Is it St Crispin's Day Already?

Who needs books...

I was idly flicking through the channels about a week and a half ago and my attention was grabbed by the sight of the guy from Office Space semi-drunkenly rooting around a wartime German house in combat gear. After a few minutes I remembered both the actor’s name (Ron Livingston) and the name of the show I was watching: Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers. I saw only about 15 minutes at most of what turned out to be the second-last episode, during which the men of Easy Company stumble on the Landsberg Concentration Camp. I needed to see more.

I’ve since, with the help of a certain Film Cricket, worked my way through the 10 hour-long episodes that make up the series, and would like to proudly declare myself an obsessive devotee. What best sum up my experience of Band of Brothers are the two reactions most commonly inspired in me by what I was watching: ‘My God, what a horrible war’, and ‘My God, what an enormous budget’. Nothing I have seen or read before has given me a better sense of the Second World War than these ten episodes. Granted, I’m absolutely the type of person that reacts better to a narrative being forced down my throat than to cold history, but Band of Brothers is perfectly pitched in its depiction of the war. Unlike its sister-film Saving Private Ryan, it is a dramatisation of actual events rather than wartime fiction, and gloriously treads the line presented to such productions, being neither too much “war is hell” nor “we happy few”. The sheer amount of money that must have been thrown at the production is awesome, with each individual aspect excelling, from acting to location to sound mixing.

Highlights for me were the sixth and seventh episodes, ‘Bastogne’ and ‘The Breaking Point’, which together document Easy Company’s entrenchment in the Belgian town of Bastogne and its surrounding woodland. Though perhaps most powerful for me was the last episode’s to-be-expected roll-call of surviving Easy Company members and what occupied them after the war – some stayed with the army, but the majority became business men, farmers, taxi drivers. It may be cliché at this stage, but how anybody can rejoin the stream of everyday life having seen what these and countless other soldiers saw during their time in combat is, to me, unfathomable.

I cannot recommend this series highly enough.

If, like me, you somehow missed Band of Brothers the first time around, get your hands on a copy and enlighten yourself immediately. It comes in a lovely box too (these things are important).