The Vietcong were very good at exploiting contradictions in the enemy camp. They launched their devastating Tet Offensive at the time of the American election, escalating the human costs of the war. Too many soldiers were being killed, too many were taking drugs, there were too many atrocities, too many massacres.  This was no longer an honourable war. The politicians, the commanders and even the soldiers were not highly regarded. The draft of 300,000 young man to fight in Vietnam was already deeply unpopular.  There were student revolutions.  “Hell no, won’t go!”  Even the leaders became disenchanted.  Robert McNamara, the Minister of Defence, was one of these. Johnson could not bring himself to run for re-election; he pulled out.  This was seen by the Vietcong as a great victory.

The Americans didn’t really understand this war. They were using military solutions to fight a political war; a war of ideologies. They didn’t understand communism. They saw the world as divided, with themselves as the leader of the free world and the Russians as the leader of the enslaved world. Theirs was a mythical conflict, the stuff of romance; the American Crusaders against the Evil Empire; Uncle Sam against the wicked Uncle Ho. Communism was an informed conspiracy of hungry revolutionaries that threatened to engulf all of Asia. There was no question they wouldn’t win it. There had not been a war that the Americans had not actually won with honour. Weren’t they always the good guys, who rode out in the sunset and defeated the evil enemy?   Remember the Alamo!  Remember their victorious intervention in both European conflicts!  And God was on their side in this conflict.

The Americans never tried to expose their enemy’s flaws.  The North Vietnamese were committing terrorist acts against their own people all the time but the Americans never really exploited this.  And they also created  divisions in their own rank, at first supporting Ngo Dinh Diem then they turning against him when he persecuted the monks and sacked the monasteries, so in the end he was assassinated by his own troops. They just failed to understand that that was the way things were done there. Politics never has been a branch of morality, but in the Camelot Court of JF Kennedy, people came to believe it was.

They were shocked to discover that they were seen as the unwanted imperialist invader.   When they weren’t trying to destroy the country with bombs they were taking over its infrastructure, its water, its power supplies, its transport. They should have showed more political wisdom, less naivety, less arrogance.  They should have never have gone there in the first place.  Do these arguments have a familiar ring to them? They should!  The war in Iraq, the unwinnable war against terror – had all the same elements. 

The Americans were in Vietnam very early.  It was Eisenhower, who committed resources to support Diem and the French colonial war that propped him up, picking up 70% of the bill in 1954.  But the French were defeated; they committed more and more troops, suffered unacceptable casualties, the war became unpopular in Paris, and they could not win.  Why did the Americans not read the runes? Arrogance?  Hubris?  Paranoia? 

So Kennedy pledged to prop the dominos up.  Johnson escalated the commitment,  claiming this was a war on poverty, a war on ignorance, a war on discrimination, Nixon began to withdraw troops but sent in the bombers. It was left up to Gerald Ford to disengage. But even he tried to get Congress to agree more military aid for Southeast Asia.  They refused; one suspects he was relieved.

The Americans realised early on that the war was unwinnable, but they wanted peace with honour. After so much bloodshed, the electorate would not accept the humiliation of defeat and it was political suicide for a president to suggest it. That’s why it went on so long.   

The war in Vietnam was the longest in America’s history, and second only to World War II in terms of blood and money. So the American leaders went to war because of paranoia and they failed to end the war because of their political suicide of humiliation.  

The Vietnam War was started without a formal declaration and ended with a false peace.  It  had no clear objective, no obvious moral imperative, no identifiable enemy.  America underestimated the task, they never issued a formal declaration of war and mobilisation took place by stealth. Air strikes would never win hearts and minds.  The draft was deeply unpopular at home.  There were too many gadgets that did not function in the jungle. But there were lessons: helicopters add mobility to jungle warfare; atrocities happen when conditions are wretched and the priority is survival.  Amid booby traps, chaos and confusion, conventional moral standards are eclipsed; any Vietnamese, even children, can be seen as the enemy.  It’s them or us.

