"La Grande Illusion", directed by Jen Renoir (1937). The shift from "Civilized" warfare in Europe to the great European civil war that was WWI. Romantically depicts the friendship between French Captain Boeldieu and German Officer von Rauffenstein. 
"Reciprocal loyalty and admiration was the mirror of a dynastic and aristocratic conception of war that would not survive the trauma of 1914-1918."
"It is in accomplishing their respective military duties that Boeldieu tries to escape from his imprisonment and Rauffenstein kills
"It is in accomplishing their respective military duties that Boeldieu tries to escape from his imprisonment and Rauffenstein kills
him; but at the moment of his enemy's death he asks to be pardoned: he did not wish to kill Boeldieu, simply to wound him, but it was dark and he failed. The movie shows that these enemies shared many common values - above all the sense of honour - that were certainly higher and
- deeper than the reasons behind their war. By 1918, this noble and humanist vision of war was over (Enzo Traverso, "Fire and Blood", pg. 70)."
A great film and good passage from a book that I am about to do a thread on. The book is a revisionist account of the world wars -
A great film and good passage from a book that I am about to do a thread on. The book is a revisionist account of the world wars -
and the inter-war period as an extended European civil war, demonstrating how conflict had devolved into two sides that did not view each other as legitimate; normal rules for war were thrown out and the conflict was totalizing.
While Europe was made up of nations; supranational dynasties, culture, and spiritual essence created mutual legitimizing structure for how to proceed with war. The destruction of that culture, dynasties, and spiritual core led to the bloodbath between 1914-1945.
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