Film 1917 shows my grandad’s cruel war
OnE of the most burning questions for me about the Great War has always been what was it actually like being a soldier in the trenches. Having read the daily Mail’s favourable review of the film 1917, I went to see the movie and wasn’t disappointed. It should be part of every school’s history curriculum because of the fascinating insight it provides into what it was really like being in a trench and no man’s land. My grandfather Arthur and great uncle Tom served in France in World War I. They mercifully survived the carnage and horror, but the horrible sights they witnessed stayed with them for life. My great-uncle Joseph was killed in action at Gallipoli in August 1915. I also think that the film 1917 will serve to bring World War I poetry to life for children and adults: the sense of grief and pity expressed by Wilfred Owen; the bitter, satirical disgust of Siegfried Sassoon; and Isaac Rosenberg’s apocalyptic vision of hell. Watching the film and reading the Mail’s article about battlefield runners reminded me of these lines from Sassoon’s poem Aftermath, written in March 1919: ‘Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz —
The nights you watched and wired and
dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats;
and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the
front-line trench — And dawn coming, dirty white, and
chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask: ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
The unthinkable did happen again in 1939 and this gripping film serves to remind us, as Sassoon wrote: ‘But the past is just the same — and war’s a bloody game.’