Lessons from 1917
Sam Mendes’s World War I drama, 1917, brings The Great War to modern audiences with raw ferocity. It makes no attempt to entertain, preach, tear-jerk, or inspire. It provides little context, but brings powerful lessons from the past from a war largely eclipsed by the Second World War and the passage of more than a century.
The film centers entirely on two lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, commissioned to deliver a message to Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) of the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. The message orders MacKenzie to stand down, because his 1,600 men—one of them Blake’s brother—are walking into a trap.
In a continual shot, Mendes takes the viewer from the relative safety of British trenches through No Man’s Land, across enemy lines, to where 2nd Devonshire is supposed to be. On the way, the viewer sees the ghastly horror that Erich Maria Remarque and millions like him witnessed for over four years.
The soldiers’ sleep-deprived existence consists of a steady diet of cigarettes and starvation rations. Hunger, cold, mud, flies, and rats are their daily companions. Outside the trenches lies a landscape stripped of all life. Bare, shelled, de-branched tree trunks stand staggered as in a horror movie. Craters full of mud, bloody water, and rotting corpses—both human and horses—litter the landscape that the message-bearers have to cross, never knowing when a German sniper will end their lives.
The film lacks any clear, overarching moral component. Its heroes aren’t cut from extraordinary cloth. In fact, they’re extraordinarily relatable. Although they draw from incredible courage to face the hellish circumstances the story has no Sergeant Yorks, who take out machine gun companies.
Mendes draws his inspiration from stories his grandfather told him, but the film is not based on actual events. The tragedy, therefore, lacks even the redeeming quality of a true story.
It also doesn’t seek to retell historical events through an embellished side story like Pearl Harbor or Darkest Hour. It doesn’t even dramatize a single historical event like Dunkirk. Rather, in less than two hours, this film tells the story of the Western Front during World War I. It accomplishes emotionally in two hours what would ordinarily take a ten-part television series.
People normally have a recency bias. As time passes through history, more people necessarily forget the sufferings and triumphs of key events. The Mongolian Empire, the Black Plague, the Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, these were all once shattering events that altered history, culture, and population sizes. Today, however, they’ve faded into the academic memory hole.
World War I was a more cataclysmic event than all the above put together. Yet, even after 100 years, it’s difficult to remember why we fought it or what it accomplished. The political leaders almost all died in infamy shortly after the war. The victors failed either to vanquish or rehabilitate the defeated.
Unlike the overly-cinemized Second World War, the First World War wasn’t the story of stellar tacticians and charismatic political leaders. World War I had no Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Patton, or Eisenhower. Rather, it is the tragedy of the trenches. It’s the war of the commoner who faces death with defiance, watches his buddies fall, and mourns on the charge.
It is this that Mendes so brilliantly drives home in one continuous shot with two protagonists in a pulsating journey to save their comrades-in-arms.
Two scenes succeed in conveying the war’s tragedy—particularly for the British.
At one point, Schofield jumps into a house, fleeing a German soldier. There, he finds a young French woman and a baby that isn’t hers. They can barely communicate in each other’s languages, but he gives her all his food and the baby the milk he found at an abandoned farm. This scene offers the only humanizing respite from the bloodshed and horror outside. It reminds the viewer of the possibility of romance, love, and new life that would be possible absent the senseless slaughter.
In another scene, as a British convoy passes the wreckage that the Germans left behind, they pass hundreds of dead cows that the Germans shot to keep the Brits from eating. Conversation turns to the fact that for three years both sides had fought in the same spot of country and made no progress. One soldier comments, “It’s not even our country.” In a world where people knew little and cared less about nations other than their own, these commoners were being forced to fight and die in a foreign land for a foreign people.
The war forces a pause in civilization—in the desire to be with family and enjoy life. Schofield tells Blake that he hated his time on leave, because he it meant seeing loved ones without knowing if he would ever see them again.
At the end, the viewer catches a glimpse of a beautiful, green field—one of the few untouched by trenches or shelling—and the back of the pictures of Schofield’s mother and sisters, which reads: “Please come home to us.”
Rather than present the war as necessary, a tale of heroism, or a tragic true story, 1917 retells the experiences of World War I as it happened to the millions of soldiers who lived it. It provides no lessons for politicians or generals. It aims its simple unstated lessons at the kind of people who fill military ranks and weep at military funerals. War requires the postponement of civilization—of love, joy, and family—of everything that makes life worth living.
