Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on men who enjoy warfare, a Tory worrying about the youth vote and film makers mucking around with history - again

The nature of warfare

Published
Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce

WERE you surprised to hear some of the Tommies in Peter Jackson's stunning film, They Shall Not Grow Old, admitting that they enjoyed the First World War and would not have missed it for anything? This is not a new sentiment.

FROM the moment the guns fell silent in 1918, some ex-soldiers said the war had brought them a sense of purpose and occasional exhilaration. When Graham Greenwell published his war diary, An Infant In Arms in 1935 he prefaced it with this: "I look back on the years 1914-18 as among the happiest I have ever spent. To be perfectly fit, live among pleasant companions, to have responsibility and a clearly defined job - these are great compensations when one is very young."

FORTY-seven years later in 1982 I interviewed a WW1 officer Aubrey Moore who had just published his memoirs, A Son of the Rectory. "The war wasn't gloomy at all," the 87-year-old told me. "It makes me so wild to hear people writing or talking about the grumbling and the morale among troops - that is all rot. I'll say I enjoyed the war. It might have been just another blinking great cricket match. But of course, we were only children."

AT the time, I assumed Aubrey Moore was a wild eccentric in a minority of one. But he had been in the war and I had not. And if you study Peter Jackson's film, you see at times the Tommies are laughing, smiling, cheering. None of this is a recommendation for wars. But it does add up to a more complex story than we usually get from teachers and poets. And if we don't understand that men - or boys - feel bloody marvellous at winning and surviving a battle, we don't understand much about the nature of warfare, or of men.

MEANWHILE, if you wish to understand medieval warfare - and have a strong stomach - I can thoroughly recommend the new movie Outlaw King, starring Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce. It is an astonishingly brutal but beautifully-crafted piece of work. However, it raises the old, old question: why must film makers muck about with history?

IN Outlaw King, Edward the First (Stephen Dillane) dies on the way to the Battle of Loudoun Hill in 1307. In fact, the battle, which gave Robert the Bruce his first victory over the English, was on May 10 and the monarch perished two months later. In an age when people get their history from movies, why such pointless fiddling with the facts?

THE Conservative Party's arch-Remainer Anna Soubry MP goes into full Roman-soothsayer mode on the subject of Brexit, warning grimly: "The young will never forgive my party.” And how exactly does she think most young people view the Conservatives anyway? She is preaching to a generation unable to utter the word "Tory" without adding "scum." The first lesson of politics is not to lose too much sleep over the votes you are never going to win.