According to Nicholas J. Cull, University of Leicester: “In 1916, a British filmmaker named Geoffrey Mallins made and released a one-hour film of life in the British trenches entitled The Battle of the Somme. It captured the imagination of the British public at the time with a host of memorable images, the most enduringly famous of which—the back view of a line of British soldiers advancing through barbed wire and into mist. Of all the filmic interpretations of World War I, it is Mallins 's film which is most closely referenced in William Boyd 's account of life in a British trench in the days leading up to that battle.” , there is clear evidence that William Boyd’s movie is based on the real documentary that inspired him to make a color, available to the mass view movie that illustrates solder’s life in trenches. The Trench is a story about a group of young British soldiers on the eve of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, the last 48 hours that took place in Northern France where the British Army was getting ready for the biggest offence of the First World War. As hundreds of thousands of troops massed in the rear waiting for the order to attack, a reduced force was put in place to hold the front line trenches.
The main movie intention is to portrait the solder’s life in the trenches during the First World War. This document will discuss in the detail the soldiers ' experience in the trenches as a mixture of humiliation, horror, fear, and boredom, confined to a trench on the front lines as well as the brutality of the battle on its first day, high losses and achievements upon the end.
As indicated above, the main purpose of the movie was to illustrate the solders life in the trenches during the First World War and give a chance to a viewer to see and realize
Bibliography: 1. The Trench, dir. by William Boyd (1999; Bfs Entertainment, 2000 dvd) 2. DeGroot, Gerard J “The Soldier’s War” in the First World War (2001) Palgrave 3. Philpott, William. "The Anglo–French Victory on the Somme." Diplomacy & Statecraft 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 731-751. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed June 10, 2011) 4. Furtado, Peter. "The Somme Battlefield." History Today 56, no. 7 (July 2006): 10-11. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed June 10, 2011). 5. Cull, Nicholas J. "Film Reviews." American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 697-698. Historical Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed June 10, 2011).