The Last Tommies, BBC 4, 9pm, BBCiPlayer, directed by Nick Maddocks

last tommies.jpg

Episode One: For King and Country

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0brjshr/wwi-the-last-tommies-series-1-1-for-king-and-country

This is the kind of documentary series that the BBC does so well using archive footage and interviewing those that remember The Great War. We are shown a Zeppelin, which could travel at eighty miles per hour and carry two tons of explosive and told about the raid on Hull. An eyewitness remembered how shocking it was, how families sheltered under the kitchen table, the horror of twenty people being killed and the morbid fascination of a house being blown apart and being able to see into somebody’s bedroom.

Inevitably, there’s the middle-class girl, with the pucker voice, unpaid volunteers for the WD, who lied about their age, said she was twenty, but was seventeen and was sent to war to assist (auxiliary) nurses to those nurses that had formal training and were paid. She tells us they got the dirty work. She didn’t much like carrying a leg in a bucket to be incinerated.

Then we had the other middle-class chap that thought it was his duty, everyone’s duty to repel those that were going to invade our country. All the water in the English Channel couldn’t cool his ardour.

We had the girl left behind, all four-foot eleven of her, a scrap of bones and hair, working as a house maid, when she gets that telegram. She’d wrote, of course, she had, that she’d wait forever for him. Forever came too soon.

We had the Scot from Glasgow, called Rabbie Burns, who heard the pipe music and joined up. A clerk, his boss, told him to be quick about it, or he’d miss the fun, home for Christmas.

The Battle of Loos, the Pals Battalion, mud up to the knees and lice feeding on every living body and rats feasting on the chest cavities of the dead. The pal that lost the pal, go forward go forward. Looks left and that man disappears. Looks right and that Tommy bites it.

At home, women take up the slack, twelve hour shifts in the munition factories, working day and night. I never thought I’d get through it, one woman worker tell us, but I did, and you get used to it.

The War to End All Wars. Here are those that did their bit and for what? The rich to get rich and the poor to get poorer.  Answers  not in the bank book but on the ballot box. Remember that old gag, Homes fit for heroes. How long did that last? 

Comments

Thanks for this Celticman. Have you read Testament of Youth? 

 

I started it, years ago, but never finished it. Can't remember why. 

 

So many sad stories of senseless deaths and shattered lives. A song by a Eric Bogle called 'The Green Fields of France' tells it all... 'it all happened again and again and again and again and again.'

 

yes, it does. I think those soldiers were more innocent then. They believed it would be over by Christmas and a bit of a jape. At the end they were asked if they would still volunteer. One or two said yes - duty to the fore, but this in no way diminished other choices.