In my quest to find interesting documentaries to watch to stimulate mind and soul, I ran across this memorial produced by Peter Jackson of Lord of The Rings fame, for the one hundredeth anniversary of the end of World War I. In some ways it is very basic, the recordings of now dead veterans previously preserved, over the film of boys as young as 16 in the British Services in the trenches, facing, quite frankly, a likely death as they "Fix Bayonets" and go "Over the Top" to be cut in half by all manner of artillery then available. In other ways, that I noticed were criticized some in the reviews of elite magazines, it was a bit of restorative magic. After a black and white introduction, the hue in which these recordings were made and are stored in the Imperial War Museum, the film becomes colorized (looking to me much like the tone and tenor of the movie "1917") and, at first surprisingly to me, the voices of officers and men from the screen spoke and seemed to match the movement before me. It turns out that lip readers were used to match what was said by these long dead boys, where it was possible. Again, it seems that reviewers found this objectionable as somehow being misrepresenting of the truth of the time and place. For me, it was like seeing real ghosts and it penetrated my heart and mind in a way I could not have previously imagined.
The picture above which attends a You Tube Link I highly recommend was one that really affected me. Remember that cameras were still a new thing during the first part of the 20th Century. These boys were having recorded their smiles of curiousity, but mostly, their bewilderment and fear and to me, in the case of the boy pictured here, their profound sadness. Not everyone who speaks in the voiceovers went because of a sense of mission; as was true of those days and days before, young men had a Romantic idea of war, for reasons that to my modern mind, seem irrationhal. It was true of Francis of Assisi when he went off to war against Perugia, only to be imprisioned for one year and to discover upon his return, the complete disorder of man and the need for God.
But some had a real sense that there was something to be defended, a way of life, perhaps, one where some men did not exert the authority of pure power and coercion against his fellow man. The cost was 1 million British servicemen. Even then, some would say that it was a waste, as they might say World War II's fight against Hitlerian totalitarianism and the culling of those considered imperfect was a waste. But then, and probably up to these enlightened times, most would have agreed that there was a mission to preserve freedom.
There they are in the muck of the labyrinth of trenches, wearing the same uniform perhaps for the whole of their services. There they are propped up and lined on long logs over a ditch with their pants down. No porto potties in those days. It was not infrequent that one of them would fall off and into the excrement. Many the picture of the dead soldier on the battlefield in this documentary. They would not grow old because they were gutted bloody on the battlefield.
If they be called foolish automatons for the cause of freedom, what might we be called today? Freedom does not have quite the cache that once it did. One might even say that we are automatons for promised safety and security that no government run by human beings will ever provide as the nature of humanity is first to suggest, then to command, and finally to compel. You don't think so? That's ok. It doesn't matter what I think as I am in no position to influence the world. In time, as is true on social media platforms, any opinion found inconsistent with prevailing propaganda will be simply mocked, then dismissed, and finally, excised. As I said, freedom doesn't have the cache it once did.
Even I, as I watched the documentary said to myself, "Why would anyone ever fight for his country?" And given the mere lip service we give to the people who lie under white crosses and
Jewish Stars in lonely fields, that boy above seems a bit of a fool to have believed that his sacrifice would matter 102 years later. But he was just a boy. He probably wasn't thinking that far ahead. He just wanted to go home to his mother, or to his girl.
Anyway, the peoples of nations say they will never forget the sacrifices of these kids, not only the ones who died, but the ones who return with their minds and souls in shreds from what they have seen. Christians say, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Church and Country seem to me, as I look around and compare this time of my little life to other times of my little life, pale versions of what they were even 60 years ago. I know, many think that because it was imperfect back "in the day" it has no merit ab initio. That is what comes of man thinking he can create a Utopia, or build a Tower to Heaven all by his lonesome. Here we are, modern men and women, knowing so much more than Socrates, or Pericles, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Augustine, or Jerome, or Thomas More, or Bonhoeffer, or Stein, or well, anyone who had anything to do with the Declaration of Independence.
I think I need to find a more cheery documentary. Let me go and look right now. But first, I probably should say a prayer to the God so thoroughly pushed out of the public square that we don't know up from down.
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