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They Shall Not Grow Old
Peter Jackson's documentary about the Great War- shown for the first time on BBC 2 last night.
The pace is no longer lickety-split, the missing frames have been restored, sound and colour have been added and the people are people again.
I've watched a lot of this footage before. In its raw state. And it didn't leave me untouched. But this was the first time I was seeing how they grinned and japed and how bad their teeth were and how they were clowning for the camera. They were no longer shadows but chaps, blokes, cards, kids- whom their mothers would have recognised- bearing up, giving it their best, rising to the occasion, getting through their day as best they could.
How cheery they were. The high art of the Great War tends to miss out the cheeriness. Not a lot of laughs in Wilfred Owen. Not a lot of anything human in the warscapes of Paul Nash. But the cheeriness was a big part of the whole experience. Not just cheeriness but decency too. As one of the disembodied voices remarked, there was a lot of kindness at the front. It's there in the cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather and in the songs the men made up for themselves. Peter Jackson's film shows us the mud and the smashed up corpses but it also shows us the singalong with the clown in the front row who is strumming his beer bottle like a uke.
Yes, sure, the dead are glorious and honoured and never to be forgotten and all that guff- but what funny faces they had.
The pace is no longer lickety-split, the missing frames have been restored, sound and colour have been added and the people are people again.
I've watched a lot of this footage before. In its raw state. And it didn't leave me untouched. But this was the first time I was seeing how they grinned and japed and how bad their teeth were and how they were clowning for the camera. They were no longer shadows but chaps, blokes, cards, kids- whom their mothers would have recognised- bearing up, giving it their best, rising to the occasion, getting through their day as best they could.
How cheery they were. The high art of the Great War tends to miss out the cheeriness. Not a lot of laughs in Wilfred Owen. Not a lot of anything human in the warscapes of Paul Nash. But the cheeriness was a big part of the whole experience. Not just cheeriness but decency too. As one of the disembodied voices remarked, there was a lot of kindness at the front. It's there in the cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather and in the songs the men made up for themselves. Peter Jackson's film shows us the mud and the smashed up corpses but it also shows us the singalong with the clown in the front row who is strumming his beer bottle like a uke.
Yes, sure, the dead are glorious and honoured and never to be forgotten and all that guff- but what funny faces they had.
no subject
Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
Isaac Rosenberg
no subject