I know it's been discussed before. But I am watching it for the first time and it is absolutely amazing. Only about a quarter hour in but hearing them lament the plum and apple jelly and griping about no strawberry for some reason really connects with me. We forget that those boys were truly just like us in so many ways. And griping about rations/MREs is still the lingua Terra for our enlisted men even today.

Wow. What an experience.

To hear them talk about how worthless they thought the war was and how they believed history would find it all worthless is quite the gut punch. My heart aches for that generation after that movie.

The "Lost Generation" really isn't a misnomer

Phenomenal film. Not going to lie either, had some tears in my eyes watching it.



The film showing this sequence, and specifically the face of the man more or less left of center is haunting. Quick back story, this is from a film shot immediately prior to 7:30 am on July 1, 1916 and shows men of the Lancashire Fusiliers about to go leave a sunken road in no man's land and assault the village of Beaumont Hamel. Within minutes the majority will be either killed or wounded.

If you liked this, watch '1917'. It's be the same director and it is one of my top 5 best movies of all time. Although it's about the British, there are so many incidents and scenes that my grandfather, 36th Division, 336th Machine Gun Battalion, would tell me about. The movie is so accurate.

Quote:

---

Scrape your fingers along your greasy scalp,
pick out scabs, bits of lice with your nails.
You are a signal officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers
and your wife of 4 months, Edith,
sings and dances across the Channel
from the blood and death and mud
which is the Somme.

A shell-broken man bleeds on a stretcher,
gestures, gargles: you understand
and take his locket from around his neck.
The weight of words press full on you,
even when they are not words, just wet sounds.

It's difficult to sleep; when you do,
you dream of a mariner
blown so far into the endless ocean
he's accepted death. But he does not die:
he's pulled off the deck of his ship,
taught, by beautiful natives of an alien isle,
language.

A week after your battalion gets shredded on the wire
you interrogate a captured German officer,
map out enemy locations.
He accepts your offered water,
corrects your pronunciation,
suggests red ink for the man-traps.

In twenty years you will argue Beowulf
is not a pagan fragment or a poor allegory
but is a poem of lights opposing outer-darkness
where a man struggles against the beast
again and again and again
and is overwhelmed.

---

-J.R.R. Tolkien at the Somme, 1916

I showed this to my students last week. Not one voice/photo/film of the living in this movie is alive today.

It is very powerful and sobering

July 1, 1916 was one of the worst days in the history of war.

Great documentary. Very well done.

As a kid, I sat on the ottoman in front of my Grand-dad while he chewed his Bloodhound tobacco, sipped his Old Grandad and spit into his Hi-C can spittoon and listened to his stories of the AEF. I loved that old man and wished I had a camera to record it all back then.