Oh What a Lovely War

Just went on Friday to see my actor friend in 'Oh What a Lovely War'.  It is an extremely good but very hard watch.  I would say that it accurately portrays the stupidity and futility of the Great War of 1914.

For example, accompanying the action on stage was a projector screen showing some of the statistics of the various battles such as Battle of the Somme, one and a half million British soldiers dead, gains = nil.  What many people don't realise is that the Battle of the Somme was not one day one battle affair.  It was several months of slaughter that nearly killed off an entire generation of young men, all because the old soldiers (generals) who were making the decisions believed in a war of attrition, not a war of mission objectives.

"Old soldiers never die, never die, never die.
Old soldiers never die,
The young just wish they would."

There again says that, considering the mess out in Afghanistan, it seems that the old soldiers are swinging back that way.  That or the politicians won't give them a clear cut objective.

The musical side of the play was also very well done, used to great affect to increase the pathos of the whole piece, especially the Christmas Day Cease Fire.  I wonder how many people realise that the Christmas Day Cease Fire was not official?  The leaders had promised that it would be over by Christmas so the men acted as if that promise had been fulfilled and called the cease fire themselves.  I will never understand how they could have made friends over No-Man's Land and the next day go back in the trenches and start killing each other again.  I know that they were ordered to and they had to obey or be shot by their own side.  That is what my head knows but my heart won't accept that knowledge because I could not kill a friend because he spoke with a difference accent to me.

"A soldier in a far off land
Fighting for peace in that far off land
And if somebody had to kill him
Why did it have to be me?"

The other thing I liked about 'Oh What a Lovely War' was that, especially in the first half, they included a lot of stuff from the point of view of the Germans.  The most touching piece was a single man sitting on stage, acting the part of a German soldier writing home, reading out what he was writing:

"The bodies around the guns are piled from the horizontal to an angle of sixty degrees.  Two or three men go mad... every day."

As the pacifists said "Nobody wins a war."  One side just looses less than the other.  And I wonder if those who shouted down the pacifists and pushed their young men into going to die, be wounded or broken for their King and Country every had the decency to feel the weight of their guilt.

One final thing and this one from real life.  One of my other friends, her great uncle signed up in 1914 to fight when he was just fourteen years old.  In 1918 he came home, having survived everything the Great War had physically thrown at him and threw himself into the Wensum.  He was just eighteen.

The cost of War.