Much of Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) was filmed on Brighton's West Pier (which had been built a century before) in 1968. In the film, it is luminous and beautiful, contrasting sharply with the Western Front.
I have fond memories of taking a train down from London's Victoria Station in 1991 and checking out Brighton with an English girlfriend, an architect who specialized in arcades and vestiges of military fortifications. The Gulf War had just ended, and British troops had paraded in the streets of London in full desert regalia. The train ride took only about an hour, and I was buoyant from seeing the Pogues and Kraftwerk at the Brixton Academy.
At the time we were there, Brighton's West Pier could not easily be reached because (as in the photo above by Paul M. Smith) a major section was missing. But you could see it clearly from shore. Since then, all the woooden parts have been destroyed by fire (in 2003), leaving only cast iron skeletal remains. Still magical in 1968, it included a pavilion, concert hall and arcade stands.
This is the West Pier observation deck from which the officer corps (surrealistically, and including John Mills and Edward Fox) direct operations and tally casualties, which were in reality colossal: on the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead. To put this in perspective, the KIA totals dwarf Anglo-American casualties for the entire duration of the ongoing Iraq (2003-present) and Afghanistan (2001-present) wars. In one day.
In the three-part documentary accompanying the DVD version (2006) of Oh! What a Lovely War, Attenborough mentions how he tried to incorporate eyewitness scenes painted during the Great War by C.R.W. Nevinson. Here's one, Paths of Glory (1917), considered "a hindrance to the war effort" at the time, now at the Imperial War Museum in London, which I explored in the early 1980s and 1991. Paths of Glory also happens to be the name of Stanley Kubrick's powerful 1957/1958 Great War film, and two WWI books (one by Humphrey Cobb, the basis for Kubrick's work, first published in 1935, and one by Irvin S. Cobb, 1915), deriving from Thomas Gray's 1750 poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:"
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
Today's Rune: Growth.
5 comments:
Odd how you compare the KIA at Somme and Iraq and Afghanistan. Throw in some American civil war battles as well. But then we have become much more efficient at killing in the digital age.
Very true. Because of greater sophistication in science and technology, there are a lot more wounded survivors, and the ratio of killed to wounded is very different. But guys like Pat Tillman realized the "Paths of Glory" pitfall In Country -- and too late. During the Great War (and American Civil War), blood sacrifices were felt directly by more of each society. The volunteer system keeps things more compartmentalized, and civilians (those without family members directly involved) more detached from the conduct of wars.
I really like that end quote.
Some of us who survived the war and now clean up old parade routes and parking lots in plazas with NO SMOKING signs all around--wonder what it was all about.
Erik, NoWar, NoWar, NoWar. Kraftwerk? Yes, yes, yes!
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