Deeper Context for Understanding Warfare

"The film was extremely well done," Mr. Fishman says. "The kids seemed to understand the gravity of what it might be like to serve during this conflict. Given that the main characters were in their late teens early 20s, I think it hit home. It also contextualized some of the military tactics used, and showed the great disconnect between privates and their superior officers." He notes that the film is somewhat comparable to "All Quiet on the Western Front" as a story about technology and how the old ways met the new. "For example," he says, "commanders had the capability to fly planes overhead, drag telephone wire across the battlefield, and create armored tanks to break the trenches, but were still in a practically medieval state using runners to pass information from one place to the next. Despite all these technological innovations, commanders still had no idea what was going on from one minute to the next, and imagine the kind of paralysis that might cause 17 and 18 year old kids that had never seen real combat before. This conundrum is exactly what the course was designed to understand."

The class looks forward to revisiting the film in the spring in the context of its WWI studies.