Birdsong and the pity of war.

The BBC have finally sallied forth where no other filmmaker has dared to tread. They have produced a film adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong. Doubtless it will be available in many other counties very shortly, hence it’s review here. As well as making a fine film the BBC, have perhaps done something far more fundamental – they have made an elegiac, lyrical film (far better than Spielberg’s War Horse) with which future generations can associate with the true horror war. In making this film the BBC have reflected the sentiments of the war poets:. ‘The poetry is in the pity.’

Birdsong is essentially an epic and ill-fated romance which begins in the ‘days of innocence’ just prior to the Great War and reaches it’s conclusion with the signing of the armistice. It starts with French provincial life depicted as a sunlit idyll of pavement cafés, lush gardens and riverside picnics, shot to resemble a dreamy Monet painting. However it soon finds its way into the horror of war which it must be said is depicted equally skilfully and graphically.

The film takes considerable licence with Faulk’s book (don’t they all) and despite a worthy attempt, fails to paint the horror of the first day of the Somme in the same way Faulks does with words. Nonetheless it is well worth seeing. There are two tragedies played out here both which are guaranteed to provoke tears from the hardest-hearted viewer.

It is good for all of us to pause and reflect on the true horror of war occasionally and that is why I offer here Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which describes a gas attack suffered by a group of soldiers in World War 1. Using shifting rhythms and raw dramatic images, Owen sets out to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the patriotic clichés of those who glamorize it. In the first stanza, Owen paints the eerie calm before the storm of the gas attack. Using alliteration and onomatopoeia along with powerful imagery he produces a pitiful sense of despair as: ‘Bent beggars’, ‘knock-kneed’, cough and ‘curse’ like ‘hags’ through ‘sludge.’

The Latin used to invoke the irony in the title and the Latin exhortation of the final two lines are drawn from the phrase ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ written by the Roman poet Horace, which translates as: "How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.


Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.