"Soldiers, about face ! Let's go and get killed !"

attributed to Marshal Murat, rallying
Friant's division at Borodino

War is forever; it is in our DNA. Peace is an aberration. All
the more reason for wars to be depicted accurately in the
popular culture, which usually does the opposite. Knowing
the truth about war makes most of us pacifists; only the
ignorant and the truly die-hard support fighting. War films
today, and films that touch on military matters in general, tend
to be full of myths and errors. First and most damaging among
these is the notion that the military hero is a peace-loving
family man who fights reluctantly (any number of Mel Gilson/
Russell Crowe vehicles will do here). The truth is the really
good soldiers love war the way chefs love to cook. They
are good at it and are a special breed. But the public is
addicted too. A majority of Americans supported the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, aided and abetted by the supposedly liberal
media which cheer-led and shared in the spoils (much needed
ratings boost) instead of questioning the non-existent
rationale. Rest assured that when Russia or China invades
its next victim, *their* public will support warfare too. Give
Europe credit for seeing through the lies in 2003 -- especially
since Europe used to be the most warlike place on earth
for a thousand years. (Films like _The Grand Budapest
Hotel_, which portray the European gentry at the turn of
the 20th century as peace-lovers and only the vulgar
plebeians as war-mongers, are criminally revisionist.) The
dream of a unified Europe has avoided a continental war for
70 years except for the disastrous Yugoslavia breakup.
For all the ridiculous bureaucracy of the European Union,
this is one of mankind's greatest achievements.

Someone recently asked me what my favorite war films were.
Although I was an avid military history enthusiasts who in
recent years spent a lot of time at the movies, I couldn't
come up any. There are always some issues with ahistorical
hardware, especially tanks, that take me out of WWII films.
(Somehow fighter planes tend to be much more authentic
in movies -- people still fly them in air shows.) But the
more fundamental weakness is the blatant disregard of basic
principles. .

One can excuse the occasional artistic license, but does
some recent war movies have to be so aggressively
anti-historical? Take _300_ and its sequel, ostensibly
about Greek-Persian battles. Greek armies were feared
and effective because they had "hoplite" formations --
heavily armed and armored infantry. The Persians had
no such troops and in fact hired Greek mercenaries.
In Zack Snyder's films, it is the opposite: the Greeks
wear no armor; they are bare-chested leaping ninjas,
while the Persians have battalions of Darth Vader clones!
It is sad if hilarious. But the two _300_ films also give
us two great performances by British actresses Lena
Headey and Eva Green amidst the interchangeable beefcake
men, so I suppose one must cut them some slack.

-------------------------------------------------------

Cinema (not just war movies) have done the cavalry arm
a particular disservice. Here by cavalry I mean mounted
troops capable of charges in massed formation that used
to decide the fate of battles, not cowboys-and-Indian
small skirmishes or fighting as dismounted dragoons.
Because horses tend to break their legs while filming,
and are hard to choreograph in the best circumstances,
this shock tactic is hard to capture on film and fades
from the popular imagination. The cavalry officer in
period films (_Anna Karenina_, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Far
from the Madding Crowd_) is either a ridiculous,
overdressed dandy bent on ruining maiden's virtues or
a frivolous, ineffectual buffoon. The truth is that
he was the fighter pilot of his day, usually the
bravest soul who was often ordered to make desperate
attacks on artillery batteries, usually with disastrous
results -- like the Light Brigade in Crimea. Joachim
Murat, Napoleon's cavalry chief, was legendary in his
disdain towards death, and legend has it that he once
charged an Egyptian sultan by himself. Tennyson
immortalized the Light Brigade, but they pale in scale
compared with, say, Murat's great charge across the
snow at Eylau in 1807, involving 15 times as many men.
The beginning of that epic attack can be seen in
_Colonel Chabert_ directed by Yves Angelo, although
I'm not sure that scene, with horses drawn up in
a thin line stretching to infinity, is accurate.
The attacking regiments were almost all Dragoons and
Cuirassiers -- heavy cavalry which attacked in dense
columns -- not light units (especially lancers) which
advanced in line formation. Napoleon did not have
a single Lancer regiment in 1807.

Perhaps it is best left to CGi technology to capture the sheer
terror induced by horses running at you. For all its fault,
_The Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers_ gives us one
of the all-time great cinematic cavalry charges, when the
armored knights attack at dawn. In contrast, _The
Game of Thrones_ featured CGI horses charging into
a forest, which would have gotten the men dehorsed
by low-lying branches. This is unforgivable; any
idiot should know that cavalry is only effective on
open ground. Now that there is renewed interest in the
Napoleonic era, maybe we will see more cavalry action
and restore the reputation of this once decisive branch
of the army. There was a _War and Peace_ miniseries
not long ago, but I haven't seen it. Regretfully
_War and Peace_ skips Eylau and Friedland, and the battles
it features are mostly infantry affairs. (At Austerlitz,
the French Guard Cavalry destroyed the Russian Guard
Infantry; at Borodino, an artillery hell that prefigured
WWI, Napoleon sent his armor-plated cuirassiers to
annihilate a Russian infantry division inside earthworks,
but got 1000 of his elite troopers killed.)

------------------------------------------------------

According to "Film Comment," the guy who directed _Casino
Royale_ will adapt Hemingway's _Across the River and Into
the Trees_. I reread it recently to cleanse the bad taste
in my mouth that was _To Have and Have Not_, Hemingway's
worst and most racist novel. _Across the River_
took its title from Stonewall Jackson's last words at
Chancellorsville, after he was mortally wounded by
friendly fire. (The phenomenon is extremely common and
didn't begin with Pat Tillman the NFL player in Afghanistan,
despite what the news media would have you believe.) I
wonder what kind of film it would be. It mostly consists
of the narrator's interior monolog, made up of countless
military history anecdotes -- catnip to the amateur historian
but no doubt bewildering to the public.

Lightning Joe Collins (the highly respected 7th Corp
commander in WWII) and Michel Ney, two figures often
mentioned in the book, are not exactly household names.
Hemingway has an axe to grind against Ney, who was indeed
abysmal at Waterloo. But he fought almost a thousand miles
worth of rearguard action after the French retreat from
Moscow. His III corps, down to a few thousand men, was
cut off but refused to surrender. It broke through two
Russian lines before being shot to pieces. Still
refusing surrender, they dissolved into the forest and
days later rejoined Napoleon with a few hundred survivors.
Perhaps 99 out of every 100 men of the III Corps that
crossed the Vistula perished. *That* was Michel Ney, whom
(along with Murat) Napoleon called "the bravest of the
brave.") He sought death at Waterloo (or, as the French
calls it, Mont Saint-Jean) in vain; it is such sad irony
that Ney and Murat both died at the hands of firing
squads. There were a million similarly amazing stories
about the Napoleonic wars, yet Abel Gance's _Napoleon_
spent most of its length on an invented snowball fight
in the emperor's fictionaized childhood and turned the siege
of Toulon into an orgasmic, jingoistic bloodlust fantasy
worthy of the worst Hollywood excesses. It is one of
the worst films ever made about warfare.

Not that one should overly romanticize the Napoleonic
wars. The French were invaders most of the time and
foraged for their food. One can imagine how much they
were hated by the invaded peasants. They also burned
Prussian prisoners alive. The Russians committed
mass rape in France in 1814. The Spaniards starved
10000 French prisoners to death. And on and on it
went. It is always better to know the truth.


-- For France, once again under terrorist attack

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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