‘World War One film is one of finest docs ever’

MUCH modern TV seems to exist just to fill the space between the adverts.

Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old was different.

Lovingly assembled and stunningly effective, it was one of the finest single documentary films ever made.

By bringing colour to old World War One footage, Jackson instantly made the hell of trench warfare more relevant to us.

This was no longer distant history conveyed in grainy black and white. These brave young men could have been plucked off the street yesterday.

Many were underage when they enlisted. One 17-year-old was told by the recruiting officer: “You’re too young. You’d better go outside and have a birthday.”

The volunteers – “all lads together” – were given horse clipper haircuts and fed on “Lance Corporal bacon” – streaky, with one stripe. And after six weeks’ training they were sent to the front.

Nothing could have prepared them for the devastation – stunted trees, shell holes, vast swathes of barbed wire, corpses, lice, rats and the awful stench of decay. Green clouds of poison gas claimed many victims. “I never saw a slightly gassed man,” observed one.

They lived in sodden trenches, suffered frostbite in winter and got gangrene often leading to amputations. And yet even in this living hell they never stopped joking. When the Germans put up a sign saying “Gott mitt uns” – God is with us – the English stuck up a sign saying: “We’ve got mittens too”.

“The Cockney wit was prevalent,” one old soldier recalled. EastEnders should try it. They brewed up with boiling water straight from their Vickers machine guns, smoked Woodbines and ate bread and jam for breakfast. One loaf fed 16.

Their memories of battle were heartrending: “Machine gun bullets came at us like hailstones”... “mates going down to your left and right”... “walking over the dead bodies of our comrades...”

This was slaughter on an industrial scale.

Yet the Germans they met were the same as them. Maybe not the Prussians who were “cruel bastards”, but the Bavarians and Saxons were “good decent people”.

Back home after the Armistice the survivors found civilians weren’t the slightest bit interested in their experiences.

One went back to work and the bloke behind the counter in the stores asked: “Where have you been? On nights?”