MovieMonday: 1917

This film won the Best Picture and Best Director prizes at yesterday's Golden Globes awards ceremony.  It will go into wide release -- will be shown at many more theaters -- this Friday.  It is handsome, handsomely done and should draw large audiences.

The story is set in France in the year of its title.  It is about two British soldiers struggling to obey an urgent order.  Except for one possible problem noted at the end of this piece, 1917 works very well.

The two soldiers -- Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) -- are called to meet their general, who explains that a 1,600-man British battalion will be "drawn into a massacre" if it follows through on a planned attack the next morning.  Air reconnaissance has established that German forces are massed and ready to defeat the action, and severed phone wires have made it impossible to notify the battalion commander.

The only way to order the attack's cancellation is by messenger.  Blake, whose older brother is a lieutenant (leftenant in Englishese) in the doomed battalion, seems to have been chosen for the job because of his family connection, and he has tapped the less optimistic Schofield to join him.

General Erinmore (Colin Firth) entrusts Blake and Schofield with written orders to cancel the attack.  He tells them to proceed on foot to deliver the orders within 20 hours and tells them that they will meet no resistance en route.

Schofield, who has seen too much, suggests waiting for nightfall to set out, but Blake resists.  "It's not your brother, is it?" And so the two lance corporals set off.

They leave their trench encampment and trudge across a muddy no-man's land marked by shell craters and corpses, then through abandoned and booby-trapped German trenches, then past a cherry orchard of felled trees (whose blossoms establish that the season here is spring) and then into the remains of a bombed-out town.

And, despite the general's assurances, Blake and Schofield meet up with trouble, lots of it, as they pursue their goal.  So it goes.

Technically, the story spools out in an unusual way, following Blake and Schofield's movements in a seemingly unbroken shot -- actually many scenes edited to feel like a continuous observation of their journey, as if the audience is there for every step.  This unusual assembly is off-putting to some, but it works well here.

This film seems to have held personal meaning for its cowriter and director, Englishman Sam Mendes, whose credits include American Beauty, Skyfall and Revolutionary Road.

The movie's last frames acknowledge Mendes' conversations with his grandfather as the inspiration for 1917.  The grandfather, a WWI veteran, was tasked as a "runner" who delivered messages between British units during that war.

Mendes studied literature at Cambridge, and presumably some history as well.  While this movie is compared often with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, its story seems to have at least a couple actual historical antecedents as well.

-- 1917 is set in France in the spring following the Battle of the Somme, a four-month horror that ended in late 2016.  After that battle, the German forces retreated behind what was called the Hindenburg Line, outlined in the map below, presumably to areas that could be defended more efficiently and with less manpower.
        It is likely not a coincidence that the movie deals with a German tactical retreat.

-- The film's idea that the Germans have retreated strategically calls to mind Napoleon's famous feint in the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz.  In that situation, the French emperor pulled back his troops along one front, effectively inviting the Russo-Austrian Army to advance in a direction where French forces were positioned to crush the enemy as it moved.
          In the movie, the general believes that the retreating Germans have set a trap for British forces by retreating and then daring the Allies to mount an attack that will be crushed.

-----

This viewer's reservation about 1917 is that it seems to have a largish plot hole.  Consider the general who sends two lance corporals out with information that, if delivered, will save as many as 1,600 lives.  Given the high stakes involved, why didn't the general send five teams out to deliver the same message, just in case Blake and Schofield were unable to reach their destination?  Why didn't he dispatch the troop truck that meets up with the team on their long walk?  Why didn't he order the reconnaissance planes that spotted the German force buildup to go back up and drop cancellation orders over the endangered battalion's bivouac?

Much smaller questions than these keep me awake at night.  Why not that general?



Notes

The Idiosyncratist noted the centennials of World War I's beginning  and its end.

Another good film about the war, They Shall Not Grow Old ,was released in the U.S. earlier this year.  It features restored film and quotes from the period. It now is available for home viewing.

MovieMonday: They Shall Not Grow Old

This film was commissioned by England's Imperial War Museum and released last year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War One.

