Faithfull greeted me in an affable and only marginally condescending manner — Donald had forewarned him of my arrival — but I instinctively disliked him. He was in his mid-twenties, and had a handsome, plump face and fine, thinning fair hair. His voice was surprisingly deep, full of sage gravitas. I was sure this was an affectation of maturity. The problem was that, to me, Faithfull reeked of deceit. I confess that at this stage my conclusion was based solely on prejudice (I am prepared to admit to some jealousy — already I envied his success with The Battle of Messines), but in spite of that there was something too glib about the man. He was always too conscious of himself and of the impression he was creating on others — an infallible sign of the vain and the fraudulent.
He was soon joined by his crony Almyr Nelson, which completed our number. Nelson was an official stills photographer. He was known as “Baby” Nelson, possibly because of his curly light-brown hair. However, I could never bring myself to call him this. With Nelson I was on safer ground professionally, and I used to talk technical matters with him, preferably in Faithfull’s hearing. Faithfull was suspicious of me and how I came to be in the WOCC unit — the most elite unit in the British Army, as he dubbed it. I had not been an avid cinemagoer before the war and my few hours of instruction on the Aeroscope would not stand much interrogation. So whenever the subject turned to the subject of moving films I steered the conversation into general areas — composition, portraiture, the merits of the posed shot against the natural — and no one, I think, guessed at my real ignorance. Faithfull possessed some wily intelligence. Nelson was more agreeable, but as far as brains were concerned, he was — as Sergeant Tanqueray would have phrased it—“as thick as shit in a bottle.”
A routine soon established itself. Donald would arrive every other day with a list of potential subjects that the WOCC considered to be newsworthy or of propaganda value. Faithfull had first choice (he was very keen on visiting dignitaries — he claimed he had filmed the visits to the front of two kings, three prime ministers and entire cabinets of politicians) and would set off after a leisurely breakfast, often accompanied by Nelson. Frequently, they stayed away the night. Faithfull seemed to receive a warm welcome at every regimental mess. Since The Battle of Messines he had become a celebrity. All his new films were very boring.
At the outset, Donald set me to work on a series entitled Great British Regiments, a simple enough job with the advantage that it allowed me to master the Aeroscope. I filmed a battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, receiving victuals at a field kitchen, playing football, listening to a singsong and marching up to the front along a road lined with shattered poplars. I shot four reels of film and sent it off to London, where some nameless editor in the Topical Film Company’s labs in Camden Town cut it up and patched it together.
A week later it was back, passed by the censor, and we showed it to the KOYLI colonel and his officers in their battalion reserve billets.
I will never forget that evening. It was in November. We drove over at dusk. There was some sleet in the air melting like spit on the windscreen. A “stunt” was on and a battery of sixty-pounders in a field a mile away fired throughout our visit. We had a drink in the officers’ mess and then went into a barn where a sheet had been tacked to a wall. I rigged up the projector and started the portable generator; the beam flickered, then sat — shivering slightly but true square — on the makeshift screen.
I can bring it all back. The faint frowsty smell of old hay, the fragrant reek of pipe tobacco, the thrum of the generator, the rolling boom of the guns, the laughter and comments of the officers, the lanterns turned down, plump with oily light.
GREAT BRITISH REGIMENTS NO. 23
THE KING’S OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY
No other name, no credits (no sound, of course), but it was mine. The opening monochrome shot of smiling marching men waving at the camera (I had been vainly shouting, “Don’t wave! Don’t look at the camera!”), then the inept jocularity of some War Office copywriter … I watched it all pass before me, entranced. I cannot say I was in the grip of some artistic or aesthetic visitation; my mood was rather — what? — proprietorial. This was mine. John James Todd fecit. Donald stood beside me puffing on his pipe, and I thought back to that day on the train from Barnton when he had held me at the window and I had taken my first photograph, “Houses at Speed.” I felt a rush of affection for him and his constant generosity to me.
There was loud, delighted applause at the end of the film. We returned to the mess for more drinks and much flattering appreciation was expressed. My first audience, my first acclaim. I felt enfolded in a radiant cloud of happiness and innocent pride.
I drove back with Donald, the two silver film canisters warm in my lap.
“Jolly good,” Donald said. “Inniskilling Fusiliers the day after tomorrow.”
But I was not listening. “I wonder why,” I said, “they didn’t use that shot of the sergeant major in shirtsleeves — you know, feeding jam to his pet squirrel.… It was far and away the best.”
Prophetic words. Prophetic complaint. I knew then that what I wanted was control, total control. And it is from that moment — and not those first hesitant turnings of the Aeroscope’s handle one morning in a village street on the Abeele-Poperinghe road — that I date the start of my career, my vocation, my work, my downfall.
In the next two weeks I filmed the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Ox and Bucks. Light Infantry. The finished films were virtually indistinguishable from the first. But all the while I was shooting them, an idea was slowly forming in my mind. I decided, quite independently, to make my own film, one that was not just an assembly of loosely related fragments, but that had a distinct shape and form, that told a story. I think the title came to me almost before anything else: Aftermath of Battle. Already I could see it on advertisement posters, on marquees above cinemas. This would be a film true to a soldier’s experience of battle, an experience that the director himself had undergone.
From what Donald had shown me of WOCC material at Bailleul it was clear that most films of offensives dealt extensively with the buildup to an attack. This was followed by a few shots of men leaving the trenches and, if you were lucky, a long view of the enemy trenches under fire. There was a final collage of glum German prisoners and smiling walking wounded at casualty-clearing stations. The implicit message was that stalwart fortitude was the route to ultimate victory. The film I had in mind would be quite different.
I was not entirely candid about my ambitions with Donald. I suspected he would gently chide me for overreaching myself, running before I could walk. I told him only that I wanted to drop Great British Regiments and see if I could convey something more interesting about the immense range of activity that went on behind the lines. He happily gave me permission to proceed.
One morning I left the farm well before dawn and drove up to the northern sector of the Salient. I went to the battalion HQ of the 107th Canadian Pioneers and was given permission to film one of its wiring parties coming out of the line. A sleepy orderly led me along a duckboard track to the mouth of a communication trench. I set up my tripod, mounted my Aeroscope on top and waited.