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The first moving picture

History and Commentary From a Prairie Perspective
rural scene pic

There were no moving pictures shown in the raw village where I was born until the owner of the only hotel bought enough chairs to fill his ballroom and invited a travelling showman to make regular visits with his films, projector, screen and sound system.

The first moving picture I saw was a war picture. I was only four years old, but I knew a little about war because my mother and her parents talked of the Great War constantly. My father didn't talk about it at all. I was surprised then when he joined the rest of the family in going to see the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

I was only four years old, little in words and understanding. There was one scene I did understand, however. An arm in a field grey uniform reaches out of a trench. The soldier wants to touch a butterfly that has landed on a lid of an opened food can. There is a flat report and the arm is convulsively withdrawn. I know the soldier who reached out to touch an object of fleeting beauty is dead.

This is a memory that has haunted me for 84 years. All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, a former German soldier, was the most powerful anti-war novel of the early 20th century. It was published in 1929. The film version, in theatres in 1930, was the first anti-war moving picture.

I think that my frugal father knew that when he agreed to go to the makeshift cinema with the others in the family. His family had sometimes spent holidays in a German-speaking canton of Switzerland. He never believed in the formidable British propaganda machine's stories that demonized Germans. He never believed in war.

My father was a strange man. He placed duties necessary and duties chosen ahead of personal pleasure. For most of us now, that would be an unacceptable lifestyle. What I see around me now are men and women living together with both working to pay off the mortgage on a house they scarcely have time to occupy. Whatever free time they have is used up in a frantic search for pleasure.

In America 50 years ago, folk singers were at the forefront of an anti-war movement. For a time, it almost seemed there would be perpetual peace in the whole world. It didn't happen. We need peace in more than fits and starts.

Those monsters among humankind who have the power to command that wars begin and millions die, as combatants and as innocent refugees, know peacemakers are their enemies. They tie us up with lies, they disrupt our organizations. If they think it necessary to protect their interests, they will arrange for the prophets of peace to be assassinated.

We have leadership skilled in subterfuge and deficient in moral imperatives. What they do, they do for their own benefit, while millions of people die.

There has been a falling away from religion in Canada. Perhaps Christianity is based on a collection of fables. Perhaps the atheists are right. I hope not, because I think we still need a special place in hell for those leaders who are responsible for the suffering and death of millions and millions of innocent, powerless people throughout the whole world.