But the war on the home front was being waged between the soldiers, who were just doing their duty and an ever growing corps of politically informed student peace demonstrators (the brutes and the draft dodgers). Besides, Uncle Ho was more of an iconic leader than LBJ, and successive American presidents failed to hang on to the hearts and minds of their own citizens. There were no heroes in this war, no victories, no spoils, just amputees and body bags. .

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Eric Remarque writes in the first person and present tense.  We are there with him,  crouching in shell holes,  deafened by explosions,  but still acutely aware of the pop of mortar shells, the hoot of gas shells  or the little whirring ones that release enough shrapnel to cut a man to pieces.   We smell and see death everywhere,  the sickly sweet scent of corruption, bits of body hanging on splintered trees.  We hear the screams.  We see boys broken down, weeping for their mothers .  We are there clearing an enemy trench with grenades, running, lunging, stabbing, not thinking, limbs working like a robot. The enemy is a machine to be put out of action, a dangerous animal; kill it or be killed.  Don’t think!   We spend the night lost in a shell hole in no man’s land, crouching up to our necks in mud and water  as bullets whistle overhead.  We suffocate in our masks as the greenish gas settles in our craters.  We see those who have torn them off coughing up the pink froth of their lungs.  There is only so much gore and death that a person can take!  We become immune to the horror of it all.  It is the inevitable backdrop of war.  Just keep your head down, run like the devil and if one comes for you, throw yourself in a hole.  Stay alive!  Don’t think! 

 As a common foot-soldier, you can’t see the bigger picture, you are not fighting for your country, you are fighting for yourself and your mates; you just have to get through it, to last out until it ends.  Remarque is German, but that is irrelevant.  There are no sides in this war; the only enemies are pain, fear  and death.  Glory, bravery, honour, have no part of this.  Pleasures are much more mundane;  a full belly, a night’s sleep,  an regular bowel, getting a good billet, going on leave, the memory of the touch of a woman, and comradeship; the companionship of communal latrines, crude jokes, a shared cigarette, a snaffled meal, revenge on a sadistic NCO.  In war, it’s your mates that get you through.

If the function of historical literature is to bring events alive,  All Quiet on the Western Front  succeeds like no other novel in conveying the essence of war for those who fight in it.  It’s up there on a par with Wilfred Owen’s poem.    

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Erich Maria Remarque was born Eric Paul Remark in Osnabruck and was just 16 when war was declared.  He went to the front in 1917, was wounded at Passchendaele and evacuated to hospital.  He never returned to the front.  His novel was condemned by the Nazis as unpatriotic but he escaped to America on the last sailing of the Queen Mary with the help of his friend, Marlene Dietrich.  He lived in Hollywood, got to know Greta Garbo and was part of the émigré celebrity circuit. His sister,Elfreda, remained in Germany and was executed by the Nazis for defeatist sentiments. Remarque, himself, was inaccessible. Somehow, I wish I didn’t know all that, but it doesn’t detract from the reality that he and the few like him achieved more hope  in a few lines than a whole dead generation of young man. .      

 My grandfather, William Scriven, chief clerk at the Bristol and West Building Society, went to war with millions of others, even though he had a rheumatic heart.  He was killed in the last battle in 1918.  We might say, my mother, only 2 at the time, never got over it.

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Vincent was the eldest of a large close knit family.  His father was a preacher and for a time Vincent tried to find an outlet for his zeal in religion, as a minister in a poor coal mining region of Belgium, but his attempts to get close to his parishioners by living like them shocked his elders and they refused to support him.  He worked in his uncle’s firm of art dealers, but his intensity put people off.   He was a rebel.  He had strong inflexible views about religion and argued constantly with his father.  His passionate nature, his need for love, could lead him to form intense attachments, like the one to his widowed cousin, but he was all too often rebuffed.  

After his father died, his sister, Wilhelmina, told Vincent to leave home because his eccentric behaviour was causing comment in the village and upsetting his mother.   Vincent would have felt this rejection keenly, but the fact of the matter was he was too much, too much for other people and too much for himself.   

