Exposure

Question 1

merciless iced east winds that knife us…

Answer 1

unrelenting
no traditional enemy
in war the elements are as threatening as ‘the enemy’

Question 2

worried by silence,

Answer 2

silence as scary as battle

fear, hopelessness and sadness

Question 3

but nothing happens.

Answer 3

boredom of war

Question 4

but nothing happens

repeated for the 2nd time

Answer 4

soldiers were unusually bored in the trenches and had a lot of time to think-anticlimactic
war doesn’t achieve anything

Question 5

-is it that we are dying?

Answer 5

rhetorical question

-confusion of soldiers

Question 6

with crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;

Answer 6

metaphor for frozen blood described as jewels, the poet sees men’s lives as valuable and ultimately wasted.

Question 7

For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;

Answer 7

The men are so broken and hurt that they feel abandoned and lose faith in God “our love is made afraid.”contrasts / juxtaposes the battlefield with the garden of Eden.
The tone is one of betrayal and despair.

Question 8

All their eyes are ice,

But nothing happens.

Answer 8

“All their eyes are ice,”- a metaphor: ice as in cold and dead but also dead and empty without soul

“But nothing happens.”- Repetition in the final line emphasises the process doesn’t end, the soldiers are frozen in time and hell.