Why did James Jones give his novel about war in the impenetrable wet, green jungles of a Pacific island such a title? Was it an attempt to position his work within a general but uncertain anglophone perception of gallantry against impossible odds which the name, "thin red line" suggests? For both the novel, and Terrence Malick's recent film, have placed their respective narratives within the greater war narrative myth, from Greek legend, by way of Dr Geoghegan's Academy in Hume Street Dublin, and Inkerman.
Ah yes, Dr Geoghegan's Academy, Hume Street. For that was the institution which gave the formative education to one of the great myth-makers of war: William Howard Russell of Tallaght, who not merely revealed the scandals of British mismanagement in the Crimean war, but contributed so much to enduring mythology about war generally. It was he who shifted popular focus from military grandees to the plain soldier, struggling as much with incompetent high command as with the enemy: and that is where narrative focus has remained ever since.
It was also Russell who coined the phrase chosen by James Jones for his novel to describe the Russians charging the British: "They dashed on towards that thin red line with steel". All myth is honed over time - in fact Russell's initial description in the Times was "thin red streak". That term was garbled in popular recollection to "thin red line": so when Russell rewrote his account of the Crimean War 20 years later, he conformed with the emergent myth.
In both the Crimea and the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal, the setting for The Thin Red Line, conditions are perhaps the primary foe, and the participants see nothing. "Our generals could not tell where the enemy were," wrote Russell of the Crimea. "In darkness, gloom and rain they have to lead our lines through thick scrubby bushes and thorny brakes which broke our ranks and irritated our men." Unseen snipers felled the British at their ease.
And at Guadalcanal 90 years later, "a lush tangle of vines and brush forming an almost impenetrable carpet. From the moist ground came the stench of decaying vegetation, decomposition, putrefaction," wrote the historian Louis Snyder. Snipers were everywhere. "Added to the clever enemy were millions of insects, including malaria-ridden mosquitoes . . . rats, scorpions and boa constrictors."
Mud, stench, millions of swarming stinging insects, impenetrable brush, blindness beyond a yard: these are not portrayable realities for a director like Malick who wishes to make a great, filmically poetic statement about war. Furthermore, the modern audience simply has not the stomach for the nature of the Pacific fighting, in which Japanese prisoners were simply not taken. The entire Japanese garrison of the Guadacanal islet of Gavatu, for example, died to a man. Wounded Japanese were every bit as dangerous as the unwounded, and were usually bayoneted or shot where they lay. One Japanese assault on a US Marine position by 900 men resulted in all 900 being killed. No injured.
This is not what we see in The Thin Red Line. Mosquitoes do not move in vast, maddening malarial swarms. Japanese prisoners are taken; some croon over the corpses of their friends; others shuffle obediently into captivity. In other words, Japs Are Human Too You Know; a reasonable enough sentiment in 1999, but an entirely non-existent one in the island wars of 1942.
Human nature tends to extremes; and where there is murderous hatred, there is often a counter-balancing love for one's friends. Veterans of organised murder-orgies, i.e. battle, speak of the bonds of love which tie together men in action together. For these are intimate moments of smell and touch, of terror and shit and blood and injury and death. They are essentially unfilmable; and so remain outside the genre of war-as-film.
The Thin Red Line has been widely acclaimed as a work of art, which indeed it might be. But it is not realistic; and how could it be? The only realistic medium in which to portray war is war itself: the unspeakable brutality of training, the crushing boredom of waiting, the relentless privations of simply enduring in malarial swamps, perhaps for months, and the vast adrenalin surges of aggression and terror in action itself. These are beyond capture by film as they are by any art form: all film can do is portray faint shadows of the real thing.
Within that thin world of faintly portrayed shadows, elegy is a common and safe refuge for film-makers; the contrast, say, between prewar simplicity, or between a spider's web at dawn, and the otherwise overpowering murdermachine which surrounds the largely hapless participants. It was used, most lusciously, in Incident at Owl Creek, and it is one which Malick resorts to in TRL with a comparably self-indulgent and meretricious artistry.
But there are moments in TRL which are blindingly good: one minisecond of a tracer-bullet approaching the viewer was so heartstoppingly, terrifyingly realistic that I ducked. Unlike its rival as second War Film of the Year, Saving Private Ryan, with its ridiculous plot and its sensational battle scenes, TRL as film is altogether more technically more subtle and more compelling.
But grizzled US veterans of Guadacanal will sit in their cinemas in Tennessee and Ohio, while actor after actor in Thin Red Line presents their sententious interior monologues of What It Is To Be A Soldier, and Why I am Fighting, and they will silently declare: "that was not what it was like". And of course it was not. Film can no more convey war to those who have not experienced it than dance can convey glorious gold to the blind. Art, after all, is mankind's attempt to culturalise creation. War cannot be culturalised; war as art is the greatest human fallacy. We only get war right with war itself. Which is perhaps why we do it so often.