His brother Theo persuaded Vincent to go to Paris to meet other artists and learn from them and continued to support him both emotionally and financially.  His work in Holland had been poetic, dark and melancholic.  His move to Paris led to a thawing of his palette.  He visited all the greats; Pissarro, Gauguin, Manet, Seurat and absorbed everything they had to teach him while developing his own unique style using a combination of vibrant brushwork, delicate draughtsmanship, an emotionally charged palette and everyday motifs.  He worked tirelessly at his craft, single minded, focussed and remarkably lucid, constantly improving refining in his quest to capture the essence, the source of meaning.  

What Vincent was struggling with was the dilemma of the creative artist.  While he needed to have the creative space to develop his own unique expression,  that expression, his identity, could only be validated  through his art.  It was a paradox; he had to be alone to belong, his obsessional  intensity fended people off though he desperately needed their love.   He wanted more than anything else to be accepted and he never stopped working.  His entire oeuvre was accomplished in a brief 10 year period between 1880 and 1890.  He was entirely self taught,  using a frame he had read about in a book to master perspective.  He learn to master expression, character.  It was as if he needed to get beneath their skin, to really connect.   His most fervent wish was to mean something to the people around him, to make a useful contribution.  ‘Man is only here to accomplish things’, but his work was little appreciated during his lifetime . 

Work had always been a lifesaver  for Vincent, his reason for living, his entire meaning in life.  Nothing else mattered.  So what went wrong?   Why did he cut off his own ear?  Why did he shoot himself?   As ever, it was a combination of events.  Theo’s plans to get married may have prompted him to move down south and get his own place.  Arles was different, strange, and had an intensity of light a vividness of colour that seemed to resonate with something inside Vincent.  Things were more extreme there, more dangerous, and he was lonely.   And then there was Gauguin’s visit.  Vincent had loaded so much meaning on this visit.  They would be brother artists, paint together, start a colony of artists in the south.   But Paul Gauguin was more self sufficient that Vincent, more of a loner.  He was sociable enough but he distrusted intimacy and would have found Vincent’s needs intrusive.  He became irritated.  Vincent was too whinging.  They argued.   Vincent lost his temper and threw a glass at him.  Gauguin decided to leave.  In desperation, Vincent cut off his ear.   If that was intended as a gesture to make him stay, it backfired.  He was left alone and desperate, and admitted himself to an asylum.  He recovered for a while.  His paints allowed him to focus his thoughts on something outside his own morbid preoccupations, but eventually it all got too much for him.  He began painting images of death.  His work was not selling.  Nobody cared.  It was hopeless.  And one sunny morning in the corn field, he shot himself. 

Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t born an artistic genius, he made himself one though the most intense focus and dedication.  What created the brand Van Gogh;  self belief, courage, imagination, perseverance, and faith could so easily be transformed into the single minded obsession, the  fanaticism, the lack of compromise and the escape from reality that could slip into a darker palette without human comfort or hope.  He needed the unflinching of Theo, faith is the meaning of his own art and the approval of artists he admired.   His genius need to be held, to be contained.   Like specialist plants and animals, he was all too sensitive and vulnerable to changes in his social environment.  Without Theo, he could not survive.  A year later, Theo died too.    

The real Van Gogh; the artist and his letters, is currently exhibited at the Royal Academy until April 18th.  Don’t miss it! 

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Dido was clearly an inspiring young woman,  beautiful, energetic and possessed of a powerful charisma that could get her anything she wanted or so she thought.  And she wanted Aeneas.  He arrived with his tales of valour; the wooden horse, the defeat of Laocoon, the shipwreck.  And what’s more he came with a ship full of treasures he had secreted out of Troy.  Was it his fault that he had lost Troy?   Hadn’t he been tricked by the Achaeans?  Hadn’t he been betrayed by King Cinyrus of Cyprus who promised a fleet of fifty ships to raise the siege, but sent just one.   Dido was entranced by this warrior prince with his broad shoulders and barrel chest and commanding manner, enthralled by his stories.  What they could do together.  They would make Carthage impregnable, an empire to rival even that of ancient Troy.  Yes, he was on a mission to found a new empire in Italy, but surely he could see what an opportunity Carthage presented and wasn’t he in love with her?  

