THE GREAT WAR

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.