The title is from Siegfried Sassoon's poem, "Suicide in the Trenches." I guess it's okay to quote the poem because it's pretty short and in its own quietly lurid way sums up the war situation in 1917.
I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.
And, well, as Michael Redgrave's narration tells us, "Only the artist's eye could fathom what madness man had inflicted upon himself." There follow a frieze and some sketches by Wyndham Lewis, a lieutenant in charge of a six-inch gun battery. Lewis was a painter and novelist. Left to his own devices he produced paintings of odd-ball geometric abstraction but here the drawings are realistic and awful. We get glimpses of the works of other artist/soldiers too, such as Paul Nash.
Lewis was the official war artist for both Canada and Britain but the officer corps didn't hesitate to post him or anyone else at the front. The series doesn't mention it but Henry Mosely, a physicist who put the atom properly together and was a forerunner of Niels Bohr, and who would probably have won the Nobel Prize, left Oxford to join the army and was shot through the temple at the age of twenty-seven. Siegfried Sassoon, whose work opens the episode, was awarded the Military Cross and nominated for the Victoria Cross before being driven mad. The tribulations of Joyce Kilmer and Hemingway would come later.
Redgrave informs us that, despite the noxious conditions, the rotting horses, the constant noises, the salient enmity on all sides was directed towards the "eyewash" produced by the war profiteers and patriots back home. "The enemy" became a faceless concept, but prisoners were treated well. The soldiers claimed that what held them together -- virtually the only positive thing about their experience -- was the feeling of solidarity, of being with others who had survived the same stressors. The narration doesn't say so but this is identical to the feeling of American soldiers interviewed by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer in an extensive post-war study. (His work led to the Combat Infantryman's Badge.)
An interesting paradox on the Western front is pointed out. There was a "deadlock", with each side in solid defensive positions protected by barbed wire. In some places the heavy wire was seven feet high and two hundred feet deep. There was no way of attacking. The only damage could be done by artillery. But the artillery plowed up the ground of No Man's Land into such a heap of mountains and craters that neither infantry nor tanks could make quick progress across it. This led to the "deadlock."
The episode, like these comments, deals mostly with life in the trenches and the sentiments of the troops, with some additional artistic renderings of the milieu. Only one battle is described -- Cambrai, where British tanks forced a breakthrough for the infantry. The ground gained was quickly recovered by a German counter attack and 1917 ended pretty much as it had begun.
I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.
And, well, as Michael Redgrave's narration tells us, "Only the artist's eye could fathom what madness man had inflicted upon himself." There follow a frieze and some sketches by Wyndham Lewis, a lieutenant in charge of a six-inch gun battery. Lewis was a painter and novelist. Left to his own devices he produced paintings of odd-ball geometric abstraction but here the drawings are realistic and awful. We get glimpses of the works of other artist/soldiers too, such as Paul Nash.
Lewis was the official war artist for both Canada and Britain but the officer corps didn't hesitate to post him or anyone else at the front. The series doesn't mention it but Henry Mosely, a physicist who put the atom properly together and was a forerunner of Niels Bohr, and who would probably have won the Nobel Prize, left Oxford to join the army and was shot through the temple at the age of twenty-seven. Siegfried Sassoon, whose work opens the episode, was awarded the Military Cross and nominated for the Victoria Cross before being driven mad. The tribulations of Joyce Kilmer and Hemingway would come later.
Redgrave informs us that, despite the noxious conditions, the rotting horses, the constant noises, the salient enmity on all sides was directed towards the "eyewash" produced by the war profiteers and patriots back home. "The enemy" became a faceless concept, but prisoners were treated well. The soldiers claimed that what held them together -- virtually the only positive thing about their experience -- was the feeling of solidarity, of being with others who had survived the same stressors. The narration doesn't say so but this is identical to the feeling of American soldiers interviewed by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer in an extensive post-war study. (His work led to the Combat Infantryman's Badge.)
An interesting paradox on the Western front is pointed out. There was a "deadlock", with each side in solid defensive positions protected by barbed wire. In some places the heavy wire was seven feet high and two hundred feet deep. There was no way of attacking. The only damage could be done by artillery. But the artillery plowed up the ground of No Man's Land into such a heap of mountains and craters that neither infantry nor tanks could make quick progress across it. This led to the "deadlock."
The episode, like these comments, deals mostly with life in the trenches and the sentiments of the troops, with some additional artistic renderings of the milieu. Only one battle is described -- Cambrai, where British tanks forced a breakthrough for the infantry. The ground gained was quickly recovered by a German counter attack and 1917 ended pretty much as it had begun.
