What is the life of a soldier worth? Who cares? Who mourns his death? In war, pain is private. Everything else is calculus. That of the politicians who decide it, that of the generals who direct it. Armed and in uniform, a man is no more than a minuscule cog in an implacable gear. A expendable pawn for the sake of any grandiose (and generally vacuous) concept. In the First World War, the contempt for the lives of the combatants reached levels that were difficult to overcome. The war in Ukraine follows in the wake.
While fierce fighting is taking place in the city of Bakhmut, in the Donbass, with an enormous level of casualties –an invisible tragedy, hidden in the blind spots of war–, the cinema brings us closer to the horror of the trenches and throws the images on us. which are usually hidden from view. The premiere of the German film All Quiet at the Front, inspired by Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel I m Westen nichts Neues (Nothing New in the West), written in 1929, and a modern version of a first film from 1930, has come to coincide with the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. And it is inevitable to draw a parallel between the reality of the western front of Germany in 1914-1918, in French territory, and that of the western front of Russia in 2022-2023, in Ukrainian territory. From one century to the next, the script is the same: thousands of soldiers dying on the battlefield trying to win or keep a foot of land. Nothing new. No news at the front, indeed.
The impressive film by director Edward Berger – which has swept the British Bafta Awards and has many numbers to win at the Oscars – crudely portrays the absurd and gratuitous sacrifice of soldiers by incompetent and egotistical military commanders, who in some cases reach the to the point – like General Friedrichs – of sending his men on a suicide attack shortly before the armistice came into force out of a pang of pride. The infamous Friedrichs is a fictional character. But not the reality that he explains. The American General John Pershing, for example, head of the expeditionary force of the United States Army, aware of the imminent ceasefire, kept the information to himself and allowed some of his commanders to continue attacking. He wasn't the only one. Historians estimate that 11,000 soldiers lost their lives on the last day of the Great War. useless deaths. The majority, by criminal decisions.
The military culture of that time placed little value on the lives of soldiers. For the Prussian military, who proudly displayed the symbol of a skull with two tibias (Totenkopf) on their uniform, death was a hallmark. The photo of Marshal August von Mackensen, the most celebrated German general of the First World War (in the image), with the hussar uniform and a huge skull on his cavalry cap ( colbac ) is famous.
Von Mackensen could not give an order similar to that of General Friedrichs, basically because before the end of the war he had been taken prisoner in Hungary. But neither did he shake his hand when it came to sacrificing his soldiers in risky actions. In fact, the battle of Marasesti in 1917, against the Romanian and Russian armies, in which Mackensen was defeated for the first time, resulted in carnage. Turned into a trench fight, as on the western front, the soldiers were sent in waves against the enemy to be massacred. The Germans suffered 65,000 casualties, for their opponents 52,000. Not at all.
The French also did the same. Deadly bare-chested frontal attacks on enemy trenches were commonplace. Another film put him in evidence for the general public in 1957: Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and produced by and starring Kirk Douglas from Humphrey Cobb's novel of the same name (1935). Angrily rejected by the authorities, France had to wait until 1975 to see it (and Spain, where Francoism prohibited it, until 1986).
In the Ukraine, the Russian army practices the same tactics as a century ago: sending waves and waves of soldiers against the enemy to try to overwhelm him and defeat him by accumulation, even at the cost of a shocking number of casualties. Cannon fodder. In Bakhmut, where the Russian shock troops are made up of mercenaries from the private Wagner group, many of them convicts recruited from prisons, the casualties are massive. The founder of the militia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has admitted that every day he loses "hundreds of combatants" – for which he blames the Russian military leadership – and broadcast a brutal image on Telegram, with dozens of corpses piled up. According to calculations by Western information services, in one year the Russians would have had around 200,000 casualties (from 40,000 to 60,000 dead) and the Ukrainians, around 100,000.
The essence of the war has not changed. And today, like yesterday, the same words that Vasili Grossman wrote in 1959 in his formidable novel Life and Destiny, with the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943), a symbol of Soviet resistance against Nazi Germany, as the axis, would be valid. Alluding to the Russian army, he said: “he too had seen men put under lethal fire not out of excessive caution or formal compliance with an order, but out of recklessness, out of stubbornness. The mystery of the mysteries of war, its tragic character, consisted in the right that a man had to send another man to his death.
