Boreal

The CBC and The Great War

I only watched about 30 minutes of the second installment of the CBC and GalaFilm of Montreal’s production of The Great War. It was so bad, so amateurish, so misleading that if I was going to watch fiction I preferred my fiction to be well done so I switched to the British mystery series Midsomer Murders.

The battle scenes, according to the CBC, were shot in rural Québec and it shows. Pleasant meadows instead of a moon-like muddy landscape from the rain of millions of shells and near torrential downpours of the regular kind; trenches so shallow you could have mistaken them for a child’s sandbox; soldier huddled in supposedly man-made caves dug under war-time conditions with ceilings as high as a cathedral’s.

The battle scenes were a joke. In one scene Canadian and German soldiers are charging each other with rifles without bayonets in a lush pasture with the Boreal forest as backdrop.

As if the bad set design, and the poorly choreographed battle scenes were not enough, the makers of this travesty could not even render accurately the actions described in letters from veterans of that conflict.

Two scenes in particular stand out in the short time that I could bear watching the CBC and GalaFilm make a mockery of what these soldiers wrote about.

1) A Canadian is picking off German soldiers casually bobbing up and down in broad daylight in a trench a stone's throw in front of him with a normal rifle with no scope. The narration is about a Canadian sniper shooting one barely visible enemy after another using a rifle with a scope.

2) A Chaplain writes how he waded trough knee-deep mud looking for his dead son. In the re-enactment the bottom of a shallow trench is hard clay (some water appears to have been sprinkled to make it appear slippery and wet) and, of course, the sun is shining.

The CBC did what it did in retelling the story of the Arrow (see Canadian History and the CBC), it made things up. There is a scene where the commander of the Canadian forces in Europe, Arthur Currie, is shown explaining his battle plans to Talbot Papineau. That never happened, at least not in Sandra Gwyn’s Tapestry of War, the definitive account of the life and tragic death of the man.

Talbot Papineau did not die a hero, as claimed by the CBC. He was killed at Passchendaele, cut in two by shell fire, killed going over the top like so many thousands of other brave Canadians whose courage the CBC and GalaFilm diminished in their poorly executed docudrama.

April 12, 2007 Bernard Payeur