This was the year that I was going to write every day. Just a little, to get into the habit. I failed (as this blog provides clear evidence). In fact, I have written less this year, either for work or my own amusement, than ever before. No, I do not count emails. I end the year continuing to battle what feels like ever-growing writer’s block, an unfinished article mocking me from my drafts file, while my book tantalizes me with exciting ideas that I never manage to get down on paper. I keep reminding myself that the excitement is worth the struggle – to make the time, to think hard, to find the order of words that satisfies. Maybe in the coming year I will find a way to make such reminders a reality.

This was the year I was going to run a bit further than I ran last year. Just a little, maintaining the distance I had achieved over a few more days. I failed, running just over half the distance I covered in 2021. I try to excuse myself by pointing out that I caught Covid, rapidly followed by a truly dreadful non-Covid cold. But it is an excuse; my distance was well down on the previous year by the point I fell ill. A combination of the ridiculous summer temperatures, a return to travel which saw me attend two conferences overseas and visit my family in the US three times and an insanely busy autumn term all conspired to throw me off course. All I can do is try again next year.

This was the year I achieved a significant professional milestone and have come the closest I have ever been to simply walking away from my job. The academic environment is increasingly unpleasant to work in, with the space for the aspects of the job that I love (the research, the writing) ever more squeezed by demands of bureaucracy which take no account of disciplinary norms or the level of expertise that academics bring to the job. For the moment, I am committed to my students, my colleagues, my collaborators. But I am coming to recognize that this is unsustainable for me personally and I need to find an exit strategy in the near-to-medium, rather than the distant future.

This was the year that I swam – in the North Sea, off the south coast, in rivers in Colorado and the Lake District. I swam with friends, with family, on my own. Each swim brought me a moment of solace missing from the rest of my year. I will write about them soon.

This was the year that I read less than I hoped, but what I did read was, more often than not, what I needed. Two series in particular – Sarah Moss’s trilogy of Night Waking, Bodies of Light and Sign for Lost Children, and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet – spoke to me in the moment that I read them in ways they could have done at no other point in my life. My only sadness is not to have been able to share the joy of Smith’s novels with my mother, a Dickens scholar. She would have loved them. With a to-be-read shelf now topping the 30-book mark, I am determined to make more time for reading. Of all my identities, I have been a reader longest, something I perhaps forgot at points this year. I will try to remember it in the coming year.

This was the year I found the greatest joy in making and creating. Most of my projects are yet to be finished. The quilt for my niece, pieced together at a rate of 10 patchwork blocks a month still remains without its five borders, backing or sashing. A cardigan I have been working on for myself continues to grow but slowly towards the neck and the terrifying challenge of steeking. But I won first prize for both my bread and my marmalade at the village fete this year, undoubtedly my proudest achievement of the 12 months. I will continue to make time for this work in the coming year.

This has been an odd, confusing year of extremes, of weather, of emotion, of accomplishment. I end the year in as hard a place as I have ever been, but there is promise for the future. I do not know what sort of year next year will be. I can only hope there will be more writing, more running, more swimming, more reading, more making.

Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy new year.

After a week of reading (and commenting on) reviews of 1917, I have finally had a chance to see it. And yes, it is good, very good. Not perfect, but very good indeed.

*Spoiler alert hereon in*

So, what works? The device of the ‘single continuous shot’ (which isn’t actually) is engaging and hugely propulsive, linking and driving the different episodes of the narrative to gripping effect. The depiction of landscape is visually impressive, particularly in its range and variety. The narrative allows for movement through a huge range of different spaces, each of which is beautifully evoked. In particular, the two transitions from the area behind the lines into the trenches, with the communication trenches rising organically from the land, are incredibly moving, while the nighttime scenes of Écoust lit by flares are, quite simply, works of art.

Some of the incidental (and not so incidental) details are lovely, and attest to the level of research undertaken. The ubiquity and size of rats, the visceral horror of crawling over the bloated bodies of the drowned, men’s ability to sleep where they drop, the importance of rumour as the way in which soldiers understood their situation, the humour they employed to wile away time, are all evocative, effective images and references which give the film a sense of emotional authenticity.

