"RALEIGH [after a pause]: The Germans are really quite decent, aren't they? I mean, outside the newspapers?
OSBORNE: Yes. [Pause.] I remember up at Wipers we had a man shot when he was out on patrol. Just at dawn. We couldn't get him in that night. He lay out there groaning all day. Next night three of our men crawled out to get him in. It was so near the German trenches that they could have shot our fellows one by one. But, when our men began dragging the wounded man back over the rough ground, a big German officer stood up in their trenches and called out: ‘Carry him !’– and our fellows stood up and carried the man back and the German officer fired some lights for them to see by.
RALEIGH: How topping!
OSBORNE: Next day we blew each other's trenches to blazes."
R C Sheriff, Journey's End
The characters in Journey's End, set in the British trenches in the Second World War are normal people. Naive youngsters, older ex school teachers, jovial pranksters, heroes damaged and made brutal by war. Of course on the other side, in the German trenches, are a similar collection of individuals. But it's easier, it makes everything make more sense, if you can believe that the other side are monsters.
Personally, I believe that life is an individual, softer and subtler battle between good and evil for each one of us on a daily basis. It's why the good versus evil premise in films, literature, games, folklore and religion is so popular and so prevelant. We consider these sorts of narratives to be escapist, but I think we are each, individually fighting a smaller version daily. To lose our temper or to remain calm, to lie or to be honest and face possible condemnation, to give time to others when we don't really want to and there's no personal gain in it, to lose faith or to hold firm, to become cynical and negative at work, or to stay positive and focused against the odds. To give money to charity or to spend it in the pub.
The reason the film and literature versions can be considered escapist, is because they are so much more clear cut than real life. I have talked about this a lot in previous blog entries, the difficulties raised by the fact that real 'enemies' do not carry pitch forks and wave forked tails. Essentially the battle between good and evil narratives in our stories are escapist because we make it simpler. And that welcome simplicity applies not just to the enemies themselves, the way they look and act, their recognisability and obvious evil, but also to the nature of the fight. Where daily battles are fought and won on the basis of a moment of hesitation and an inner debate, and actual wars on the basis of money, weapons, equipment and strategy, these narratives make it a straight forward face to face physical fight in which the good to evil combat comes down purely to the endurance, skill and determination of the players, with the weapons and situation carefully balanced and everything, very often, coming down to a straight, one to one battle between the leader of good and the leader of evil.
Because it's inspiring. You can, as a viewer or reader, identify with it and get behind it. You can imagine yourself as that leader of good, saving whole populations with the strength of your courage. Who hasn't watched something like The Lord of the Rings and thought that of course they too, in that situation, would fight, felt a little pang of longing to have the chance, themselves, to lay waste to a few orcs. Many people literally play out these scenarios for themselves in computer or role playing games. The trick, literally is to take the real battle, and blow it up larger than life, lending, by doing so, the person who is watching, a larger, stronger persona with which they can fight these, clearly evil, monsters.
So arriving in Wellington and going to visit the Weta workshop where the artists specialise in the crafting of monsters, famously for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies and then going to see a newly opened exhibition about the first world war, for which Weta has made huge, four or five times life sized images of individual characters, men and women whose first hand accounts have been made available to us, and brought to greater than life, is rather pertinant.
Its funny how the Weta workshop visit is just a lot of fun, despite the weapons, monsters, armoury and other worldly creatures and landscapes being often centred on the creation and depiction of bloody battles, whereas the war exhibition, also centring on bloody battle and larger than life (literally) characters, is very far from that. In one sense this is obvious, because the war exhibition depicts a real event. We have to think about the reality and the actual suffering involved. But, having said that, the work done at the Weta workshop, albeit creating orcs and monsters, is still deeply committed to realism, at least within the bounds of whatever storyline the work belongs to. Monsters and weapons are modelled on real anatomy and actual weaponry. Much research is done in the very first stages of the design process. Even the actors craft their performances with as much realism as possible, during The Lord of the Rings production, for example, actors did as many as possible of their own stunts, learning for real skills like fencing or horse riding. Our guide through the workshops shows us real chain mail, and then explained the process by which the workshops had tried to produce something as true as possible to the original, but light enough for the actors to wear. We hold in our hands a sample of both types of armour. The original is incredibly heavy. However we are told that one of the key actors in the Lord of the Rings trilogy chose to wear the real version in order to feel more at one with his character.
