The Humanity of the Trenches

The First World War was a huge, sweeping affair leading to millions of deaths. But each of those deaths was of a real flesh-and-blood person.

Scene from They Shall Not Grow Old Credit: BBC/Wingnut Films/IWM

Cheated of life

My series of posts* leading up to the First World War centenary on Sunday 11th was really about the big picture: the reasons the war started, the huge events that triggered it, the titanic battles and the quirks of history that changed the world to this day. Delving into to the details of those tragic events and recording how many soldiers died on each side became slightly nauseating. Not because it was wrong to do that, but that each of those numbers was made up of actual people. Each, a real person like you and me. Not some grainy old photograph, but a vibrant boy, man or woman with bright eyes, who loved and was loved and expected to lead a good long life.

To say things of those killed such as: “they are at peace” or “at rest”, or that “they will not grow old” seems to be a way of not confronting what happened. If any one of those victims had been told before being slaughtered that dying would come with the benefits of peace, rest and eternal youth, I'm pretty sure they would have regarded that as sick in the extreme. No, they wanted to live — knowing that there would be turmoil, but also times of peace; there would be weariness and great exhaustion, but also there would be time to sleep and rest; that getting old was a privilege to enjoy after a life well lived.

Humanity in the trenches

On Armistice Day, I (along with @kiligirl) attended a special screening of the Peter Jackson film They Shall Not Grow Old. It is not a documentary about the war, but of the humanity of the ordinary soldier told in snapshots of their lives as they went to fight in the fields of Europe.

Many of us have watched old footage from that period. It is jerky, at the wrong speed, and in grainy and scratched black and white. And, of course, silent. What Peter Jackson and his team have succeeded in doing is to bring those scenes almost miraculously back to life in a beautiful colour film with sound. Veterans of the trenches narrate their stories over scenes of common soldiers, real flesh-and-blood young men laughing, suffering, fighting and dying.

I think this is the closest we'll get to understanding what those boys (as many of them were) went through. And how many of them thought it was a great adventure and would have done it again. One veteran remembers the trenches as “a sort of outdoor camping holiday with the boys, with a slight spice of danger to make it interesting”.

Those veterans grew old. But their comrades left buried in shallow muddy graves did not. And in this case, I think the title could refer to the young men cut down in the prime of their lives and never given a chance to grow old.

Please watch this interview with Peter Jackson about the making of the film, including many scenes, and what he learnt from making it:

An Irish lament

For some reason, I got one of those “earworms” today — an old song, by the Irish band The Fureys, called The Green Fields of France. When I listened to it again after all these years it affected me in a way it had never done those decades before. Perhaps dredging through all the facts and figures of the Great War had got to me.

It's a song directed to a soldier in his grave, representing the ordinary soldier killed in that terrible conflict. If you have a few minutes and a tissue at hand, have a listen to this (lyrics included):

The Green Fields Of France

By The Fureys & Davey Arthur

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride?
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
And rest for a while in the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
And did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
Although, you died back in 1916,
In that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enclosed in forever behind the glass frame,
In an old photograph, torn, battered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

The sun now it shines on the green fields of France;
There’s a warm summer breeze that makes the red poppies dance.
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’s no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it’s still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned.

Ah young Willie McBride, I can’t help wonder why,
Do those that lie here know why did they die?
And did they believe when they answered the cause,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying, were all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

* Here are links to all the post in the series The Great War Centenary:
The Great War Centenary: Introduction
The Great War Centenary: Part One, The Tinderbox
The Great War Centenary: Part Two, The Spark
The Great War Centenary: Part Three, Invasion
The Great War Centenary: Part Four, Ottomans and Gallipoli
The Great War Centenary: Part Five, The East and At Sea
The Great War Centenary: Part Six, The Trenches
The Great War Centenary: The Last Post

Also posted on Weku, @tim-beck, 2018-11-17