Many of secondary characterisations are also beautifully done. Impressively, while all are brief, almost none are black-and-white. Even the Germans are shown as humans with agency, neither solely evil nor solely victims. Of the recognisable cameos, while both Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch are very good (the latter in particular capturing once again something ellusive about the paradoxical nature of British martial masculinity in the period), Andrew Scott’s turn as a lieutenant awaiting his relief after a long night in the lines, stands out as pure Journey’s End.

And that characterization is important for understanding what makes this film such a good film about the First World War. Because its basis is not in the history of the war, but rather in the history of its cultural representation. Yes, the script writers have read soldiers’ memoirs (and possibly also letters and diaries) as well as, I suspect, more historical analysis than they have admitted to. Yes, the costume and set designers have consulted with all the right historical consultants. But the film makers as a whole have also clearly been influenced by the films, fiction and poetry that have so profoundly shaped our understandings of the war over the past century. So, in addition to Journey’s End (1928), we get references to the visual trope of going over the top that has defined First World War films since The Battle of the Somme (1916), to the unheimlich of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918), and to the final dramatic scene of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). This is a film as much about, and as rooted in, the artistic interpretation of the war as it is the war itself.

This positioning of the film does not detracted from its quality as a work of cinematic art in itself. But it does help to explain some of the problems with it, because it is not a perfect film. Yes, there are inconsistencies and inaccuracies of detail which, for someone with a deep familiarity with the war and its history, can have the effect of breaking into any suspension of disbelief. As a historian of medicine and the war, while I cheered the use of first field dressings, both to bind wounds and staunch blood, I was always going to notice the continuity error where a bandage disappears and then reappears, complete with a hastily tied knot that apparently managed to survive some pretty extreme activities. (I’m not sure what it is with continuity editors and First World War hand wounds, but referencing the disappearance and reappearance of Thomas’s hand wound in Downton Abbey was probably not the the effect they were aiming for.) And having a man put his wounded hand into a corpse without any reference to the heightened risk of infection (even when he ends up at a medical unit a day later) feels like a wasted opportunity for an otherwise striking historical detail.

As for the final scenes, while it nice to see so many stretcher bearers (not orderlies, as per the script), both regimental and RAMC, represented, did they really all have to be two to a stretcher with no harnesses? Bearer units were four to a stretcher for reasons. Equally, their negotiation of the trenches rather defies belief, particularly in the year when the British Medical Journal was publishing articles about the difficulties bearers faced in moving standard stretchers around the corners of trenches. Oh, and that medical unit? It is a dressing station, not a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), as claimed by Major Hepburn.

Are these niggly little details which won’t affect the viewing enjoyment of those who haven’t spent nearly ten years researching the history of British medical care provision in the war? Yes, of course they are. Even as they affected my ability to suspend my disbelief, they didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film as a film. And, if nothing else, they have given me a very good argument to present to a publisher of the need for a good accessible history on this subject. But they are not the only, or even the main reason why I call this a very good but not a great film, although the classification of a dressing station as a CCS is symptomatic of the wider problem.

That wider problem, bluntly, is the necessity for films to compress historic realities. There isn’t the time for the film to portray the slog of several hours, over relays between multiple dressing stations, that was the reality of evacuation to a CCS. So dressing stations, and the work of Field Ambulance bearers and orderlies disappear, with space and time collapsed to represent an over-simplified image of the medical evacuation process.

As I say, this won’t be a problem for the vast majority of viewers, but it isn’t a narrative issue limited to medical evacuations. Unfortunately, it also effects the relationship between the two central characters in ways that are confusing and ultimately problematic for the film itself. On the one hand, Blake and Schofield are part of the same regiment, comrades in arms under the authority of the same chain of command from their sergeant on up. They know each other and they know (a bit) about each other. On the other hand, their partnership is presented as accidental, a result of proximity as much as of intimacy. This allows their backstory to be told through their conversation, which is a useful dramatic device, but it robs the relationship of any sense of the intimacy that developed between men who shared lives in the trenches. [1] The result of this apparent lack of connection between the characters is that it undermines the emotional connection forged with the audience. Ultimately, I found myself unmoved either by Blake’s death or Schofield’s contemplation of his family photographs. The importance of these men as individuals, with emotional lives beyond their immediate surroundings, was never developed enough for me to care about them as anything other than carriers of the film’s driving adventure narrative.

