Howdy Otterites! Francis here again for another Friday posting.
If you’ve listened to the podcast for very long, you’ll realize quickly our fascination with World War I. The changes it wrought to our society are enormous, and in many ways it marks a clear break with prior attitudes and outlooks of the human species from what had gone before. In fact, two of our very earliest episodes were devoted to a deep discussion of it, and we tend to reference the event all the time.
With this in mind, and as its been on my mind of late, I thought I’d give you all a great way of learning and understanding the war – for free via YouTube – with one of the best short series on the war ever produced. Called “The Western Front” it was made for the BBC in 1999 and hosted by esteemed scholar the late Professor Richard Holmes. I have the companion book at home on my shelf and it is an amazingly easy read.
The six-part series of 22 minute episodes makes the entire complex event astonishingly comprehensible, even for the most uninitiated, working not only from a historical perspective but also from a social and emotional one. My favorite scene comes at the end of episode two when Holmes is walking through the graveyard at Loos and reciting a portion of Rudyard Kipling’s famous wartime poem “Our Fathers Lied“. It is but one of many chilling and poignant moments in the series which never fails to move me every time I watch it.
Below are the embedded links to all six parts of the series, and I invite you to view them and visit those lands and times yourself. To do so is to become immersed in a land of the dead, a madness long past, hopefully never to come again. It is a sharp and visceral reminder to us who are still living what a horror war truly is . . .
