THE GREAT WAR
“For the
Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, one of the most famous poems of World War I,
provides the title for Peter Jackson’s documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
Jackson takes the words, slightly rearranged, from the fourth stanza:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Jackson’s
film indeed remembers the Great War, the War to End All Wars—the usual titles
for what came to be known as World War I when another European and global
engagement inspired the now familiar numbering—and especially the men who
served. The director, best known for The Lord of the Rings spectaculars,
mined what must be hundreds of miles of film from the collections of the Imperial
War Museum to show some of the story of the British soldiers who fought and
died in that conflict. Any veteran of
cable TV knows the innumerable documentaries on this, the first filmed war, but
Jackson uses entirely unfamiliar material from the archives to create something
like a soldier’s history, from the declaration to the Armistice. He shows the sequences of recruiting and
training, complete with inadequate equipment and preparation, and the embarkation
to the Continent, so eagerly anticipated by politicians, propaganda, and the
combatants themselves. The film then
settles into an essentially chronological account of what became organized
butchery on a hitherto unimagined scale.
He accompanies the film with narration drawn from the words of the soldiers
themselves as they described their own experiences from that recruiting, outfitting,
training, and so forth, then of course the years of stalemate and suffering,
all the way to the Armistice.
The director chooses
footage of practically all the activities of the soldiers, concentrating
especially on their daily life in the squalor of the trenches, interrupted by
the innumerable dangers of their periodic attacks across No Man’s Land, that
devastated ground, a wasteland pocked by shell holes, inhabited by the dead of
many nations, fought over for four long, bloody, useless years. He shows the first appearance of the clumsy
early tanks, one of the major weapons that World War I introduced, along with
the airplane and poison gas. The movie reveals
more than most of the usual documentaries the realities of existence in those
trenches that came to symbolize the static warfare that a legion of incompetent
and inhuman generals established. As a
result, we see bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, headless corpses,
bodiless heads, all so familiar that the soldiers hardly notice them, and of
course long lines of wounded men. We
also see less dramatic but equally distressing images—the lice that bred wildly
in the unsanitary conditions, the lesions of trench foot from long periods of
standing in water, even the boards placed on sawhorses that passed for latrines,
as well as the men using them.
One of the saddest short sequences,
however, involves an officer reading a short speech to his men just before they
go over the top, as the expression went, a moment that, as Jackson points out,
would constitute the last half hour of their lives; they indeed did not grow
old. The picture also at least hints at the
truth of the prevailing English social system, which happily sacrificed the
lower classes in a slaughter that took the lives of a million of their
subjects. Jackson omits one important
result of the war, the mutinies that occurred in every nation’s armies, the
refusal of men to obey the idiotic commands that would send them to certain
death.
When the war finally ends, the
soldiers meet their enemy, often in the form of prisoners, and realize that
they were fighting innocent, ordinary young men like themselves, who served
under the same fools, suffered the same privations and fears, and endured the
same attacks and barrages. As history
shows us, of course, that War to End All Wars ended nothing and in fact created
the Second World War, the national divisions that remain today, and perhaps
even the wars that followed.
One of the most remarkable achievements
of They Shall Not Grow Old involves
the actual methods of turning the available footage into a watchable feature
film. In an extraordinary postscript,
Peter Jackson addresses the camera and details all the painstaking effort that
the production required. He shows how
his technicians brightened dark images, darkened bright ones, dealt with the
problem of all the varying frame speeds—from hand cranked cameras—in order to
achieve a uniform speed. He recruited
lip readers to translate the silent dialogues into actual speech, even
recovered the notes for the sort of lecture that the officer delivers to those
men who don’t know they are about to die.
He also mentions several of the
untold stories of that war that he had to ignore in order to concentrate on the
trenches. He includes some footage of
the air war, for example, some of the work in the factories, including the
important role of women, who in fact were to some degree liberated by their war
work. We can only hope that he or
someone like him will now use the technology, the experience, the people, the
whole cinematic infrastructure he has created to tell those necessary stories
before they are entirely lost to the global memory. The film at least validates Binyon’s poem: it
remembers.
