‘Colour allows us to understand in a deeper sense’: Hitler, Churchill and others in a new light

Posted on May 9, 2020 by Admin

The story of global conflict is all the more powerful when it isn’t seen in black and white. Artist Marina Amaral explains her latest work

On a stretcher lies a patient; his ashen face protrudes from under a green blanket, eyes closed. Two uniformed women carry the stretcher, wearing face masks. It looks as if it’s a lovely day: the sun is shining, the shadows dark, the sky blue. But this is not a happy picture. Is the casualty even alive, or has he already been taken by the killer virus that has wrapped itself around our planet like a python, squeezing the life from it?

The photograph was taken at an ambulance station in Washington DC. Within the past couple of months? It could have been, if it weren’t for the uniforms (I don’t think today’s nurses wear lace-up leather boots) and the stretcher. In fact, it was taken more than a century ago, in 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic, which killed so many millions. The photographer is unknown, forgotten. But the black and white picture was recently “colourised” by Marina Amaral.

Hobnails, drill and boot camp: secrets of Sam Mendes’s war epic 1917

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Admin

Director tells how getting every detail right was crucial to helping his cast understand emotions of war

Wasted youth, random violent death and the folly of armed conflict are the big themes of 1917, Sam Mendes’s orchestral symphony of a first world war film. But for the director and the team who made it alongside him, no detail was too small to consider.

“It was very important, the question of historical accuracy,” said Mendes. “We had two very fine historical advisers, Andy Robertshaw and Peter Barton, who are world renowned. And one military adviser, Paul Biddiss, who was also brilliant.”

Not all Africans’ sacrifice is forgotten | Letters

Posted on November 10, 2019 by Admin

While many African soldiers from the Great War were buried in unmarked graves, a memorial in Malawi pays due tribute

I was saddened to read that many of the African soldiers and carriers who served with the British Army in east Africa during the First World War were buried in unmarked graves (“No graves, no dignity. How Britain dishonoured its African war dead”, Focus). The acknowledgment by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of its past unequal treatment is at least a start in redressing the balance.

However, while it may be true that memorials in east Africa do not give the names of individuals who fell, the situation is not the same in at least one southern African former colony: Nyasaland, now the independent state of Malawi. In the old colonial capital, Zomba, lies a memorial to men of the King’s African Rifles who fell in the war.

Scott Morrison says reports of Isis plot to target Anzac Day Gallipoli events ‘inconclusive’

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Admin

Turkish police said they had arrested a Syrian national who was planning retaliation for New Zealand mosque attack

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, has cast doubt on a possible plot to target Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli despite the arrest of a man with suspected links to Islamic State by Turkish police.

The suspect, a Syrian national, was arrested after a police operation in Osmaniye and was among several Isis members detained.

All Quiet on the Western Front becomes instant bestseller – archive, 1929

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Admin

Ninety years ago, a harrowing account of warfare in the first world war was brought to an international audience by German veteran Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier fighting on the western front during the first world war. Bäumer and several of his friends join the army voluntarily after listening to the patriotic speeches of their teacher, but soon become disillusioned after experiencing the horrors of the battlefield.

After being serialised in 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitunghe, Erich Maria Remarque’s book was first published on 31 January 1929, and instantly became a bestseller. In March 1929 it was translated into English and the following year was adapted into an Oscar winning Hollywood film. All Quiet’s sense of empathy for a putative enemy did not find favour with the German Nazi party and in December 1930 filmgoers were attacked at several early showings of the movie in Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the book was banned, along with the rest of Remarque’s works, and it became one of the most common books destroyed in the infamous Nazi book burnings.