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Oh! What a Lovely War

And we have such gullible people even today doing and believing exactly what the government tells them. Ukraine is a perfect example with us in the west beating our chests to Russia. I mean why would we want to send a young man from France or the U.K. to die for a fight between Ukraine and Russia yet that’s the way it’s going. And no one dares says ‘no’ and no dares tell the media to stop stirring. It was the same in WW1 - fight for what. Germany never threatened the west and only did so when we threatened it because the elites ego was put out of joint because they thought they should rule the waves.

I am very sorry your grandfather suffered. I expect you would call me a Toff, but all classes suffered. My grandmother lost both her husband and her son in WW1. She gave the Bolitho Maternity Home to Penzance, so I guess you could say that out of death there came life. She put a beautiful stained glass window into Paul Church outside Penzance, and into Leusdon Church in Devon, as we then had land in both counties. She came from Invergordon Castle, so there was a monument I believe in Invergordon, as well as a cut-granite stable bungalow outside Penzance, complete with a memorial plaque to her lost son. / The windows are superb works of art, and give a lot of people something to see, while the bungalow has been a good home for a century, so her grief had some benefit. I never met her, so whether it did her any good, I do not know. / What I do know about your father's war, was that everything possible was done to minimise casualties. The soldiers loved Field Marshall Montgomery because they knew he cared about each and every life lost. I know this makes me sound like a "toff", but it is true - the husband of my late mother's cook, Violet, was a man by the name of Percy Cockings, and he had served in the Eighth Army, and was very proud of it. / My late father was a WW2 submarine officer with a DSC, and when he had heart problems, he went to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight, then a service hospital or convalescent home - I forget which. There he met an older Irish lady, Betty Sheridan, and they got on so well, and as she needed a place to live, she came to one of our flats. She had been a nurse in WW1, and her fiance was killed, so she never married. She was a sister in WW2, and her convoy was shelled by the Germans, and she broke her back, though she recovered. She had a good dozen medals - more than my father - and on the Africa Star ribbon there was stiched on a silver '8', signifying that she had been under fire. She was very proud of that. / We are lucky we never saw war, due to their service. /

No, it started with Charles Chiltern simply taking a note of the songs, the voice of the men. Joan Plowright then used it as a history of the war, which nearly got censored by the Establishment, on a shoestring budget at the Theatre Royal Stratford - she used end-of-the-pier pierrot costumes as they were what she had, rather than uniforms, and that got caught up in the Summer of Love anti-Vietnamse War movement. In the autumn of 69, Dickie Attenborough got the necessary rights together to make the film, and a cast of the whole UK theatre establishment. I'd just joined the CCF battalion at the school which had founded the National Youth Theatre movement fourteen years earlier, and had spent the afternoon sorting the stores in search of a battledress my size - an the bottom of a pile of kit about eight feet high was a box, different cloth and cut, I looked for a label - 1917. I finished off, left the box where it was, and reported back to Admin. The guy was on the phone, retired RSM, "No, Dickie, sorry, I'm pretty sue we don't have any WW1 uniforms. What is it, Rahere? We do? Well, you speak to Mr Attenborough then." That solved the issue of the box - and irritated Mrs Plowright considerably. A couple of months passed, basic training complete, orders from Admin, be on parade in uniform 0630 outside the school gates on Saturday. That meant the milk train. So there I was, feeling a right lemon, when a parp-parp came from down the road, a charabanc rolled into sight with the cast on board. That's how I took my first salute from Olivier and Gielgud, the High Command of the stage, they'd partied the night at Stratford and were now en route to Clapham Common to join the London-Brighton veteran car rally, ahead of filming in and behind the town. A lifetime later, I was a Staff Colonel, beating militarism into Peacemaking, and realised there was a hidden message to the cast. Then as now, it's the teens who die. At least the reintroduction of National Service has faded with the election. It is, certainly, something a citizen must do to defend the Nation, and that requires training. But it's not the right of the feudal rump to demand it, and at long last the end of the Hereditary Peerage is in sight.

