisters were also cheering me on when I told them the news. I also had that thought that I would come back home as a hero and everyone would love me... but when I landed in France I could see that I had made the wrong choice.

I was born in 1897 so I have lived through a lot of significant events and I have got a lot of stories to tell. It is now 1967 and it was just a few weeks ago when I celebrated my 70th birthday and while my family and my friends were singing happy birthday I was thinking about the things that I lived through including World War I when "I was only 18" years old and went and fought in that dreadful war. From 1939 to 1945 I witnessed the horrors of World War 2.

I am here to talk to you young boys from Whitefriars College because I am in fact an old collegian and the real reason I wanted to come back here and give this speech is to let you see that war is a futile exercise! Young people like yourselves should be taught about past wars, and shown that war hardly ever made a bad situation better and almost always created worse problems for future generations.

I heard that your whole year 10 level is reading the novel "All Quiet On The Western Front". I have read this book myself and I could really relate to it, when it was first published back in 1929. I was one of the first to read it and I could relate to it like no other. When Remarque described the huge "corpse rats" I remembered them so clearly. They never left us alone but they ate all of our food. He also said that the "front is a cage and you have to wait nervously for whatever happens to you". Oh my, this gave me the shivers. The same shivers I got back in 1915...

I can remember just before we Australians entered the war I was sitting down just like you guys are now listening to someone give us a talk just like I am to you. It was the same scenario. But this woman that gave us the talk was Jessie Pope. The difference between me and Jessie is that she was expressing propaganda and what I am doing