The increased horror of the barbaric things happening to the Ukrainian people resisting forces sent by someone bearing the reincarnated mentality of a previous century’s Bavarian corporal is that we are witnessing it through the most immediate visual reporting.
The Crimean war was perhaps the first to be reported using photography. However, because of long exposures needed at the time there are no action pictures: Roger Denton’s depictions are largely of soldiers posing in their camps. Nevertheless, a look at their faces discloses enough of the sufferings endured because of pitiable army organisation. Indeed, a far greater number of recruits died of cholera than of wounds.
The USA Civil War was another major conflict first recorded in photographs by Matthew B. Brady and his team.
It was left to the First Word War for film to be more extensively used although how much of what we see was the result of real-time combat or whether it was staged reconstructions is problematic.
The Second World War brought media to the fore in combat recording. Footage of events like the Battle of Midway and the atomic bombings remain haunting. However, censorship and propaganda played an important part in reportage, particularly for commentaries, and I find excessive stiffness and artificiality which only such great correspondents as Richard Dimbleby in his D-Day reports dispel.
Since then war reportage has vastly expanded. However, it is only now with Ukraine that television viewers can fully experience the unutterable awfulness of war and its participants in this ghastly, pitiful and tragic phenomenon.
New technology and, in particular, mobile phones, internet communication and social media have broken through state-staged propaganda falsities and brought us ever closer to the shame of war.
Who can possibly forget the bombings recorded in real-time of the past few days – just the initial five of the first international war in Europe since 1945? More horrific footage will inexorably emerge as cities with millions of inhabitants like Kharkiv continue to be pounded and bomb through the orders of a gang of madmen.
We are utterly shocked by the tragic events of a part of our beloved continent of Europe so wretchedly still infected by the virus of the human race’s worse failing – the supposed excuse for war.
I need to take my mind off these events, even partly. so as to retain some measure of sanity.
Yesterday we took a little detour around the countryside of the Luccan hills. It seemed worlds away from the current crises. The landscape unfolded itself before eyes so beautifully and peacefully, the fields, woods, churches and villages basking in an exquisite early March sunshine. Our planet, tragically wounded elsewhere, lay here in an utterly idyllic nature, a truly earthy paradise.
Yes, Peace had returned to this land which in the last century had also suffered the worst vicissitudes of war. Hope springs eternal indeed!
May our prayers and wishes go out to the heroic people of Ukraine. May we all hope they will be able to return to a quiet life before too long….and may their courageous dead rest in peace…