The grinning ghosts of "They Shall Not Grow Old"

What stays with me after watching "They Shall Not Grow Old" - Peter Jackson's World War I documentary - are the smiles on the faces of the soldiers as they look into cameras.

Plenty has been written about Jackson's film, which takes the old Imperial War Museum silent footage of the Western Front trenches, with all their cracks, jumps and jerky movements, and transforms them into clear, smooth, color images in 3-D that appear living and vital. The film, in limited release, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.

I think we often forget that the men who fought in the trenches did not know that another World War would follow scarcely 20 years after the close of the first. Unlike the Second, which was extensively recorded on film and occasionally in color, World War I doesn't leave us with film of blitzkriegs and Stuka dive bombers, Pearl Harbor or the devastation of Hiroshima. What we know of it resembles impressions of the wars of antiquity. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Schlieffen Plan, Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, the Russian Revolution - all of these monstrous events play out largely in books and our imagination. And they survive there, through the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the prose of Erich Maria Remarque, among others.

Jackson's film begins rather ordinarily. The pre-war and military training footage is clear but in black and white and at the regular frame speeds we expect of that time. It is the kind of film you would expect in a museum. We are clearly watching the past, distant, even cold, in spite of hearing the voices of World War veterans remembering these times, recorded when the men were in their 60s and 70s. When the scene shifts to the battlefield, though, the images suddenly grow sharper, gain color, and the depth of 3D. And we are suddenly transported.

What "They Shall Not Grow Old" gives us are faces - the faces of ordinary British and German soldiers sacrificed on the fields of Belgium and France. At various times in Jackson's film, he zeroes in on the faces of soldiers recorded for the cameras. There are various scenes of soldiers, in the off hours, at work, at play, horsing around for the camera. They seem fascinated by it. The camera pans over men on a march, in a trench, at a table, in a huddle, or hunched against a wall before an offensive, and their eyes all gravitate to the lens. For some, their faces appear in a locked fascination. For others, they seem determined to model courage, or appear as an individual. Others are instantly taken with the desire to perform. One man's eyes bulge before an engagement. Another wounded man's hands shake violently. One man maintains a stone face while playing a bottle as a guitar. Computer refinements makes the faces appear as contemporary and alive as if the footage was shot hours before. We have to be reminded that many of these faces did not survive the end of the day's filming.

In our time of Snapchat, the photobomb, the selfie and the surreptitious filming that surrounds us, we have to be reminded of a time when a person might go their whole lives without seeing a bulky motion picture camera. They might not even know how such a thing might appear. But the film informs and deforms the past. We don't know these men's names. The voices we hear are not young men, but old. They are survivors, so there is a disconnect between the immediacy of the image and the reality of what is being seen. The voices have traveled a long way from the desperation of the trenches, when tens of thousands of men perished over yards of ground. They survive, at the moment they recount their stories, sometimes by the barest of luck and the inscrutable will of God. They have had many meals since their time on the front. Consider the words of Remarque's narrator in "All Quiet on the Western Front:"

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

We are looking into the faces and hearing the memories of recognizably ordinary men. As in any war, they are called upon to do extraordinary things, mixed up with the maddeningly pedestrian, the absurd, the ghastly. The film reminds us of their daily routine of bland and appalling food, the muck of the trench, the fetid and festering surroundings, verminous pests run wild, rats grown obese on bloated corpses sinking into mud, accompanied by the din of machine guns and the thrum of distant artillery. But these men are mostly poor, judging by their appalling teeth, unevenly educated, bred to toil, nurtured in the idea of Imperial rightness and might, determined to see through their fates because they've been called by King and Country. Or at least, that's what the voices tell us.

 But I kept looking into those faces, looking out over a century, out into the auditorium where we munched on popcorn and checked our iPhones. The faces, restored to color, revived by the manipulation of the image. Was I being deceived into seeing something sweet and sentimental about the past? "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" asked Owen in "Anthem for Doomed Youth." 

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
     Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs. - 

Many millions more have perished since the guns fell silent in November 1918. Humanity is much larger, more connected and disconnected. I sometimes sense the indifferent arrogance of the pre-war, post-Victorian West in the world now, and I shudder. One sometimes hears that education and the inculcation of human rights consciousness has made the world more humane. Just a momentary study of the sweep of history does little to inspire confidence that this is true. Hang around a while, says a darker, inner voice. Give our truer natures time, and we will again be busy.


But "They Shall Never Grow Old" succeeds by reminding us that there is more to the story than the carnage we associate with the trench. These were not cattle, though circumstances and a relentless accumulation of horror made they feel so. The faces of the soldiers we see are not actors trying to illuminate a time through gesture and expression, but the actual human beings who were chosen to enact an ancient rite that we seem unable to grow out of it, a ritual where even the best of our instincts survives alongside the worst of our sins. Those enduring, ghostly faces awaken, to our astonished eyes, and reach back with their doomed, determined eyes.

What would they think of us? What would they think of the civilization they fought for? I don't ask this question as an indictment. Instead, I ask it as one asks oneself, after the parents are long dead. "What would they think of what I've become? What do I owe them? What does all of this mean?"

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

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