Coup de grâce Coup de grâce A coup de grâce (; French for "blow of mercy") is a death blow to end the suffering of a severely wounded person or animal. It may be a mercy killing of civilians or soldiers, friends or enemies, with or without the sufferer's consent. Examples of "coup de grâce" include shooting the heart or head (typically the back of the skull) of a wounded, but still living, person during an execution or by humanely killing a suffering, mortally wounded soldier, in war, for whom medical aid is not available. In pre-firearms eras the wounded were finished with
The Death of a Soldier by World War II. Bates compares the poem to The Snow Man, particularly its final stanza, in which the snow man must be "nothing himself" in order to behold "the nothing that is". In this respect "The Death of a Soldier" adopts the snow man's point of view, according to Bates. The soldier has a "Lockean mind": "He is the sum of his impressions", Bates writes, "identical, in this instance, with the nothing he does behold". The soldier's "blank slate" (tabula rasa) becomes a blank, so to speak, leaving the clouds to go in their direction. Even if Bates's reading