They Shall Not Grow Old – Film Review | Royal Canadian Legion, US Zone, Branch #25

From the Legion Magazine.

Youth’s thousand-yard stare speaks
volumes in WW I documentary

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

For all the talk of the talking in director Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, it’s a scene in which those featured in the film don’t say anything that resonates perhaps more than any other.

It comes at the storyline’s transition from the war’s outbreak in 1914 and the enthusiastic queues of volunteers and recruits-in-training, rendered entirely in restored black-and-white, to the battlefront trenches of France, where the old footage emerges in full-colour, its detail and currency jarring to those who’ve only seen the time through the filters of scratched and faded monochrome.

King George VI dies

King George VI, his health eroded in part from the stresses of the Second World War, died on Feb. 6, 1952. He served in both world wars and was the first British sovereign to have seen action in battle since William IV, whose coat was pierced by a bullet while he was observing the bombardment of Antwerp in 1813 from a church steeple.