Of war and retribution

When Michelangelo painted the Fall of Man, little did he fathom the commonality and the parallels that could possibly be, insipiently and rather incongruously, drawn between the falling out of the men on the mural and the growing wedges between men and women irrespective of creed and colour, who, driven by anger, jealousy, lust, ambition, and egos, go to war. Men have been at war for ever. Even so, images of war on celluloid sear the soul, cripple memory and instigate fears of yet another conflagration claiming the lives of hundreds of innocents. But, the sucker for war films that I am, I end up compulsively and with renewed interest watch was films the second and even the third time. Saving Private Ryan (1998) is a film I have watched thrice and every single time I did, I came away thoughtful, questioning. Why do men go to war (I say men here as the case of women going to war have been critically rare)? In 1914, the Germans, the British, the French and the Russians went to war, the leaders disregarding faint but powerful voices advocating peace. Mammoth egos of powerful men led thousands to their deaths, countries and economies collapsed, widowed women lined the streets demanding jobs, Russia convulsed internally as the peasants and the working class rose against the Tsar. Even after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, the League of Nations established, the losing Germans stripped of everything including their dignity, and the world sighed in relief, Europe went up in flames again in 1939, this time primarily because of the whims of one man—Adolf Hitler—and the uncompromising attitudes of the Allied powers. The mass murder that followed left all involved with nothing more to fight for or fight with and hence the bloodiest war in history came to an end in 1945. Saving Private Ryan is a story set in 1944 and begins on the beaches of Normandy in France, seen through the eyes of erstwhile Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon). Captain John H Miller (Tom Hanks) and his company, oblivious of the German emplacements throughout the beach lands in hell as the German guns open up. Miller loses more than thirty of his men under ominously grey French skies, in one of the best combat sequences ever filmed. As young American soldiers, most not more than boys, kiss their crosses and utter the Lord’s Prayer and stricken men look around the bloody beach for a limb, the catastrophe that is war comes home in one blinding flash. A day later Captain Miller is informed of his next mission—finding Private Ryan, under direct orders from the Army high command in Washington, following the deaths of all three of his brothers in combat. A shamed American military top brass is faced with a tragic dilemma—breaking the news to the grieving mother and delivering alive the one hope in the world she has—her last child. Thus, begin’s Miller’s journey, seven of his men giving him company through the French battlefields, through the heart of German reinforcements. He loses one man then another to battle. As the men trudge along, they make small talk, trying desperately to shrug off the fear and the possibility of death, they bet dollars on the origins of their group leader, toss around dog tags to find Private Ryan and even converse about the merits and demerits of a melancholic love song playing in the background of their last battlefield. They also lose friends, the team medic Wade who asks for morphine so that he does not feel the pain and dies calling for his mother and the big Caparzo who tries to save a tiny French girl from German sniper guns because she reminds him of his niece and falls to a shot. And Miller faces rebellion in the form of Reiben who wants to kill a f****** German PoW but relents to reason by Miller and protestations by Upham, the translator. After a few false starts, Ryan is actually found alive and unwilling to vacate his post. What wrong have these men committed? Why do I get to go home while they don’t? The utter uselessness of war, the half-baked logic of sending young men to their deaths for no fault of theirs, apparent or otherwise, the preposterous arguments in favour of armed conflict and absolutely unnecessary exercise of power…it all comes to naught. There is no logic for war, no logic either for transferring the weight of the ambitions of one man or one class of men on to the shoulders of common men and women. In the glazed dead eyes of Captain John Miller and the tears-streaked eyes of Private Ryan, is reflected the futility of war.