Zero mention of the Yanks?
Please don't get me wrong with this topic title; I enjoyed this screenplay very much from the fine direction to the sets and costumes to the scripting. Kudos to the cast that all performed with excellence, (and I was especially disarmed by Miranda Richardson as Queen Mary if you needed to know). Certainly it afforded educated insight of the challenges, and the resulting successes and failures, of a precariously inept royalty during that period that I would have not otherwise ever known of let alone considered.
However, after I dried my eyes and the credits were rolling, I realized that there was something missing... With a great portion of the performance centered upon the horrors of WW1 and how royalty was becoming totally inefficacious in doing anything to either prevent it, stop it or win it, I did not catch one mention of America entering the war. Granted, casualty-wise, (and not to diminish the sacrifice of any soldier in any way), the USA was a mere footnote compared to the losses of Russia, Germany, Austria, England and France. But perhaps such low casualties out of over four million US soldiers mobilized can be seen as either the result of our lateness in arriving, our ability in fighting to win or a combination of both?
The fact remains however, (and this was brought out well and repeatedly in the play), that morale had reached new lows with earlier assumptions of a quick Allied victory becoming very dubious with most everyone at home waiting day to day to hear whether or not the Germans had broken through Allied lines.
That's when we yanks showed up and turned the tide in the Spring of 1918. If we had never shown up, that war might have lasted yet another 4 or 5 years and the death toll doubled to over 18 million but not with only more soldier's lives - certainly more women and children too with many of those being English and French.
As the expression goes, "If you don't toot your own horn, who will?" Well, I 'toot' only that I was dismayed that American involvement was not mentioned in this screenplay and that led me to ask the question why? Is the absence some sort of European psychological process of denial at play or is it a reflection on the affect intravenous doses of liberal news media have upon them in regard to Iraq?
If the latter, let me make one thing perfectly clear to my European brothers and sisters, if the USA had had a hawk president in 1914 and a willing populace that put him there, (and I say 'him' because women couldn't even vote back then let alone be president..), and we had entered the war near the start, is there any doubt that it would have tipped the scales and MILLIONS of lives would have been saved? If we had all stopped Hitler from taking Poland in 1938, (per what should have happened per the Treaty of Versailles, correct?), is there any doubt that many more MILLIONS of lives would have been saved? And yet, if such had indeed taken place there would remain no proof of such millions having been saved! There would be only the musings of political pundits bandying about their experts' projections in tabloids whining about what was wrong with doing it and of what 'might of' occurred and all them likely wrong in one fashion or another.
If that alternative outcome sounds a wee bit familiar and, if those two wars were of any indication, it seems that the USA was guilty back then of waiting too long while watching evil power gather in the distance and all of us in the free world guilty of watching history repeat itself in WW2. Let it be known that I for one see George Bush and Tony Blair as two leaders of the free world unwilling to watch it all happen yet again with both knowing fully well there will be little or nothing to prove 'what might have happened' if they had been as willing to wait and watch as were our leaders in the past. The courage to endure the prospect of such lack of proof, endure the tabloid pundits et al, to me, is the mark of true leaders and was, apparently, a painfully absent quality back in 1914. Though this screenplay did make its mark on that point, I believe that it should have at least mentioned that we were there too so that people might consider that, today, the yanks have come to the rescue yet again but, this time, - on time.