She had played it cautiously. She would not submit to him without ensuring his loyalty and support.  She was not sure how long she could hold out in Carthage alone.  Armies were gathering to attack her claim in North Africa.  She might have been able to maintain her hold on him, were it not for the weather.  They had been out hunting and were forced to take shelter together in a cave.  She called it their marriage cave, for in it, he pledged himself to her.  Her future looked wonderful.   But then he reminded her of his promise to set up a state in Italy and he proposed leaving before  the weather  turned bad, but he added, he would love her forever and perhaps she could come and join him. 

What a louse!  What a sneaking, conniving, cowardly weasel!  Dido was beside herself with rage.  Aeneas tried to appease her.  Perhaps he didn’t have to go just yet.  Perhaps the Gods would relent. 

You see, he always had the excuse of the Gods to fall back on.  Zeus had been importuned to assist Dido’s enemies in North Africa in their land claims on Carthage.  Ibarus, King of the Moors, was a son of Zeus and had been rejected by Dido. He prayed to his father, who sent Hermes to remind  Aeneas of his promise to go to Italy.  So Aeneas spread his arms and said sorry darling,  ‘Would you have me disobey the Gods?’   Oh he was in such a dreadful bind, especially as Hera and Aphrodite will telling him to stay.  What was he to do?   ‘Let Dido down and lose his one true love or disobey Zeus and be punished forever.’  Put like that there was only one decision.  He had to go, but perhaps, if their love meant everything she said it did, he could return.  Besides, didn’t she have all the Trojan treasures?  Didn’t that mean anything? 

Apparently not!  She had compromised herself.  In her reckless love affair, she had not only incurred the wrath of the surrounding nomad chieftains, but had also lost the support of her own Tyrians.  There was no way to turn, but her response was uncompromising.  ‘ Get on your boat, sailor! And don’t come back.  But you will pay for this for the rest of your life’   She was true to her word.  As soon as Aeneas galley rounded the cape, she fell on the point of his sword and threw herself on her funeral pyre.  Aeneas didn’t hear of it until he had reached Italy and established Rome.  There he descended to the underworld and met Dido, who was reunited with Sychaeus and refused to talk to him, but she continued to haunt his thoughts until the end of his days.  .      

This is one of great love stories of all time, rivalling Abelard and Heloise, Troilus and Cressida,  Helen of Troy and her lover, Paris,  Mark Anthony and Cleopatra and Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII.  It illustrates the dangerous and enduring power of love to transform or to devastate lives.  The Gods in this tale are really metaphors for emotion, there to symbolise forces of desire, anger, and duty.   The Gods battle in out in mortals whose souls are in conflict.  

So the Gods made you do it, Aeneas?  Baloney!  You wanted to go to Italy all along.  It was a challenge.  You’d lost Troy?  This was a chance to make up.  And although Dido was the woman of your dreams, your one true love, didn’t she come across a bit too strong.  She would  have your guts for a suspender belt if you didn’t do exactly as she ordered!  How would you cope with that?   

And what about you Dido?   Did the Gods make you give yourself to him?  No, you could see him slipping away and with that your toehold in Carthage.  So you decided to give him one night of magic that would ensnare him, bind him to you forever.  Oh yeah, that was Aphrodite’s work.  Convenient; only  it didn’t work.  It only served to unnerve him and made him more determined to do his duty.  He was but a man after all

So is this really the greatest love story of all time?  Or is it a tale of hubris and political power; the  risky deployment of romance and sex to achieve ambition?  Or is an example of the age old conflict between love and duty.   How often does love come along at the opportune time?  Can you always be so ruthless and single minded to give up all ties and responsibilities for what may be one great illusion?  Can faith and love move armies and mountains or are there always qualifications?   

Dido was devastated, but maybe not so much by loss, as by the thought that a bloody sailor from Turkey could treat her, Dido, Queen of Carthage, in such a manner.  But she would get her own back.  She would die on the point of his sword and he would never ever forget her.  Hell knows no fury like a Queen who is scorned and she would summon all the Gods in hell to enact it. 

