Oh! What A Lovely War (1969)

"Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?"

‘The late, great Maggie Smith…’

And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,
Oh, we'll never tell them, no, we'll never tell them:
We spent our pay in some café,
And fought wild women night and day,
'Twas the cushiest job we ever had.

And when they ask us, and they're certainly going to ask us,
The reason why we didn't win the Croix de Guerre,
Oh, we'll never tell them, oh, we'll never tell them
There was a front, but damned if we knew where.

From Oh! What a Lovely War, sung to Jerome Kern’s They Didn’t Believe Me.

Growing up in the 1970s, the Great War was everywhere, or, at least, so it seemed to a child with historical curiosity. On film, television and in children’s fiction. A nightmarish imagery— of gravel pit, gasmask and tin hat in Doctor Who’s The Deadly Assassin (1976); and in Sapphire & Steel (1979), the ghost of a British Tommy trapped in a fog-bound railway station. In Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes (1969), set in a girls’ boarding school, the heroine dies of Spanish ‘flu in the epidemic of 1918. All this became a juvenile obsession in the hot, languid summer of ‘77, with obsessive hours spent pouring over my father’s copy of John Masters’ Fourteen Eighteen (1970) — gruesome photography— alongside John Elliot’s Fall of Eagles, a paperback tie-in from the television series of 1974, with its photographs of the imprisoned Romanovs at Ekaterinburg. I have both books still, liberated from my parents. Treasured possessions from a different time and a different place.

Cheryl Campbell as Vera Brittain in BBC2’s Testament of Youth (1979).

For the grown-ups, the period television dramas sold the romantic imagery of the cuff pips and Sam Browne Belt, of the doomed, shell-shocked, stiff upper lipped subaltern: Evelyn Waugh’s ‘she saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern in a mud-bogged trench, standing-to at dawn, his eyes on the wrist watch, waiting for zero hour…’, in Upstairs Downstairs (1974), The Duchess of Duke Street (1976-7), Wings (1977), A Horseman Riding By (1978), Flambards (1979), and the BBC’s Testament of Youth (1979), based on Vera Brittain’s experiences as a V. A. D. nurse on the Western Front.

‘The Assassination Bureau (1969): Pickelhaube Chic…’

In the previous decade, the 1960s, the Edwardian era (including the run-up to 1914) had been depicted as a nostalgic Golden Age— when, in truth, the historical reality (of strikes, social unrest and rapid, unsettling technological change) was, actually, rather different, with the old European order portrayed in an often, whimsical, even comic, fashion— what I like to describe as internationalist ‘pickelhaube chic’, also an excuse for the various national anthems in jazzy pastiche, as seen in: The Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and The Assassination Bureau (1969): a world of white-painted wrought iron, conservatories (à la Ronald Searle), Bavarian castles, spiked helmets and Zeppelins, dirndls, beer hall carousing and veteran motor cars. The Great Powers manoeuver on the map of Europe, like the board game Diplomacy (1959) or as in the television series Fall of Eagles (1974). But unlike the players of the time, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know what will happen to the Tsar’s daughters. In their pretty white dresses à la Laura Ashley.

Sir John Mills as as Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE.

In the summer of 1931, a grateful French populace raised a statue of Sir Douglas Haig in the peaceful town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, paid for entirely by public subscription. At the same time, the ultimate triumph of the British and Commonwealth Forces on the Western Front in 1918 has been described by the distinguished military historian, Gary Sheffield, as the ‘greatest series of victories the British army has ever seen.’

Yet, by the 1970s, the accepted historiography of the First World War (at least in the popular imagination), as championed by A. J. P. Taylor, was of a futile conflict, the working-class fodder for the stupidity and indifference of the ruling class, with the red-tabbed generals— especially Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig— very much cast as the villains of the piece. Today, thanks to the considerable work of revisionist military historians, John Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (1963), Paddy Griffith’s Battle Tactics on the Western Front (1996) and the late Richard Holmes’ The Western Front (1999), we now have a more balanced, a more nuanced, and a frankly more objective interpretation of the war, which accounts for the considerable complexities of an intensely difficult and almost impossible situation. Eighteen per cent of British Generals (who served in the First World War) were killed in action, wounded or captured. I repeat. Eighteen per cent. So much for Blackadder’s cognac-swigging cowards hiding in chateaux well behind the lines. It’s also worth mentioning, at this point, that Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (an intelligent man who spoke six Indian languages, including Hindustani), far from being a toff, had risen from the ranks and dropped ‘is aitches left, right, and centre. In John Lewis-Stempel’s superb and often moving account, Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War (2011), the young officers who led from the front (and suffered the highest casualty rates), the Lieutenants and the Captains, were men of considerable education, selflessness, integrity and competence, respected— and often loved— by the men under their command.