Often the best keep silent. It meant something to serve the country then. Government has trashed that since. But you still take prode in it. / I was briefly a TAVR infantryman, but the hierarchy were in the early stages of Woke, and we spoke a different language, so I left. My family has produced warriors for centuries. /

Really? There were some very, very good officers in the Great War. The problem with this film is that it is as much an artefact of the 60s anti-establishment as it is an accurate portrayal of many elements of the War - not least because of the huge inaccuracies of "The Donkeys" - the book that was the spur to this and other protrayals.

What's so terrible about the whole thing was WWI is overshadowed by WWII. Despite more people dying in WWII, I find WWI was much worse since it was literally a meat grinder where people died for nothung

@@aishabintabubakr4944 Because WWI had a really incompetent General Staff from what I can gather.

@@labeles41 Do some proper research! The Far Left want you to believe their propaganda. The army learnt. Remember, Britain was NOT a continental army like Prussia/Germany or France. It was TINY. By 1918, it was 5 million men, and with our allies, we swept the Germans from the battlefield. We created combined arms soldiering. A cousin of mine invented the whip aeriel for tanks, based on his fishing rod, and he pioneered air-to-ground radio for artillery spotting. Many years later, he moored his yacht next to an author, and his name - Richard Bolitho - became the hero of many books. / Just find out how many senior British officers were killed on the battlefield. The Far Left tells you they were all miles back in chateaus, which some were. But plenty went right to the front. Winston Churchill - a cabinet minister - was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Scots in WW1 - right in the trenches. / People like Montgomery, who saw poor staff work, particularly early in the war, made it his life's work to be the consumate staff officer, and then a caring general. Which was why his soldiers loved him. / When Douglas Haig died after WW1, huge numbers of soldiers mourned his passing, even though he lacked Montgomery's common touch. / his nam

Correct, it's a disgraceful lie, there are very good reasons why the British Army, alone of all the major combatants, never mutinied or indeed had any notable disciplinary issues throughout the whole war.

Yes, that's true. But it's out of the subaltern's hands here. I think what's being shown is how the number of unexpected casualties swamped the home country's resources. The War is already growing into a monster.

The degree of Communisation nowadays, I find it hard to believe anything that the media say.

In what way...??? we need some more than a pithy comment! makes you you sound like a d!ck...!

You certainly are.

You obviously know a lot about bullshit - or perhaps you don't, because this isn't.

Complete bollocks of course, never happened and more to do with the hard-left, anti-establishment obsessions of the late 1960's. That you're prepared to take this snippet at face value says a lot about it's effectiveness and your own credulity and lack of curiosity. The whole film is full of crap like this.

If you believe that you obviously know nothing about the British Army.

Officer casualties as a proportion were higher than other ranks and I write that as the grandson and great grandson and great great nephew of many who served on the Western Front as rankers in front line infantry units .German soldiers sought out officers as targets to the point where officers went over the top wearing private's tunics and carrying rifles to avoid being targeted .

Yeah, business as usual meaning the wounded officers get transport arranged and the enlisted have to rely on the good will of lorry drivers. Business as usual - UK style.

@@229andymon oh definitely

I surest you spend a bit more time and look at the contemporary film made at Southampton. You can find it if you search shell shock.

It's a film mate, not a documentary or a newsreel, they're ACTORS!

@@paddy864umm it’s an observation and actually the truth.

We only cracked PTSD in 2021. We sussed how trauma worked in the Iraqi wars, the first Immediate Action therapy was from Peter Levine's thinking in 1995 (Waking the Tiger), but it didn't address embedded issues. Ruth Lannius gave the hints in May 2020, I worked it through, as I'm NeuroDiverse and at least one therapy was obviously dangerous (the FDA has since banned it). but was sponsored by the great and the good in Psychiatry, so sussed how the therapies work, under the eye of Bruce Duncan Perry. We come equipped to heal ourselves, if only we'd stop thinking for half an hour. The limbic system which drains the reflex needs the trigger in the mind's eye, it's as simple as that, drop into the subconscious and let it do it's thing.

@@paddy864 It started as a documentary, brought together by Charles Chiltern. Joan Plowright then assembled it into a history of WW!, as a critique of the Vietnamese War, and Richard Attenborough filmed it, his first venture into directing.

My Great Grandfather was also a Sapper in the Royal Engineers. He was killed at Ypres. RIP.