LIFE AND NOTHING BUT

July 23, 2018

Erie, Pennsylvania

Last week Tim and I watched a movie that Mike Hanlon, our tour guide and historian extraordinaire, mentioned in 2015, Life and Nothing But, a film produced in 1989 by French filmmaker, Bertrand Tavernier. The story takes place a year after the end of the war in October 1920. A French major has been given the task of identifying and interring thousands of fallen French soldiers, most anonymous, from the Verdun battlefield.

“Humanity has entered its last dance”

In the film's opening, a woman is looking for her husband amongst the unidentified living soldiers while a French major looks for the soldier to be the French Unknown Soldier. The filmmakers recreated a ruined village and the desolation of the country side vividly reminded me of our 2015 trip. Today the fields are covered in grasses and shrubs, even trees, but huge craters and trench lines are still visible.

Desperate families are examining found objects, personal letters, books, cups, dishes, trying to find some vestige of their loved one, gone for at least two years or more. According to the film there were 349,111 missing French soldiers, 1.5 million French soldiers killed. Wooden crosses indicate temporary graves. A hospital train, buried in a tunnel collapse during the war, yields even more bodies. However, the train was also carrying explosives and another catastrophe befalls the families when it blows up unexpectedly.

Tavernier is a popular French director and producer. His characters are deeply developed in Life and Nothing But, the story skillfully told. I like the question on the back of the DVD, would we want to be post-war survivors stripped of illusions or would we want to be trapped in the seductive feelings of bitterness and mourning for days, lives, and loves gone by?

Life and Nothing But. Dir. Bertrand Tavernier. Perf. Philippe Noiret and Sabine Azema. Hachette Premiere/King Video, 1989. DVD.

According to an article at  http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/unksold.htm, “After World War I, the Allies found that the bodies of many soldiers killed in battle could not be identified. The governments of Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the U.S. decided to honor the memory of these soldiers. Each government chose a symbolic unknown, buried his remains near the national capital and built a monument in his honor. The first unknown to be interred was France’s. The selection was made at the Verdun Citadel and the body was then taken to the Arc de Triomphe. Each day the eternal flame is relit at the Arc in a commemorative ritual.”

The full story of the American Unknown Soldier can be found at this website, too.

KING AND COUNTRY

Another film that I watched recently was King and Country, a British film about a young British soldier at Passchendaele, Belgium. After three years in the trenches, he decides to just walk home. The movie is a heartrending depiction of the effects of PTSD (long before it was called that, of course) and how the soldier was court-martialed for his desertion. The captain assigned to defend the soldier learns that the soldier spent three years in front-line trenches and was the sole survivor of his company. Despite the circumstances, the soldier is executed. My writer friend, Chris H. recommended that I watch the movie, recently shown on AMC. It was an intense and poignant film, a story starkly told. War is horrible. The graphic on the movie poster is stunning.

King and Country. Dir. Joseph Losey. Perf. Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay. BHE Films, 1964. AMC.