He saw it there, pushing through and twisting its head, saw the wet greasy fur and its mean red eyes. He kicked at it and missed. The rat scuttled out from the tiny gap between the slat supports and ran across the mud. Normally Alfred would have let it go. Rats were, after all, commonplace but something, whether pent-up anger... hate... loss... pain... boredom, whichever it was made him give chase after it. The creature appeared sluggish, as if it were weighed down with overeating. It had most likely been feeding on what was caught, left behind, in the lines and coils of barbed wire which stretched for miles beyond the trench. The terrible sad debris of dead soldiers. The remains that were left behind after a 6am push.
How does the writer use language here to describe the rat? You could include the writer’s choice of:
 words and phrases
 language features and techniques
 sentence forms.
[8 marks]