Lions Led By Donkeys - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

The musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963) and the comedy television series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) are two well-known works of popular culture depicting the war as consisting of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of Blackadder) lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque's novel (and subsequent film) All Quiet on the Western Front which have been criticised by revisionists such as Brian Bond for having given rise to what he considered the myth and conventional wisdom of the Great War as a war of absolute futility. What Bond found most objectionable was how, in the 1960s, the works of Remarque and the Trench Poets slipped into the nasty caricature of lions led by donkeys, while the more complicated history of the war receded into the background.

Producers of television documentaries about the war have had to grapple with the "lions led by donkeys" interpretive frame since the 1960s. BBC Television's 1964 seminal and award-winning The Great War has been described as taking a moderate approach with co-scriptwriter John Terraine fighting against what he viewed as an oversimplification, while, in one noted instance, Liddell Hart resigned as an advising historian to the series in an open letter to the Times, in part over a dispute with Terraine's minimising the faults of the High Command on The Somme and other concerns regarding the treatment of Third Ypres. The Great War war was viewed by approximately one-fifth of the adult population in Britain and the production of documentaries on the war has continued ever since. While some more recent documentaries such as Channel 4's 2003 The First World War have confronted the popular image of lions led by donkeys head-on by reflecting current scholarship presenting more nuanced portrayals of British leaders and more balanced appraisals of the difficulties faced by the High Commands of all the combatants, they have been viewed by much less of the public than either 1964's The Great War or comedies such as Blackadder.