Miss Littlewood, and Attenborough after her, present the war as a British music hall review there's a lot of smiling up front, but backstage you can see the greasepaint and smell the sweat, and the smiles become desperate, and there begins to be blood. There is something paradoxical in the thought of singing about a war, and yet cheap popular songs often capture the spirit of a time better than any collection of speeches and histories. 'Oh! What a Lovely War' does recreate this time, in a bitter mixture of history, satire, detail, panorama and music.Įspecially music. Those which have (like 'King and Country') have done it in microcosm we care for the Courtenay character, but we do not reflect on the total war. England literally lost her generation it was dead and buried, and we seem to see it beneath the countless crosses stretching out behind John Mills in the last, stunning graveyard shot in 'Oh! What a Lovely War.'Īnd yet war films and books have usually not recorded this loss, or the enormity of the stupidity which caused it. America, which came into the war rather late and sustained much lighter casualties, could afford the luxury of a 'lost generation' in the 1920s. This was apparently fairly common.Īnd so this tragic event sank into the bones of the British memory.

Joseph Losey's film 'King and Country' shows us Tom Courtenay as the lone survivor of his original unit every other man had been killed, and many of their replacements had died as well. Something like 90 per cent of the field officers were killed on some fronts.

Like most people, I know World War I at second or third hand, through such sources as Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That.' The most dramatic point Graves makes is that the war almost literally exterminated the generation that would have ruled Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lovely war book review