It had a brief, limited rollout and now is shown rather sporadically -- once a week in two theaters near me -- to appreciative audiences, albeit older audiences than I usually see in movie theaters. 

The story is not of the war's causes or particular battles but simply the experience of young men who enlisted, who were taught to march and shoot, and who then were sent to fight in hitherto unimaginable battlefield conditions.  After the war they returned to their unchanged homes with memories they carried for the rest of their lives.

Current films have accustomed us to computer-generated imagery of lifelike universes created out of nothing, but this film goes the other way -- showing us cleaned-up and colorized black-and-white still photographs and moving pictures shot in various formats and at various speeds, all discovered in various states of aging and decay.  The movie's narration is also authentic, drawn from recordings of veterans' spoken memories in a 1964 oral history project.

The effect is to show us young men as they were at that time, and to hear them describe their experiences in chipper, stiff-upper-lip styles that probably were not so common in subsequent wars.

The soldiers of World War I experienced the usual privations of filthy uniforms, bad food, body lice and rats, but also encountered weapons developed and refined during and after the Industrial Revolution -- reliable rifles, machine guns, land mines, tanks and various forms of poison gas.  These are observed in the movie, as are their gruesome effects: bloody injuries and bodies slumped in trenches and strewn across battlefields.  (Not appropriate for small children.)

The filmmaker (Peter Jackson, best known for the Tolkien trilogies) has done a beautiful job here.  "They Shall Not Grow Old" manages both to humanize soldiers' experiences and to respect their decency and heroism in terrible circumstances.

The film likely will be available soon on streaming services, but its impact is enhanced when viewed on a larger screen.  I wish I'd gone earlier and seen it in an IMAX theater.


Notes

This movie's title comes from the 13th line (with two words inverted) of a 2014 poem that valorized soldiers killed at war.  Its tone is true to the expressions of soldiers expressed in the movie.

For the Fallen

by Laurence Binyon 

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

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.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

-----

The British do a nice job of commemorations.  I was impressed by another one, Poppies, that was mounted at the Tower of London during the first year of the World War I centennial.

World War I: Guns, Gas, Poetry and Painting

November 11, 2018

Wilfred Owen

One century ago today, World War I ended.  Germany had been defeated and signed a surrender.  All combatants agreed that the Armistice would commence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.  

I'm not sure the 11-11-11 symbolism was helpful.  Once an agreement had been reached, why not lay down arms immediately?  There were telegraph wires to send messages rapidly by then, and at least a few more soldiers and civilians might have survived if the order had gone out immediately.  As it was, 17 million persons, military and civilian, already had died.

Meanwhile, in England, church bells were ringing to celebrate the end of fighting when a telegram was delivered to the Shrewsbury home of Thomas and Susan Owen.  Its message was that their son, Wilfred, had been killed in France just one week earlier, cut down by machine gun fire as he led troops across a canal in Ors.  He was just 25.

Like the telegraph, the machine gun was a newish innovation.  More than 50 years earlier, during the American Civil War, the first multiple-shot weapon, the Gatling gun, was introduced by the North.  By World War I, Germany had refined the idea and in 1917 introduced a machine gun that could spit out 600 bullets a minute.  One of those bullets killed Wilfred Owen.

Another innovation of the war was the armored tank, deployed first by the British in the Battle of Somme in 1916 and soon afterward by the German army.  In 1915, the Germans began lobbing chlorine gas during battles; the English responded with gas attacks of their own.  The most deadly gas, mustard gas, was introduced by German forces in 1917; it too was taken up by the English.    

Owen, a tutor and teacher, had been fighting in the British army since 1915.  After more than two years at the front, he was sent back to England to be treated for for "shell shock," which we now would call PTSD.  During that period he wrote war poems that reflected his disillusionment and anger.  He left these behind when he returned to the battlefield in July 1918.  They were published in book form in 1920.

Owen had read his classics:  Homer's "Iliad," the history/poem about theTrojan War and Horace's odes about the internal battles between the assassination of Julius Caesar and the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman Empire.  

The Romans built their influence with wars of conquest, and Horace was a sort of court poet who was expected to glorify heroism and even death in battle.  

