Equine Odyssey

We saw War Horse today. WARNING - spoilers ahead.

So it was out with the old way of trampling folk underhoof on glossy steeds and slaughtering folk with shiny sabres...

...and in with the new way of crushing people with dirty tanks and shredding them with machine guns.

The war scenes were harrowing, and I was glad to read this piece about how all the horse and battlefield stunts were done, especially those involving barbed wire.

However, as a fan of the book by Michael Morpurgo, I found it enormously irritating that the boy's family was cleaned up and made Disney-nice at the beginning. Given that it was a movie about the horrors and cruelty of mass warfare versus individual decency, I also thought the use of the father's regimental pendant glorified war in a way that was contrary to the general message. I realise that handing over this symbol of a past war and the father-son handshake at the end, one soldier to another, was all about 'now you understand what I went through, son', but to me it also had uncomfortable overtones of that 'and war has made a Man of you' bilge that helps to perpetuate the notion of war as a character building experience for young men. And the film ends right there, with that message.

In the book, Albert goes back to the family farm with his horse, marries, and puts the war completely behind him rather that dwelling upon it, embodying the very virtues of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519 BC – 430 BC) who fought when he had to, but preferred his plow to the battlefield. The handshake at the end of War Horse, and the cinematography which so blatantly evokes Gone with the Wind, seems to give back to the concept of war a sense of nobility and honour that the film spent 2 hours (sort of) dismantling.

Ah well, perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I wonder what T.S. Elliott and Siegfried Sassoon would have made of it all.