This, of course, is a key difference between the time-limited fictional representation of a film and a historian’s engagement with the historical sources which underpin. Reading a collection of letters or a diary covering months and years of war can demonstrate the development of a man’s (or woman’s) character over time, but it can, at times, be incredibly dull. Much of war is extremely boring, and that is reflected in the source material. Most men who served in the war were not great stylists. Their diaries and even many of their letters home are filled with in jokes, family gossip relating to unknown individuals and endless quotidian details about what they had for dinner or how cold the weather is. Films, particularly commercial films, cannot afford to be boring in this way, and 1917 is anything but boring. The compression of the narrative into just under two hours means that choices have to be made, and in this case the choice was made to flatten characterisations for the sake of narrative propulsion. It is, I think, a valid artistic choice in this case, but it has to be acknowledged as that, an artistic choice about how to represent the war. The history, and the men who made it, are inevitably more complex and complicated than any single film can capture.

So, a very, very good film rather than a great one and one which tells us more about the way in which we remember the war than about the war itself. However, as well as enjoying the film, I remain fascinated by the way in which it is being used by reviewers to project their own ideas about the history and meaning of the war, with The Guardian characteristically identifying it a pacifist film (it isn’t) and Variety locating firmly in the history of Hollywood films. And I think it has a great deal to say about the way in which our reading of the war has evolved over time, not least over the course of the centenary period. In fact, I would suggest that this film marks a good moment for Dan Todman to update The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005) to include another generation’s worth of interpretations of the war.

So, as a historian and teacher of history, would I recommend 1917 to students of the history of the war? Only in conjunction with primary sources to illuminate and deepen understanding of its representation. Would I use it as a source for teaching the history of the memory of the war and its cultural representation in Britain? In a heartbeat. It has earned its place in the canon of great Great War fictions.

[1] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), Chapter 3.

*Spoiler alert throughout*

I hadn’t intended to write this post. I have been making a very conscious effort this holiday not to do any work until today anyway, and I was planning (still am, I hope) a short post reflecting on the labours of the past year and the promises of the new one, to be written tomorrow.

But then last night, while watching the BBC’s flagship Christmas drama, The Witness for the Prosecution, as a double bill on catch up, I found my husband attempting to soothe me as I harrumphed in irritation at the First World War backstories supplied to both the Voles and John Mayhew.  Having tweeted indignantly and non-specifically about it, I feel it behooves me to explain why in more detail.

To start with, I should say that the production as a whole was beautifully shot and acted extremely well by its stellar cast. It is hard to go wrong with Andrea Riseborough or Toby Jones, and they were, as expected, exceptional.  I wasn’t so keen on the adaptation which, padded out to fill a full two hours felt baggy and lacking in tension.  Was the whole twist involving the cat (very much not part of the original) necessary or even credible?  Given the amount of time which passes between the murder and the discovery of the cat’s body, surely it wouldn’t be in such an uncorrupted state?  But that is, perhaps, a minor criticism.  The bones of Christie’s original plot were maintained, even if the twist she wrote had less impact after nearly two hours than it did in the compact half hour dramatisation that was my introduction to this story.

So I could live with this production of a classic mystery drama, with all its updated bad language and sex scenes.  It was with the First World War back stories that I found I could no longer sustain my suspension of disbelief.  To start with the second, that of the solicitor, John Mayhew, whose poor health and blood-spattered coughing underscore almost every scene he appears in.  The cough, we are told, is the result of being gassed in the war, in which he lost his son, age 17, also to gas.  In the final scenes of the drama we are informed that Mayhew lied about his son’s age in order that they could enlist together and his motivation throughout the play is ascribe to the guilt he feels that he came back while his son did not, thereby destroying his wife’s love for him.

This narrative is physiogologically unlikely, but perhaps not impossible, although Toby Jones as Mayhew looks old enough to have had lie about his own age to have been accepted for service before 1916 (when the dual enlistments must have happened if the two men ‘volunteered’ together. His eyesight, given his spectacles, would have made doing so when overages particularly difficult.)  Equally unlikely would be for them to be serving in the same unit, causing them both to become casualties of the same gas attack (as is strongly implied).  Mayhew’s son apparently learned about motor vehicles during the war, which would suggest a posting either to the Army Service Corps or the Tank Corps to me.  It is just possible that Mayhew Senior would be assigned to the ASC which, as a non-combatant unit, might take volunteers with impairments that disqualified them from combatant duties.  Even so, the chances of father and son ending up in the same unit seem slim.  Psychologically, however, this story seems nigh on impossible.  Fathers certainly supported and even encouraged their sons’ decisions to enlist, may have in some cases turned a blind eye to a teenager lying about his age, and there are examples of fathers and sons both serving, as Laura Ugolini [1] has shown, but the idea of a father supporting his son to the extent of both lying about his age and enlisting alongside him assumes a level of war enthusiasm that has been effectively undermined by historians such as Catrionna Pennell and Adrian Gregory [2].