World War I wasn't that kind of war, however, and Wilfred Owen's most famous poem laid out the differences.   

One Horatian line that Owen borrowed was this:  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,"  which translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."  Owen had seen too much.  He called that notion "The old Lie."

Here is the poem itself.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- 

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

This poem is strong for its complex structure, for its imagery and for its unflinching description of a soldier's death throes following a mustard gas attack.  

Another artist, painter John Singer Sargent, visited a World War I battlefield and observed soldiers who had been blinded by mustard gas at a treatment station.  From this experience, he made this painting, "Gassed," which was completed in March 1919.
  

The painting is huge, more than 20 feet long, which suggests how strongly Sargent took its subject.  Later, when he was commissioned to do group portraits of British commanders and and statesmen, those paintings were smaller.

So that was the war:  A triumph of military innovations and the death of millions, remembered in art but without a meaning understandable to the men who fought or to their loved ones.

World War I was known for several decades as the War to End all Wars and the Great War.  Then, in 1939, came World War II, which was distinguished by more deaths, deadlier weapons and not so much art.

MovieMonday: Journey's End

Here we have an engrossing movie set exactly one century ago, in March of the final year of the First World War. 

Based on a popular 1928 play by R.C. Sheriff, an English veteran, most of the film is set in an English artillery trench 60 yards from a German trench in northern France.

The story is launched when an idealistic young 2nd lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), asks to be assigned to the company of Capt. Stanhope (Sam Claflin, excellent here) an older classmate whom Raleigh admired in school.

"You'll find he's changed," Raleigh is warned. Indeed, Stanhope has grown frustrated and bitter, drinking to salve his conscience as he dutifully leads solders into situations they do not understand and he cannot justify.  

As the unit begins a week of trench duty, the senior officers are told to expect a German advance within days and not to expect backup support when the advance arrives.  If the news is dire, they understand they must "stick at it, the only thing a decent man can do."

They are decent men, including their older leader, Osborne (Paul Bettany), a schoolmaster.  In a letter to his wife, he writes, "These youngsters do not realize who they are, so new are they to their very existence."

As events proceed, Raleigh's idealism is tempered with empathy and Stanhope personifies the cumulative cost of the Great War on England's soldiers and the country itself.  

The theme here is not upbeat because it cannot be upbeat.  World War I involved no particular cause, but seems to have been sparked because the warring countries had large militaries and and thin-skinned rulers who were ready to fight.  Cynical commanders sent armies of loyal soldiers into lacerating battles that left thousands dead but resolved nothing.

Even before the war ended, it had spawned a literature of disillusion, mistrust and fury --  messages that resonate to this day.  

"Journey's End" is a very good movie whose story is as relevant now as it was a century ago.


Modern War

War historians generally agree that the American Civil War was the first modern war.  The Industrial Revolution provided better armaments, telegraphic communication and rail lines for logistical support.  The result was more, and more efficient, bloodshed.

Fifty years later, World War I was Europe's first modern war.  Countries used all the Civil War innovations, and added others:  machine guns, hand grenades, barbed wire, poison gas, fighter planes and aerial reconnaissance photos for pinpoint bomb targeting.  During the course of the war, gas masks, metal helmets and tanks were refined and added to combat arsenals.

The Pandemic That Started Here

The most frightening diseases humans have faced have come from many places.

The Black Plague, which reduced the population of Europe by one-third in the 14th century, is believed to have been transmitted to humans by fleas from Central Asia.

The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic that killed 8,100 in 2002 was passed to humans by small mammals in the Guangdong Province of China.

Ebola, which was first traced to fruit bats and then other animals, has arisen several times in Africa since 1976.

Interestingly, the most deadly pandemic of modern times, the misnamed Spanish Flu of 1918, is now believed to have originated in a rural county in the American Midwest.


The Spanish Flu in Context

The world rejoiced in November 1918 when World War I ended.  In its four years, more than 20 people, military and civilian, lost their lives.  But an even worse killer was still on the loose.

During 16 weeks at the end of 1918, a vicious flu spread across oceans, among combatants and ordinary citizens, through cities and and countries worldwide.  After four scant months, between 50 million and 100 million people -- no one can say for sure -- died and the virus went to ground and disappeared.


