Peter Jacksons Cartoon War
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
When director-producer Peter Jacksons World War I film, They Shall Not
Grow Old, which miraculously transforms grainy, choppy black-and-white
archival footage from the war into a modern 3D color extravaganza, begins,
he bombards us with the clichés used to ennoble war. Veterans, over
background music, say things like I wouldnt have missed it, I would go
through it all over again because I enjoyed the service life and It made
me a man. It must have taken some effort after the war to find the tiny
minority of veterans willing to utter this rubbish. Military life is a form
of servitude, prolonged exposure to combat leaves you broken, scarred for
life by trauma and often so numb you have difficulty connecting with others,
and the last thing war does is make you a man.
Far more common was the experience of the actor Wilfrid Lawson, who was
wounded in the war and as a result had a metal plate in his skull. He drank
heavily to dull the incessant pain. In his memoirs Inside Memory, Timothy
Findley, who acted with him, recalled that Lawson always went to bed sodden
and all night long he would be dragged from one nightmare to anotheroften
yellingmore often screamingvery often struggling physically to free
himself of impeding bedclothes and threatening shapes in the shadows. He
would pound the walls, shouting Help! Help! Help! The noise, my dearand
the people.
David Lloyd George, wartime prime minister of Britain, in his memoirs used
language like this to describe the conflict:
[I]nexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake
individuals who
would rather the million perish than that they as leaders should owneven to
themselvesthat they were blunderers
the notoriety attained by a narrow
and stubborn egotism, unsurpassed among the records of disaster wrought by
human complacency
a bad scheme badly handled
impossible orders issued by
Generals who had no idea what the execution of their commands really meant
this insane enterprise
this muddy and muddle-headed venture.
The British Imperial War Museum, which was behind the Jackson film, had no
interest in portraying the dark reality of war. War may be savage, brutal
and hard, but it is also, according to the myth, ennobling, heroic and
selfless. You can believe this drivel only if you have never been in combat,
which is what allows Jackson to modernize a cartoon version of war.
The poet Siegfried Sassoon in The Hero captured the callousness of war:
Jack fell as hed have wished, the Mother said,
And folded up the letter that shed read.
The Colonel writes so nicely. Something broke
In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.
She half looked up. We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers. Then her face was bowed.
Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
Hed told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because hed been so brave, her glorious boy.
He thought how Jack, cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how hed tried
To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.
Our own generals and politicians, who nearly two decades ago launched the
greatest strategic blunder in American history and have wasted nearly $6
trillion on conflicts in the Middle East that we cannot win, are no less
egotistical and incompetent. The images of our wars are as carefully
controlled and censored as the images from World War I. While the futility
and human carnage of our current conflicts are rarely acknowledged in
public, one might hope that we could confront the suicidal idiocy of World
War I a century later.
Leon Wolff, in his book In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign, writes of
World War I:
It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing
had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452. Of 7,750,919
others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed
dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.
The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been
demonstrated with some exactitude. One of them (Woodrow Wilson) later
admitted that the war had been fought for business interests; another (David
Lloyd George) had told a newspaperman: If people really knew, the war would
be stopped tomorrow, but of course they dontand cant know. The
correspondents dont write and the censorship wouldnt pass the truth.
There is no mention in the film of the colossal stupidity of the British
general staff that sent hundreds of thousands of working-class
Englishmenthey are seen grinning into the camera with their decayed
teethin wave after wave, week after week, month after month, into the
mouths of German machine guns to be killed or wounded. There is no serious
exploration of the iron censorship that hid the realities of the war from
the public and saw the press become a shill for warmongers. There is no
investigation into how the war was used by the state, as it is today, as an
excuse to eradicate civil liberties. There is no look at the immense wealth
made by the arms manufacturers and contractors or how the war plunged
Britain deep into debt with war-related costs totaling 70 percent of the
gross national product. Yes, we see some pictures of gruesome wounds,
digitalized into color, yes, we hear how rats ate corpses, but the war in
the film is carefully choreographed, stripped of the deafening sounds,
repugnant smells and most importantly the crippling fear and terror that
make a battlefield a stygian nightmare. We glimpse dead bodies, but there
are no long camera shots of the slow agony of those dying of horrific
wounds. Sanitized images like these are war pornography. That they are no
longer jerky and grainy and have been colorized in 3D merely gives old war
porn a modern sheen.
When the war was not very active, it was really rather fun to be in the
front line, a veteran says in the film. It was a sort of outdoor camp
holiday with a slight spice of danger to make it interesting.
Insipid comments like that defined the perception of the war at home. The
clash between a civilian population that saw the war as a sort of outdoor
camp holiday and those who experienced it led to profound estrangement. The
poet Charles Sorley wrote: I should like so much to kill whoever was
primarily responsible for the war. And journalist and author Philip Gibbs
noted that soldiers had a deep hatred of civilians who believed the lies.
They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men.
They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed to God to
get the Germans to send Zeppelins to Englandto make the people know what
war meant.
Military studies have determined that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98
percent of those who survive will have become psychiatric casualties. The
common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat
was a predisposition toward aggressive psychopathic personalities. Lt.
Col. David Grossman wrote: It is not too far from the mark to observe that
there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98
percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they got
there.