Dido and Aeneas inspired some of the world’s greatest art; in England a play by Christopher Marlowe and an opera by Henry Purcell (1670).  Dido’s Lament in the last act is reputedly the greatest tune of the 17^th century, simple in structure but containing sequences of chords that twist the heart strings like no other melody.  Dido ensured that she was never forgotten.

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The opening sequences set the mood, time passing in the ticks and strikes of the clocks, the unrelenting passion of the crimson carpets, walls and drapes.  We see a woman or is it a man; the angular face and lank hair obviate sexuality.  She is lying in bed.  Another woman, plump and beautiful with ringlets of honey blonde hair lies asleep in a chair.  The invalid gets up stiffly and walks painfully across to her bureau and writes in her diary, ‘It is Monday and I am in pain.’ 

Agnes is dying of cancer.  Her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to look after her, but it is the peasant Anna with her plump expressionless face and simple faith who loves and cares for her.  ‘In elliptical flashbacks, intended to give us emotional information, not tell a story, we learn that the three sisters have made little of their lives.’ Karin is icily detached, married to an older husband, a calculating, sneering diplomat, whom she loathes. She cannot bear to be touched and in one awful scene lacerates her cunt with a broken glass and smears the blood over her lips to avoid her husband’s attentions.  Maria is beautiful, but corrupt and heartless.  She is married to a weak man, whom she despises and so she consoles herself with other liaisons.  When her husband stabs himself and pleads for help, she turns away.  Maria and Karin were close as children, but are now too damaged to allow any real intimacy.  Agnes always felt isolated, especially from their tragic though beautiful mother.      

Theirs is not a happy house, it’s a place of guilt and repression, cries and whispers.  Nobody can get close enough to draw comfort from anybody else.  Agnes is in agony, her back arched as she struggles to breathe, desperate for human warmth, but her sisters turn away.  Only Anna can console her, pillowing her head in the living flesh of her breasts to ease her terrible transition.   

Cries and Whispers is a disturbing film, a film about life and death.  It’s not only Agnes who is dying.  Karin and Maria are too, and in a way, we all are.  Their lives have no hope, no meaning.  Karin works while Maria plays, but these are evasions.  Theirs is a simalcrum.   Without human warmth, without love, there can be no life.   Paradoxically, it is Agnes,  who finds life  in simple pleasures, the garden, a drink of water and the comfort of  being held.   So Bergman presents us with a contrast, a counterpoint between the hopelessness, defensiveness and meaninglessness of  Karin and Maria’s lives with their compromises, pretences and terror of real contact and the dreadful void of death that confronts Agnes.  

Bergman does not spare us the shock and horror.  Harriet Andersson is not beautiful in death; sweat glistens on her angular face, her hair is lank, her skin pale and grey, her eyes terrified;  she arches her back, she drags air into her damaged lungs with long, tortured stridor, she retches, she beats her fists on her barren, wasted chest. 

The cinematography is superb.  As the critic, Roger Ebert, wrote, ‘The camera is as uneasy as we are. It stays at rest mostly, but when it moves it doesn’t always follow smooth, symmetrical progressions. It darts, it falls back, is stunned. It lingers on close-ups of faces with the impassivity of God. It continues to look when we want to turn away; it is not moved.  Agnes lies thrown on her death bed, her body shuddered by horrible, deep, gasping breaths, as she fights for air. The sisters turn away, and we want to, too.’  We know things are this bad, but we don’t want to have to feel it.  The scene of  Anna embracing the decomposing Agnes has all the soul searching depth of a Rembrandt,  the horror of embracing death but at the same time a moving and familiar reminder of the pieta.   So the death of Agnes  represents the corruption of humanity.  And here again we have the dialectic;  life in death and death in life.   This film gets as close as any film can get to the crimson membrane of passion and sexual disquiet that for Bergman is the soul.  

Cries and Whispers has little narrative.  We don’t know how the major characters arrived there; we are left to fill in the gaps from the darkness of our own experience.  This is the power of Bergman.  He does not attempt to explain; he just shows us what its like.  He communicates on a level of human feeling so deep that defies description – but how well he communicates.

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