Where the Flu Began

Camp Funston Flu Patients, 1918, from the U.S. National Archives

For decades after the pandemic, health researchers tried to establish where it began.  In a 2004 article in the open-access Journal of Translation Medicine, John M. Barry revisited the theories:

        -- A British scientist suggested the origin was WWI British Army post in France where
            doctors treated "purulent bronchitis" in 1916, but this theory was dismissed because
            the disease had not rapidly or broadly as the flu had done.

        -- Another flu outbreak in early 1918 in China was studied but seemed unlikely because
            it stopped early and did not spread far.

        -- Several other outbreaks of disease in early 1918 in France and India also were ruled out
            for similar reasons.

All the signs pointed to origination in the United States where, Barry wrote, "One could see influenza jumping from Army camp to camp, then into cities, and traveling with the troops to Europe."

Gene sequencing of preserved tissue suggested that the outbreak was very rapid.  Epidemiological studies and oral histories narrowed the focus to Haskell County, Kansas, a rural area with a population of 1,720 and an economy based on farming grains and raising poultry, cattle and hogs.

In early 1918, the local doctor observed many cases of influenza.  Barry's article noted the following:

        "Soon, dozens of his patients -- the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in
          the county -- were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot.  Then one
          patient progressed to pneumonia.  Then another.  And they began to die . . . . The
          epidemic got worse.  Then, as abruptly as it came, it disappeared.  Men and women
          returned to work.  Children returned to school.  And the war regained its hold on people's                     thoughts."

The doctor's warning, sent to national public health officials, was the first alarm sounded anywhere in the world.  By that point, the end of March, the flu had run its course in Haskell County but just begun its spread.

At the time, the U.S. Army was preparing recruits for service in Europe.  Haskell County soldiers were trained at Camp Funston, home to more than 56,000 troops.  Starting on March 4, soldiers at the camp started coming down with the flu; 1,100 were hospitalized and many others were treated at infirmaries.

The soldiers transferred from Camp Funston to other Army bases and then to France.  According to Barry, "by the end of April twenty-four of the thirty-six main Army camps suffered an influenza outbreak.  Thirty of the fifty largest cities in the country also had an April spike in excess mortality from influenza and pneumonia."

The flu proceeded from there.  Its second wave, later that year, was far more deadly.

Barry's conclusion:

"The fact that the 1918 pandemic likely began in the United States matters because it tells investigators where to look for a new virus.  They must look everywhere."

Poppies

Above is a photo of a remarkable art project taking shape around the Tower of London.

For months now, volunteers have been setting out ceramic poppies at the rate of 180 a day.  By November 11, Armistice Day, there will be almost 900,000 poppies, one for each British and Commonwealth soldier who died in World War I.

Poppies have been a symbol of the Great War for many years, partly because of a famous poem about the British war dead in Flanders.  The poem is set at the site first of an early trench battle and, then, a soldiers' cemetery.

An English ceramic artist, Paul Cummins, and a set designer, Tom Piper, came up with the idea and have cooperated on its execution.  At the end of the project, the poppies will be sold and proceeds devoted to veterans' charities.

Several elements strike me here -- beautiful flowers representing death, the mass of flowers acknowledging the staggering numbers of war dead and the placement at the Tower of London, for hundreds of years a prison notorious for the torture and execution of people deemed enemies of British kings and queens.  During World War I, 11 spies were executed by firing squad at the tower.

It looks in photographs like a thoughtful, respectful remembrance, and it makes me wish I had a trip planned to London this year.


The Poem

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place, and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

                           scarce heard amid the guns below

We are the Dead.  Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets flow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

in Flanders fields

The poem, memorized by Commonwealth children for generations, was written in 1915, early in the war, by a Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, after he watched a friend die on the field.  "In Flanders Fields" is marked by the theme of sad but honorable loss.

As the war ground on and the carnage continued, later British poets composed more graphic verses about the frustration, suffering and even horror that they had witnessed.  (More about them later.)

John McRae died toward the end of the war, still in service, of pneumonia, in 1918.