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And on those bloody beaches, the first of them fell
I saw the first half of Gallipoli tonight. I had office hours; I had to leave after the ball at Cairo. All bets are off until I see the rest. But I was thinking as I walked out that up to this point the film had been much less a traditional war movie than a picaresque adventure, and how that was not inappropriate. Because young men did join up for the greatest game of them all as though it were a race-meet or another chance to impress the girls, and larked around foreign places and lied about their ages and played at war-drills and hit the beaches and died. And that was all.
I will have to reserve judgment until I've seen the rest of the film, I know. It could still tank in the second half. But in some sense, it doesn't matter. You know how it will end when the title comes up. And how, in that hell that they called Suvla Bay, we were butchered like lambs at the slaughter. No one can outrun bullets. But they don't know that, those laughing boys. Even the cynical, practical ones, they don't know how bad it will be. And we who have history on our side, who know what Oedipus is going to find out in the last act, and what will happen when Agamemnon comes home, all we can do is watch. It's a trope; it's a storyteller's trick. Even so.
I hope no one still signs up for the military that way—believing the newspapers, thinking dulce et decorum est. I'm not that much of an optimist.
I will have to reserve judgment until I've seen the rest of the film, I know. It could still tank in the second half. But in some sense, it doesn't matter. You know how it will end when the title comes up. And how, in that hell that they called Suvla Bay, we were butchered like lambs at the slaughter. No one can outrun bullets. But they don't know that, those laughing boys. Even the cynical, practical ones, they don't know how bad it will be. And we who have history on our side, who know what Oedipus is going to find out in the last act, and what will happen when Agamemnon comes home, all we can do is watch. It's a trope; it's a storyteller's trick. Even so.
I hope no one still signs up for the military that way—believing the newspapers, thinking dulce et decorum est. I'm not that much of an optimist.
no subject
I had a professor who said once that he believed that the two biggest factors in history are fatigue and boredom. He may have been talking about WWI at the time, and if he wasn't, he could have been. I think the biggest factor in situations like that is less that the papers are full of hype (which they are) than that the society has been at relative peace for long enough to have lost the collective first-hand awareness that in fact war really sucks. (I'm always reminded of Kappelle's statement that the Romans always liked the idea of conquering Parthia, as long as the present generation of Romans hadn't actually tried it.) I have no idea whether anyone signs up for the military in that way today, but I do know that at some point in the future, they will again.
And of course, on the other end, sometimes the war never really happened and it was just a fun romp abroad annoying the natives, with occasional spurts of danger to impress your grandkids with, and cavalry charges for the heck of it. There were plenty of ways in which it could be unfun and/or lethal to be a British soldier in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the overall picture was very different from "and now you'll all sit in muddy trenches for four years and most of your generation will die." So it makes some sense that the nastiness of the whole thing sort of caught everybody by surprise on all sides.
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I am reminded irresistibly of the fourth season of Blackadder, which is set in the trenches of World War I, and the following exchange between the brainlessly idealistic George (Hugh Laurie) and the lethally cynical Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson):
"You know, that's the thing I don't really understand about you, Cap. You're a professional soldier, and yet sometimes you sound as though you bally well haven't enjoyed soldiering at all."
"Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns—even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass."
"Now, come off it, sir! What about Mboto Gorge, for heaven's sake?"
"Yes, that was a bit of a nasty one—ten thousand Watusi warriors armed to the teeth with kiwi fruit and guava halves. After the battle, instead of taking prisoners, we simply made a huge fruit salad . . . No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I'd had fifteen years of military experience perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying 'Do you do it doggy-doggy?' in Swahili, and then suddenly four and a half million heavily armed Germans hove into view. That was a shock, I can tell you."