Lessons from 1917

Sam Mendes’s World War I drama, 1917, brings The Great War to modern audiences with raw ferocity. It makes no attempt to entertain, preach, tear-jerk, or inspire. It provides no historical context, but brings powerful lessons from the past from a war largely eclipsed by the Second World War and the passage of more than a century.

The film centers entirely on two lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, commissioned to deliver a message to Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) of the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. The message orders MacKenzie to stand down, because his 1,600 men — one of them Blake’s brother — are walking into a trap.

In one continual shot, Mendes takes the viewer from the relative safety of British trenches through No Man’s Land, across enemy lines, to where 2nd Devonshire is supposed to be. On the way, the viewer sees the ghastly horror that Erich Maria Remarque and millions like him witnessed for over four years.

The soldiers’ sleep-deprived existence consists of a steady diet of cigarettes and starvation rations. Hunger, cold, mud, flies, and rats are their daily companions.

Outside the trenches lies a landscape stripped of all life. Bare, shelled, de-branched tree trunks stand staggered as in a horror movie. Craters full of mud, bloody water, and rotting corpses — both human and horse — litter the…