(no subject)
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanHaving faffed about for a half hour or so and made myself a coffee - black; I keep forgetting to buy milk, I thought it time to sit down and rattle something off.
I spent the hour between 9 and 10 watching the First World War in Colour on Channel 5. The first in a new series chronicling the history of the war using original footage that has been 'painstakingly' colourised using the 'latest techniques'.
To my mind the process doesn't always work as well as the hyperbole would suggest. Nonetheless, colourisation has brought an rare immediacy to these ancient celluloid images which, incidentally must have been run through a computer to regulate their speed as they seemed less jerky than I remember. Or maybe I was beguiled by the colour.
There is something about the First World War that is inherently more pathetic than other wars, and I use the word pathetic in its strictest sense.
For all that we are bombarded by news pictures of war in Iraq and, indeed the world over; for all that in TV history shows, library and bookshop shelves and Hollywood output, the Second World War might as well be more recently immediate than close on sixty years, that conflict for all its horror seems somehow to impact less on the senses. Perhaps it is over exposure.
But the First World War, the Great War, the War to End All Wars is different. It is the war no-one likes to talk about. And yet there is not a village in the UK where the names of the local dead are not recorded. Names of sons, brothers, fathers and friends. It was the conflict that killed my grand parents' (and probably your great-grandparents') generation.
It is the war of the Lost Generation, the war of lost innocence. It is the war in which mass industrialisation met massed ranks of flesh and bone for the first time. And industry won.
It was the war in which Europe's confidence and self-assurance was shattered, and in which the Social Order which, developed since time immemorial, but increasingly and imperceptibly ossified, was dealt the first of a series of mortal body blows.
But now, 90-odd years on, watching recent interviews with the veterans, the last hurrah of a number of dignified, proud but infinitely sad Old Boys, who served in the war brings a lump to the throat in a way few things can. Not one of them was younger than 105, several have died since they were filmed. And you couldn't fill a village hall with those who survive.
My granddad would have been 108 this year.
I spent the hour between 9 and 10 watching the First World War in Colour on Channel 5. The first in a new series chronicling the history of the war using original footage that has been 'painstakingly' colourised using the 'latest techniques'.
To my mind the process doesn't always work as well as the hyperbole would suggest. Nonetheless, colourisation has brought an rare immediacy to these ancient celluloid images which, incidentally must have been run through a computer to regulate their speed as they seemed less jerky than I remember. Or maybe I was beguiled by the colour.
There is something about the First World War that is inherently more pathetic than other wars, and I use the word pathetic in its strictest sense.
For all that we are bombarded by news pictures of war in Iraq and, indeed the world over; for all that in TV history shows, library and bookshop shelves and Hollywood output, the Second World War might as well be more recently immediate than close on sixty years, that conflict for all its horror seems somehow to impact less on the senses. Perhaps it is over exposure.
But the First World War, the Great War, the War to End All Wars is different. It is the war no-one likes to talk about. And yet there is not a village in the UK where the names of the local dead are not recorded. Names of sons, brothers, fathers and friends. It was the conflict that killed my grand parents' (and probably your great-grandparents') generation.
It is the war of the Lost Generation, the war of lost innocence. It is the war in which mass industrialisation met massed ranks of flesh and bone for the first time. And industry won.
It was the war in which Europe's confidence and self-assurance was shattered, and in which the Social Order which, developed since time immemorial, but increasingly and imperceptibly ossified, was dealt the first of a series of mortal body blows.
But now, 90-odd years on, watching recent interviews with the veterans, the last hurrah of a number of dignified, proud but infinitely sad Old Boys, who served in the war brings a lump to the throat in a way few things can. Not one of them was younger than 105, several have died since they were filmed. And you couldn't fill a village hall with those who survive.
My granddad would have been 108 this year.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-24 02:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-24 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-24 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 01:28 am (UTC)Either Sir Bryan is older than I thought or there were larger generational gaps. My surviving grandparent was born at the start of that war and has just passed 89, so perhaps the latter.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 02:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 02:36 am (UTC)My father was 28 at my birth. His father was 28 at his.
I turned 29 thinking that I'd missed something...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 06:16 am (UTC)