Perhaps, apart from obvious production values we strive so hard in films and fiction with a good versus evil premise, for it to feel real because we long for reality to be a simpler fight. The fact is that in fantasy the battle may still be bloody, but it's cleaner, clearer.
We are shown a set of armour designed for one of the key villains. Our guide talks us through the design and creation process.
"We needed it to be practical to wear," he tells us, "but still look cool." And it does look really cool. Much cooler than the rather grey, grimy every-day battles we fight with ourselves, or the shocking, nightmarish blood baths and violent deaths of fathers, brothers, sisters, children that occur in real war. And in real war there is not a clear enemy. There are no monsters. We must make them ourselves to cover the fact that we fight against what are essentially only other people.
The great war exhibition, newly opened to commemorate the role played by New Zealand soldiers in the Great War, follows the journey taken by the soldiers, who landed in Turkey for the battle of Gallipoli, largely composed of New Zealand and Australian men, fighting on behalf of the British. The Generals directing the fighting were British. The men on the ground were ANZACs. They landed in the wrong place on treacherous terrain to fight against a badly underestimated Turkish army. On several occasions there was such a bloodbath on both sides that first hand accounts talk of the stench and of the ground being thick with bodies. At one stage the two sides called a temporary truce in order that soldiers could bury their dead. Soldiers talk of the heavy silence of that day, and of the fact that, due to the heat and the number of dead, burials were quick, mass and perfunctory. There was no time to shed a tear and say a prayer for your friend. You had to dig a shallow hole and heave him in. This is not the sort of battle you daydream about fighting.
The fact is the war feels like pointless attrition. The Turks allowing the men to bury their dead, indeed to bury their own, points to their humanity. They don't conveniently use the opportunity to break their word and shoot the soldiers while they have laid down their arms. They are no more monsters than the ANZACs are. In first hand accounts of both wars, in the football game on Christmas Eve, and the burying of the dead in Galipoli, in the accounts of the capture of enemy soldiers where the prisoner is described, rather compassionately as 'no more than a boy' we see that the front line soldiers understood this.
But it isn't simple. I am a confirmed pacifist. But I feel, as I make my sombre way through the exhibition, as I stand silent, looking at the exquisitely detailed statue of a young private trying to eat corn beef from a fly covered tin with blood stained hands, towering over me while his voice tells of his failure one night to keep awake during look out, as I stand in the firing line of a corporal, face twisted with sweat and fear, shooting over the fallen body of his comrade, as I move, slowly, blow by blow, through the account of the attempt by the troops to make inroads into the territory they are trying to conquer, I begin to feel their victory. After losing, with them (it is an immensely well designed exhibition) comrades and friends, and the person they were before they came to this battle, I am horrified by a quick stab of jubilance when a particular battle seems, finally, to have been clearly victorious. And with them, after all that has happened, I am not pleased, but angry and let down when, after long months of this struggle, the Generals, from their station so far away, decide the attempt isn't worth it, and order withdrawal.
Never have I felt I understood the reluctance of soldiers to come back home, from such foul and inhumane conditions, other than perhaps because they have changed beyond recognition and cannot bring themselves to present such a changed face to their loved ones, so innocent of this reality, back home.
But to withdraw, to finally, after so much attrition, be ordered to give up, means that every friend you saw wasted on those blood soaked landscapes had died for no reason.
It was all for nothing.
And this is the tragedy of war, the sheer fact that. try as we might to make a meaning, even if that meaning really is there and there is a discernable, genuine purpose, it all so often comes to nothing. Either, even in victory, it does not solve the initial problem (new dictators welcomed in by the people you stepped in to save from the last one, or anarchy and bloodshed following freedom from genocide because there was never any real opponent) or the fight, you now discover, was being fought for a disingenuous purpose in the first place.
But you lost friends to that purpose. You did things which, in the normal course of existence, seem terrible. You lost things you cannot even express, things which never had a name in the first place.
How did the British soldiers returning from Afghanistan feel following claims that it had all been an illegal war based on misinformation? How did the American soldiers returning from Vietnam feel, to be greeted by their people, not as heroes, but as murderers.
The trouble with battling good and evil is that it's very hard to tell which exactly is which.
There are too many humans and not enough monsters. And in the end, the defeated party and the victors? Well sometimes you still can't tell which is which. And often, for the soldiers, and for the rest of us, whether the troops are pulled out early or returned home victorious, the fight is still not necessarily finished.
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