“With a smile on his lips and his Lieutenant’s pips upon his shoulders bright and gay…”

The problem, of course, with revisionism (and I’m firmly in the revisionist camp), is the danger of appearing callous, reducing the tragedy of a hideous conflict to statistics, charts, figures and dry argument, when of course, a soldier’s experience on the first day of the Somme, on the front line, must have been, for many, a terrifying and hideous ordeal. And yet, and yet— I have my own great-grandfather’s papers (Thomas Cornwell Parker, 2nd Lieutenant, East Yorkshire Regiment, ex-Artist’s Rifles), from 1917, describing his month on the front line, at Oppy Wood in Passchendaele, which paints a different picture from the 70s interpretation, with talks of a trench raid (which he led along with another officer) as a ‘scrap’. Interestingly, my paternal grandfather (Philip Honey, Lieutenant, Royal Garrison Artillery) loathed Oh! What a Lovely War— in his opinion it made a mockery of the ordinary soldiers who had died defending their country. Read Duff Cooper’s diaries and he enjoyed the war. As did the poet, Julian Grenfell. But by the end of the 1920s, as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) has shown us, there was a shift in perception. With the publication of the war poets. With Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That (1929) and Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Which takes us, finally, to Dickie Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), the film version of the stage musical. It’s very much a period piece, I think, reflecting the popular view of the war, as seen from the perspective of the 1960s, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam conflict. Joan Littlewood’s original musical from 1963, was a stage adaptation of a radio work by Charles Chilton, based, to some extent (there was a lawsuit) on Alan Clark’s, stylish if historically flawed The Donkeys (1961), in which Clark falsely attributes the infamous ‘Lions Led by Donkeys’ quote to the memoirs of General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German Imperial Staff in 1914, a mysterious memoir which researchers have yet to track down. Although the phrase had been bandied about for some time, the truth is that Clark plucked it from the air and gave it a false attribution. Ironically, both Clark and Littlewood (a former Communist) were poles apart, politically, if singing from the same hymn sheet, with Clark’s mass-slaughter of the officer class in 1915, furthering the decline of the British Empire and Littlewood’s establishment conspiracy, a betrayal of the working class, lambs to the slaughter. In Littlewood’s original anti-war production, the ‘soldiers’ wore Pierrot costumes with tin hats.

“Hush, here comes a Whizzbang!”

And in Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) there’s an element of late 60s surrealist whimsy (actually not dissimilar to The Prisoner or later episodes of The Avengers). It was filmed on the West Pier in Brighton— a superb Victorian pier, one of the best, now tragically lost following storm damage and a senseless arson attack— evoking the grind of a barrel organ: straw boaters, Punch and Judy and pink and white striped rock. That carefree August Bank Holiday of 1914. Everyone’s in it, too— a Star too Far, some might say: Larry, John, Johnny, Ralph (to rhyme with waif), Kenny, Dirk, Nanette (she’s a fetching V. A. D.), Vanessa (she’s a socialist), amongst other luminaries of stage and screen, including Ian Holm, Susannah York, Edward Fox, the vicar and whatsherface from To the Manor Born (1979), and that bloke off Danger UXB (1979) and Who Dares Wins (1982). Plus, of course, the great, late Maggie Smith in a terrific performance as Music Hall Glamour Girl turned Cockney Harridan: “On Sunday I walk out with a Soldier, On Monday I’m taken by a Tar…”

‘Roedean girls and lax sticks…’

The script was written by Len Deighton, who refused a credit as he found the finished film too sentimental. A shame, I think, as the final scene in Oh! What a Lovely War is genuinely and deeply moving— and chokes me up every time— the 16,000 white crosses planted on the Sussex Downs, above Brighton, and filmed, presumably, from a helicopter, set to Jerome Kern’s tear-jerker, They Didn’t Believe Me. No CGI in those days. Every cross had to be planted in the Sussex turf. It’s one of the great moments in British cinema history.

“Oh, we’ll never tell them, we’ll never tell them…”

I watched Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) in a Special Collector’s Edition on DVD. It’s also available on Amazon Prime Video digital download, which you can rent from £3.99.

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