So Mayhew’s back story is unlikely in the extreme, calling into question the attribution of his motivation to old man’s guilt, as in Owen’s Parable of the Old Man and the Young, over the loss of his son and his son’s generation.  By forcing Mayhew into the role of both guilty old man and, apparently, a witness to war, a ‘man who was there’ [3], the story ensures that he is incapable of properly representing either.

Which brings me to the second backstory, that of the Voles who, in the opening scenes of both episodes, are shown meeting in a bombed-out trench during the war, before walking hand-in-hand across a shell-pitted landscape oddly denuded of any individuals, given that this was apparently the scene of a major battle. For the military historian, this is a frustrating piece of representation.  Setting aside the question of what the hell Romaine as a woman was doing on the battlefield in the first place, somewhere that military authorities on both sides went to great lengths to ensure did not occur, the recurrent emptiness of no-man’s-land is an extremely irritating trope of contemporary televisual dramas.  Even if the battle itself was over, and night had not fallen, in which case Leonard and Romaine would have been fair game for snipers, there would still be wounded men around, as well as corpses, human and otherwise.  Desolate here does not mean empty, but presumably the scene is meant to be symbolic, as much as literal.

I hazard this suggestion on the basis of the final scene in which Leonard and Romaine appear, as they pursue Mayhew down the corridor of a luxury hotel, taunting him with their brutal success.  ‘We are what happens when you butcher the young’ says Romaine, following up her husband’s dismissal of Emily French’s murder ‘just one more life after so many’.  And it was at this point that my husband had to stop me from yelling something very rude at the television screen, because this interpretation of Christie’s story, and the relationship of the whole genre of Golden Age detective fiction to the war, is just plain wrong.  Yes, this narrative of disillusionment existed in contemporary modern novels, the ‘war books’ of the 1920s boom.  But as Rosa Maria Bracco and Alison Light have both shown [4], it was not the narrative of genre fiction, including detective fiction.

In fact, the relationship between interwar detective fiction and the war is a complex one, but the idea that the war brutalised society to the extent of making murder acceptable is, in fact, the very antithesis of the message the genre holds.  There are remarkably few interwar murderers (although rather more murder suspects) who are explicitly ex-servicemen or whose motives can be traced back to wartime experiences.  More common, indeed, are ex-service detectives (some, but not all, attempting to assuage their guilt a la Mayhew), the very people whose role in such fiction is to reassert the social order by bringing the murderer to justice.  War, like murder, may disrupt society in these narratives but in the case of murder, social order reasserts itself; civilisation and society are restored, not distorted.

The significance of this reading can, in fact, be seen in Christie’s own treatment of The Witness for the Prosecution, which she rewrote to ensure that Leonard does not get away with murder.  In this second version, Romaine stabs him as he is about to leave her for his lover, Christine.  The Law in this story remains an ass, but justice, in the classical sense, is served and Emily French’s death avenged.  No life, in interwar detective fiction, is ‘just one more death after so many’.  It isn’t until post-Second World War detective fiction (such as Marjory Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke and Ellis Peter’s The Funeral of Figaro) that we start to see the war-brutalised ex-serviceman emerge as a hardened criminal.  By attempting to attach this narrative to the First World War, the adaptors of The Witness for the Prosecution do a disservice to both the ex-servicemen of the First World War whose main aim was to reintegrate themselves into civilian society in spite of the trauma they had suffered, and to the writers of detective fiction in the interwar years who sought, through their fictions, to make it easier for them to do so.

References:

NB: As I am not in the office, I don’t have all the notes to hand for full references for this.

[1] Laura Ugolini, Civvies: Middle-class Men on the English Home Front, 1914-1918 (Manchester University Press, 2013).

[2] Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2014); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[3] Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Allen Lane, 1997).

[4] Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 (Bloomsbury, 1993); Alison Light, Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (Routledge, 1991).