The smoking, by contrast, is entirely convincing. At any time at least half the people in shot are puffing away. They smoke so much you suspect they are trying to build up resistance to possible gas attacks. To our eyes these films are vintage cigarette ads — especially since a good proportion of these smokers are only days or hours away from getting blown to bits and so the possibility of developing lung cancer in twenty years is a luxurious pipedream. Still, what with smoking, gas, artillery, noise, damp and generally poor conditions of hygiene and sanitation, war, in these films, seems characterized by a general disregard for the health of the soldier.
All the more remarkable, then, that nothing too serious results from it. Gilbert Adair has pointed out that in Hollywood films of the Vietnam War ‘every American character who happens to find himself within the camera’s field of vision is already in danger’. In this documentary view of the First World War the camera frame is a safe haven, a refuge from danger. To be on film is to be out of harm’s way.
Hardly anyone dies and they’re all Germans anyway. As for the Tommies they have the odd arm wound, sometimes a head bandage, usually just a limp. After the battle friend and foe alike tramp back together — Tommy supporting Fritz — as if from a fiercely contested rugby match in atrocious conditions. After the game it’s all handshakes, friendliness and slapstick fraternization: a British soldier changes hats with a German prisoner (the title reads ‘Tommy and Fritz change hats’). Everyone looks on. All in all the battles of the Somme and Ancre look pretty harmless affairs.
Harmless and, from an allied point of view, entirely successful. The role of the German army is to suffer terrible bombardment and then surrender in numbers so vast the whole army must have been rounded up by 1917 at the latest.
So it goes on. Everyone looks the same. Everywhere looks the same. Every battle looks the same. And so, while titles and maps give an impression of a succession of easy victories, the films undermine themselves: if it’s all so straightforward, why this need to fight another identical battle, over an identical patch of ground a few months later? What we end up with is, as Samuel Hynes almost accurately puts it,
masses of men and materials, moving randomly through a dead ruined world towards no identifiable objective; it is aimless violence and passive suffering, without either a beginning or an end — not a crusade, but a terrible destiny.
Destiny is the wrong word here, for it implies a purpose, a goal, and thereby contradicts his main point that ‘nothing really happens’. Not a destiny, then, but a condition.
After a couple of hours of this condition I am stupefied by boredom. My interest is revived briefly by a sequence showing an officer in cavalry uniform — cap, boots, riding coat, riding a tank. An innovation so novel that on titles the word is always flanked by inverted commas, the ‘tank’ is the real star of these films. Ugly, slow, it lumbers up to the battlefield and then lumbers back again, unscathed and terrifying, an ungainly iron beetle. A bucking beetle, an iron bronco rather, for as it dips and grinds over the cratered field the officer perched atop tries desperately to keep a stiff upper body.
After this humorous interlude the war reverts to the plodding, plotless norm. The same faces, the same ground. I imagined I could watch footage endlessly and am surprised by my longing for modern documentary framing, for the raw material of history to be recut, edited down further, reshaped and contextualized. I almost find myself wishing there were a few of those interviews with ageing generals (‘Yes, I like to think I did for them both with my plan of attack.’) that I’d hated in The World at War.
The war goes on, silently, visibly. The same faces, the same ground. A title says something about our tireless armies marching without rest and I feel I’m the tireless viewer yomping without pause through the battles of Ancre, the Somme, Arras — I’ve long stopped noticing which is which or taking notes. I sit for another quarter of an hour, slumping deeper and deeper in my chair. Eventually I can bear it no longer. I get up, bang on the projectionist’s door and plead, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’
He is only too happy to call a truce. He can knock off a bit early for lunch too. Live and let live. As I walk out I half expect to be presented with a white feather by more diligent researchers.
This is what the war is like for us. We can stop it at will. We gaze at photographs of soldiers in the trenches. Snow, dirt, cold, death. When we have been there long enough, we get up and leave, turn the page and move on.
The war was filmed at 16 to 18 frames per second on hand-cranked cameras. Modern projectors — like the one in the museum’s screening room — run at 24 frames per second and so the action flickers quickly by.
As part of an installation in the museum’s main building a special projector has been set up to show an endless loop of parts of The Battle of the Somme at the correct speed. Men marching to the front, survivors limping back. This is the middle segment of that continuous line of men first seen entraining for France and glimpsed later winding its way past the Cenotaph. An endless loop: a river of men, moving towards death. They are dead and they are going to die. Marching to the front, endlessly, so slowly that they never cease marching. In Craiglockhart, Sassoon remembered the war in an almost identical image:
I visualized an endless column of marching soldiers, singing ‘Tipperary’ on their way up from the back areas; I saw them filing silently along the ruined roads, and lugging their bad boots through mud until they came to some shell-hole where trees were stumps and skeletons. .
Because the original cameras were hand-cranked, it is impossible to synchronize the projector exactly. Consequently the action is often slower than it should be. Like a photo taken at a shutter speed so slow it actually moves, the picture ‘ghosts’.
‘The past is never dead,’ wrote William Faulkner. ‘It’s not even past.’
Before going over the top, an officer said that his men ‘seemed more or less in a trance’. Charles Bean, the official Australian historian of the war, noted that after action ‘the men appeared to be walking in a dream and their eyes looked glassy and starey’. Another survivor recalls going through battle ‘like a sleepwalker’. David Jones notes of combat-weary soldiers that ‘they come as sleepwalkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest’.14
In Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, a company of men are about to march to the front to join a major offensive on the Somme. The men looked at each other ‘with strange eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was’. When the order to move off is given there comes
a rippling murmur of movement, and the slurred rhythm of their trampling feet, seeming to beat out the seconds of time, while the liquid mud sucked and sucked at their boots, and they dropped into that swinging stride without speaking. . and the mist wavered and trembled about them in little eddies, and earth, and life, and time, were as if they had never been.