War As It Is

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 248, 24 March 1944, Page 3

War As It Is

HAT is it like to wait for zero hour? What is it like to go into battle with the guns roaring behind and in front of you, with land mines sowed around you, and the enemy waiting ahead? Nobody who has not himself taken part in front-line fighting can answer those questions, and few who have can put their impressions into clear enough language to make the experience real to those who have never fought. But what the tongue and the pen often cannot do, the movie camera sometimes can. It can do it because it is impersonal and has no inhibitions and can take in more than any human eye. And in the film Desert Victory, which officially records the Battle of El Alamein and the rout of the Afrika Korps, it has done it. After a long delay, this film has now been released to New Zealand audiences. It will give them the closest thing possible to a firsthand experience of modern warfare. And although the illusion that war is a romantic business is | already as good as dead, this film | should help to put the last nail in its coffin. For while there is much that is exciting and heroic and sensational about Desert Victory, there is nothing glamorous about it, and nobody is glamorised-not even the New Zealanders, in spite of the fact that the film was sent back in order that more prominence should be given them. The faces it puts unforgettably on the screen-the faces of English, Scottish, Australian, New Zealand, and South African soldiers; yes, and of Germans and Italians too-are not the faces of conventional story-book warriors. They are the faces of men who are grim but bewildered; determined but fearful; childlike rather than fierce. For this is a documentary film in the truest sense; a unique record of war and of what the fighting man endures in it. Seeing it, one may well believe that four of the 26 cameramen who made it were killed, seven were wounded, and six were captured,