The military cliques in American society are as omnipotent as they were in
World War I. The symbols of war and militarism, then and now, have a
quasi-religious aura, especially in our failed democracy. Our incompetent
generalssuch as David Petraeus, whose surges only prolonged the Iraq War
and raised the casualty figures and whose idea to arm moderate rebels in
Syria was a debacleare as lionized as the pig-headed and vainglorious Gen.
Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, who resisted innovations such
as the tank, the airplane and the machine gun, which he called a much
overrated weapon. He believed the cavalry would play the decisive role in
winning the war. Haig, in the Battle of the Somme, oversaw 60,000 casualties
on the first day of the offensive, July 1, 1916. None of his military
objectives were achieved. Twenty thousand lay dead between the lines. The
wounded cried out for days. This did not dampen Haigs ardor to sacrifice
his soldiers. Determined to make his plan of bursting through the German
lines and unleashing his three divisions of cavalry on the fleeing enemy, he
kept the waves of assaults going for four months until winter forced him to
cease. By the time Haig was done, the army had suffered more than 400,000
casualties and accomplished nothing. Lt. Col. E.T.F. Sandys, who saw 500 of
his soldiers killed or wounded on the first day at the Somme, wrote two
months later, I have never had a moments peace since July 1st. He then
shot himself to death in a London hotel room. Joe Saccos illustrated book
The Great War, a 24-foot-long wordless panorama that depicts the first day
of the Battle of Somme, reveals more truth about the horror of war than
Jacksons elaborate restoration of old film.
The military historian B.H. Liddell Hart, who served in the war, wrote in
his diary:
He [Haig] was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruplewho, to his
overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who
betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the Government which he
served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely
immoral but criminal.
The American attorney Harold Shapiro, following World War I, examined the
medical records of the Army on behalf of a disabled veteran. He was appalled
at the reality these records elucidated and the misperception of the war
within the public. The medical descriptions, he wrote, rendered all that I
had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated
reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda. He published a
book in 1937 titled What Every Young Man Should Know About War. It was
pulled from circulation when the United States entered World War II and
never reissued. It was the model for my book What Every Person Should Know
About War.
Shapiro wrote in his chapter Mental Reactions:
Q: What may happen to me after I bayonet my enemy in the face?
You may develop an hysterical ticquick, sudden, convulsive spasms of
twitching of your own facial muscles.
Q: What may happen to me after I bayonet my enemy in the abdomen?
You may be seized with abdominal contractions.
Q: What may happen to me following particularly horrible sights?
You may be seized with hysterical blindness.
Q: What may happen to me if I find the cries of the wounded unbearable?
You may develop hysterical deafness.
Q: What may happen to me should I be detailed to burial parties?
You may develop anosmia (loss of your sense of smell).
The German pacifist Ernst Friedrich collected 200 photographs of gruesome
wounds, piles of corpses in mass graves, the hanging and executions of
deserterstheir families were told they had died of woundsand battlefield
atrocities censored from the public in his 1924 book, WAR Against WAR! He
juxtaposed the images against the propaganda that romanticized the conflict.
His 24 close-ups of soldiers with grotesquely disfiguring facial wounds
remain difficult to view. Friedrich was arrested when the Nazis came to
power in 1933, his book was banned and his Anti-War Museum closed. A picture
of a nearly naked soldier dead in a trench in his book reads: Mothers! This
was the fate of your sons in the war; first murdered, then robbed to the
skin and then left as grub for animals.
Honestly examining past wars gives us the ability to understand current
wars. But this is a herculean struggle. The public is fed, and yearns for,
the myth. It is empowering and ennobling. It celebrates supposed national
virtues and military prowess. It allows an alienated population to feel part
of a national collective engaged in a noble crusade. The celebration of the
destructive force of our weaponry makes us feel personally empowered. All
wars, past and present, are effectively shrouded in this myth. Those who
decried the waste and carnage, such as Keir Hardie, the head of the
Independent Labour Party, were jeered in the streets. Adam Hochschilds book
To End All Wars details the struggle by pacifists and a handful of
journalists and dissidents during the war to make the truth known and who
were mocked, silenced and often jailed.
Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the
momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling,
wrote J. Glenn Gary, a combat veteran of World War II, in The Warriors:
Reflections on Men in Battle. This is especially true of men in war. The
great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave
he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.
Jackson closes the film with an army ditty about prostitution. You might
forget the gas and shell, the song goes, but youll nevr forget the
Mademoiselle! Hinky-dinky, parlez-vous?
Tens of thousands of girls and women, whose brothers, fathers, sons and
husbands were dead or crippled, and whose homes often had been destroyed,
became impoverished and often homeless. They were easy prey for the
brothels, including the military-run brothels, and the pimps that serviced
the soldiers. There is nothing amusing or cute about lying on a straw mat
and being raped by as many as 60 men a day, unless you are the rapist.
Give sorrow words, William Shakespeare reminded us, The grief that does
not speak whispers the oerfraught heart and bids it break.
It is fortunate all the participants in the war are dead. They would find
the film another example of the monstrous lie that denied their reality,
ignored or minimized their suffering and never held the militarists,
careerists, profiteers and imbeciles who prosecuted the war accountable. War
is the raison dêtre of technological society. It unleashes demons. And
those who profit from these demons, then and now, work hard to keep them
hidden.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers
Chris Hedges
