The Great War (PBS, Nov. 11-13) wants to change all that. This literate, absorbing eight-hour documentary–the best of its kind since ““The Civil War’’–is a chronicle of both that distant era and our own. The full title is ““The Great War: And the Shaping of the 20th Century’’ to remind us that this devastating conflict was not merely a dress rehearsal for the second world war but for the entire modern age.
Grim contemporary resonances abound. First use of chemical weapons. First aerial bombing of civilians. The century’s first ““ethnic cleansing’’ (Turkish Armenians were the target). It was also the first war captured on film, which is what gives this series its potent cinematic sweep. The producers–Los Angeles PBS station KCET and the BBC, with England’s Imperial War Museum–have selected key scenes from the vast archival stock of ““industrial slaughter’’ on the battlefield, strutting generals and homefront grief. Some footage is awful to watch: soldiers going ““over the top’’ of the trenches and being mowed down by machine-gun fire, shell-shock victims reduced to twitching madmen, other veterans whom the French called ““the men with broken faces’’ being fitted with masks to hide their hideous scars.
Awful but relentlessly compelling. The haunting silent reels are given voice by actress Salome Jens, who narrates the series, along with a cast that includes Jeremy Irons, Natasha Richardson and Martin Landau. They read from poems, letters and diaries of the wars’ leaders and soldiers, as well as their loved ones. Vera Brittain, a young British nurse whose enthusiasm for the war died with her brother and her fiancE, wrote how both men promised her that if life existed beyond the grave, they’d come back and visit her. When they didn’t, she wrote, ““I walked in a darkness, a dumbness, a silence, which no beloved voice would penetrate.’’ Personal memoirs bring home the textbook dates, battles and realpolitik–although these are all concisely explicated by American scholar Jay Winter and his British and French colleagues. (Winter and coproducer Blaine Baggett wrote the companion book, published by Penguin this month.) They leaven history with humanity.
And art. The scabrous paintings of German artist (and soldier) Otto Dix bear witness to the carnage. British poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon illustrated the same horrors in verse. Owen was the young idealist, crippled by shell shock, then killed a week before Armistice Day. ““Mad Jack’’ Sassoon was the aristocratic hero turned conscientious objector. His bitter postscript: “”… the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game. / Have you forgotten yet?''
The larger point of the series is the adage about those who fail to learn from history being doomed to repeat it. The last two hours of ““The Great War’’ are devoted to what happened after 1918, the ““seething cauldron of hate,’’ in the words of British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, that gave rise to a second conflagration even greater and more terrible than the first.
