The Dumbing of WW1

It's started already.  In the London Evening Standard this evening there's an article by Nick Curtis entitled, "The WW1 Look".  It begins, "With First World War-based Birdsong all over our screens, it was only a matter of time before men revisited the grooming of the era."  Oh dear.  It continues, "It was a global catastrophe that cost an estimated 15 million lives... Now it is giving its name to a London grooming trend.  Ladies and gentlemen - but especially gentlemen - may I introduce the World War One Look?"

After reading this drivel on the train this evening, I fired off a quick email to the Evening Standard which read, "For a truly authentic WW1 look don't forget the lice. Add some splashed-on brain from the chap blown up next to you; splatterings of blood, and plenty of mud. You'll then have the WW1 look down to a tee."

Rather than well-groomed models sporting short, well-combed cuts, I'd suggest that the image above is a strong contender for the WW1 look; or perhaps one of Harold Gillies' facially disfigured patients:

And I make no apologies for showing these images again which, personally, I find less offensive than Nick Curtis's entreaty that we should "savour the WW1 look" and "the burnished image of Eddie Redmayne [the actor playing the lead in Birdsong]... the stirring sight of a mounted and mustachioed Benedict Cumberbatch tremulously exhorting his cavalry..." The pardox of the homo-erotic youth drowning in mud or being blown to smithereens has been so much better done by Sassoon and Owen, and they at least knew what they were talking about.  For that matter, I never warmed to Birdsong when it was first published, even though I have no doubt that the novel is well-written.  It must be, it's won so many plaudits. 

By the time that Birdsong was published in 1993 I'd already spent the previous 12 years immersing myself in everything WW1.  I had read extensively - mostly works of non fiction, true accounts from the battlefield - and I had met and interviewed dozens of real live veterans.  Birdsong and Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy left me cold.  I read the books and then dumped them.  They still find no room on my shelves which are crammed with divisional histories, rolls of honour, contemporary memoirs and the fiction of the period written by men like Barbusse, Remarque and Aldington who were there. 

So forget the WW1 look of tabloid journalism and at least show some understanding of a conflict which re-wrote the rules on warfare (some might say, threw the rule-book out of the window) and changed society for ever.  The legacy of WW1 was certainly more significant than a short back and sides.