Band of Birdsong

Recently I borrowed the DVD set of Stephen Spielberg's "Band of Brothers" and it made me think about its treatment of war compared to the texts we have studied. Far from glorifying war his american text escapes the hollywood tradition of sentimental musing about the heroism of the stereotypical US GI. Instead BOB focuses on the human element within war. While depicting battle scenes and the horror that is caused, often in gruesome detail, the focus is on the individual reactions of the human characters to their comrades and the horror the war has inflicted on them. The strength of the series lies in the rounded, very "human", characters. This is mainly dictated by the fact that the concept is drawn from a real regiment ad the screenplay was written after extensive interviews with many of the men that characters in the series are depicting.

This human treatment of the war with a focus on the relationships between men that warfare and shared experience can create is quite different to the other texts concerning war that I have read/viewed in the last two years. Barker's text seems to imply that while these men do have shared experiences thy are all simply part of a much larger political and social problem-being fed to the barbed wire lions. Also "The Ghost Road" has a focus on class which separates the men within the thrall of the first world war which Band of Brothers dismisses. In the first episode "Currahee" all the men seem dislocated within the unit as they all they have different social positions. However after two years of collective training and the experience of warfare they are a collective group with class/race causing almost no issue.

Faulks' "Birdsong" does discuss the concept of collective humanity but her focus seems to lie on the effect of war on the individual, rather than the group or even, as Barker does, early 20th century society as a whole. Her narrative follows Stephen Wraysford from pre-war France through all four years of the first world war all the way through to the research that his Grand daughter put into his war years. Faulks seems to focus on the effect that the war had on every individual, not as a group. Elizabeth is highly affected by the war because her heritage was caught up in it and his has an important bearing on her daily life.

BOB does talk about the effect on the individual but the main theme so far seems to be that the soldiers are what we should remember, not the lines on the maps or the political consequences worldwide, this concept is the absolute opposite of Barker's aim within "The Ghost Road".