David Quinn
Actor George Mackay in 1917
Photo: Awards Daily It’s unfair to say that all deaths in World War I were futile, writes David Quinn
The World War I drama 1917 took away two of the big prizes at the annual Global Globe awards at the weekend, namely Best Picture and Best Director.
To judge from the reviews so far, it is a wholly conventional depiction of the war, namely that it was utterly futile and wasted millions of lives. World War II is rarely depicted in this way, even though far more people died in it (50 million) than in World War I (17 million).
Why is World War I considered futile while World War II is not? It is probably because Hitler represented a far greater evil than Kaiser Wilhelm. The Holocaust was an evil of singular historical enormity and almost any price was worth paying to end that, even though the Holocaust as such was not yet under way as World War II began.
In Ireland, we tend to view World War I through British eyes. This is virtually unavoidable because almost every drama or documentary we see about that war is British-made. The movie 1917 is no different. The director is British and British soldiers are its central characters.
Trenches
Our view is also very dominated by the poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘It is Sweet and Fitting to Die for One’s Country) by Wilfred Owen who died in that war.
The poem depicts the hell of fighting in the trenches and ends by condemning the idea that it is fitting to die for one’s country as “a lie”.
Owen’s poem is on the Leaving Certificate English course in this country and hugely flavours our view of World War I.
In fact, neither Owen’s famous poem, nor its view of World War I became popular until the 1960s. In the 1920s, books of his poems sold only in the hundreds. The popular poet of the war for years after it wasn’t Wilfred Owen at all, it was Rupert Brooke.
By 1929, his poems about the war had sold 300,000 copies. Like Owen, Brooke died during the war.
Brooke’s most famous poem was ‘The Soldier’. Its opening lines read:
‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.’
It is a fond way for mothers and wives to remember their fallen sons and husbands, a far cry from telling them that their sons died in vain.
Of course, it can be said that whereas Brooke died in 1915, when the war was still relatively new and in its more idealistic phase, by the time Owen died in 1918, that mood was long past, and this is true to a certain extent.
Nonetheless, if the Owen view had come to predominate by the end of the war, then why didn’t his poems begin to sell in big numbers until the 1960s, whereas Brooke’s were a huge best-seller immediately?
One reason World War I looms so large in the British imagination is because it is the first war Britain fought in that eventually involved conscription and a mass army and a long front line that stretched from the Swiss border to the English Channel.
The view of it is also very influenced by the image that we have of trench warfare and the hideousness of battles like the Somme and Gallipoli.
However, our image is also of soldiers spending months on end in the trenches. This rarely happened, in fact. Soldiers would be rotated in and out of them and, over the course of their service, might spend one day in five fighting, which was quite enough, obviously.
One in ten British soldiers were killed, that is, 700,000 dead, a huge number…”
This was still very unlike any previous war British soldiers had fought in. The very first trenches appeared in the America Civil War. Before this, big, pitched battles involving mainly volunteer armies would be fought, like the Battle of Waterloo. There was no long, continual front line. So World War I stood out.
A total of seven million men served in the British army over the four-year course of that war. One in ten were killed, that is, 700,000 dead, a huge number, but the vast majority of men who served in the British army made it home. The first day of the Somme, when 54,000 British soldiers were killed or injured was extremely unusual.
To commemorate the centenary of the end of World War I, film director, Peter Jackson, made a documentary called They Shall not Grow Old. It used footage from the war and colourised it.
In addition, he used lip-readers to see what the soldiers were saying to each other and then produced a voice-over so we could almost literally hear the soldiers’ conversations.
Better life
A few things struck me about it. One is that for many of the men who signed up, they were now eating a square meal with meat every day for the first time in their lives. On average, they put on one stone in weight and two inches in height in their first months of service.
The second thing is that when the war ended, many did not want to leave the army because it offered a better life than the slums back home.
The World War I historian, Hew Strachan, tells us that many veterans would gather every year for decades afterwards to remember their fallen comrades, but also to recapture some of the tremendous camaraderie they experienced with each other during the war.
They did not, for the most part, believe they had fought in vain, or that their fellow soldiers died in a totally futile cause. They believed it was right to save Europe from German domination.
This is why it is unfair to view World War I purely through the eyes of Wilfred Owen.
This does not give a rounded view and is unfair on the men who died in that conflict, on their families, and on their brothers-in-arms who lived on afterwards. It is unfair to say that all those who fought and died, fought and died for nothing.