Reeling Back

Lest we forget, it was on this day (November 11) in 1918, that the “war to end all wars” ended. For just over four years, the world’s several empires were engaged in wholesale slaughter in every corner of the globe, a useless assertion of imperial might that left millions dead and millions more questioning the meaning of it all. One year on, Britain’s King George V marked his empire’s “victory” with the first annual Remembrance Day celebration. A year later, in 1920, the monarch unveiled a cenotaph on London’s Whitehall. It was dedicated to “The Glorious Dead,” and established the official answer to the question “lest we forget . . . what?” In 1921, wearing a red poppy became part of the ritual, along with a reading of Canadian John McCrae’s elegiac poem In Flanders Fields. Instead of recalling the social and political reasons for the carnage, we were urged to focus on the “sacrifice” of those who died. The Great War was renamed the First World War when, after 20 years of misremembrance, a Second World War broke out. The argument over how to view armed conflict continues to this day in the popular culture, most prominently in one of cinema’s founding genres, the war movie. The First World War is the background remembered in the three feature films being added to the Reeling Back archive today (with links to each following the Afterword). In 1975, director George Roy Hill showed how the war shaped the worldview of one of its American veterans, an aviation legend known as The Great Waldo Pepper.