They Shall Not Grow Old

Jon is going to be leaving us soon, so I made sure to get him to sign up for a couple of slots before he graduated.  His first pick was a film I saw in the theater and was happy to see given a slot at Cinema 1544 – Peter Jackson’s 2018 restoration WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.

As there’s no particular narrative to the documentary, there’s not a lot to write up in that respect.

Jackson structured the film to follow a “typical” journey for a WWI soldier, with the first act (not restored to color) taking place in the U.K. and covering training and the like.

Things then move to the front, and we spend a great deal of time in the trenches, while we also get to see the soldiers shift out of the trenches into support/reserve roles as they cycled in and out of the worst positions.

We get to see artillery in action in some beautifully restored footage.  And while the artillery was essential to the establishment and prolongation and futile waste of trench warfare, we also get to see the secret weapon that turned the tide:

The “tank” (which funnily enough was the deceptive code word the British used to refer to the Caterpillar vehicles while they were under development – for whatever reason it stuck), though it was very slow in being brought to the front, finally allowed the Allied armies to defeat the German trenches.  As Winston Churchill said in regard to the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, not the first tank battle but really the first time tanks were used to good success:

Accusing as I do without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done?  And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai, ‘THIS could have been done.’  This in many variants, this in larger and better forms ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.

With the advent of the tank, we then follow our generic troops through an assault on the enemy lines, and finally through the aftermath, the casualties, the Armistice and the return home.

And all along, front and center, are the soldiers.  Now over 100 years ago, the Great War claimed nearly 18 million lives if you count combatants and civilians on both sides, and many if not most of the men you see in this restored footage will be counted among them.  The title of the film comes from the thirteenth line of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fallen”, composed following a defeat for the British Expeditionary Forces in the first British action in the war:

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables at home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Jackson does a remarkable job of restoring century-old footage, which was recorded on the very earliest film cameras, which were not only handheld but even hand-cranked (and not always at a constant rate).  Although some of the restoration is understandably blurry, the improvement on the original footage – 100 hours of it from the Imperial War Museum, much of it previously unseen by the public – is remarkable.  Jackson does not add a modern narrator, relying instead on voiceover culled from hundreds of hours of interviews from 120 WWI veterans who, in some distant past, recorded their stories for the IWM and the BBC.  Add to that a lip-reading team (remember, this was before “talkies”!) that analyzed the footage used, recovered the utterances of the men on camera, and then passed them on to voice actors selected from the regions the soldiers were inferred to be from to even give them the proper accent.  For the song that runs through the credits, the contemporarily-popular “Mademoiselle from Armentières” was recorded by a group of British citizens working with the U.K. Embassy in New Zealand to once again get the accent right.

It’s a powerful film, and nearly perfectly done, and one everybody should see at least once.