When they had gone, a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead

Sunday column

At the end of a long day of coffee at Satriale's and getting rowdy in a hotel bedroom and lighting cigars and losing his rag with Junior and agonising with Dr Melfi and having a quiet dinner with Carmella and taking phone calls at the Bada Bing and worrying about Christopher  and getting somebody whacked, Tony Soprano would often finish the night with a bowl of ice cream watching the History Channel.

Mostly this would be the Second World War, in all its black and white turmoil and blurred fury. 

I always found this behaviour relatable. I mean the watching the war on the TV, not the criminal enterprises and the getting people rubbed out. Terry Clark lived here in the seaside village once, but that was before the renovations started and every shop became a cafe.

Books are our friends, I love them, but not when I’m reeling. Whenever I am decked, wrung out, or needing to lie down and recuperate for six weeks, I find myself turning to the same channel as Tony, for the black and white turmoil and blurred fury. 

For the past little while I have been watching a new series whose name I could look up but it's not all that important, it’s just enough to know it’s the newest take on the same turmoil and fury I’ve been watching ever since The World at War arrived in 1975, narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. 

Amongst them all, the very many war documentaries, The World at War is singular. It sees - and never loses sight of - the people, and the inhumanity, more than any other telling I have seen.  

The series opens in quiet, in France, an empty road, as Olivier begins, quietly,

Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, China, in a world at war.

Throughout, his tone is sombre, slightly removed. Someone described it as persistent disdain for the subject matter, watching a horrendous thing unfold. 

This maybe helps explain why I feel less uncomfortable about watching it than I do the rest of them. But I do feel unease, the more I watch these things, and I feel a bit wrong, some kind of war voyeur.  I turn to this in moments of duress and discomfort, and I’m not sure I can say why. Does it say something about me, or my motives? And do I want to know?

Let's put it to one side for a moment and pan back to Tony. Why was he watching, what made him turn to that with his ice cream?

Maybe it was just study, looking for insights into the strategies of great leaders: Patton, Rommel, Churchill, Ike. 

Maybe it was cathartic relief, at the end of yet another day and week of living dangerously, to watch other people also fight epic battles and win.

I’m synthesising popular opinion on this topic, and by that I mean anyone joining in on the discussion at Reddit. One person recalls Tony telling Dr Melfi he sees himself, and his men, as soldiers; and that soldiers don't go to hell. 

Or, to get more existential about his greatest fears: perhaps it's a comfort to watch the deeds of people recounted, providing a comforting reassurance: that the world and life is worth remembering, that it is not one big nothing. 

If only we could see some more of him, learn more. But we can't because we now know Tony’s last minutes were in that diner, and he’s not coming back. I feel bound to share this news once more, if you missed it the last time I mentioned series creator David Chase inadvertently referring in an interview to the last minutes of the series as the death scene. 

Poor Meadow, poor AJ, poor Carmella.  Poor Tony. 

I offer this as evidence impugning my TV-watching motivation. I may be pointing my inquiring mind at the screen, but it's equally possible I’m just another slack-jawed spectator at the Colosseum.

What draws me to it again and again, the black and white turmoil and blurred fury? 

I have most often explained it to myself in this way: you grow up in the shadow of this thing, you know it by broad sinister reputation, but you only know loosely how it proceeded and you want to put faces and detail to it all. 

This latest series - now for the first time in full HD colour! they jarringly declare in the opening credits of each episode - is valuable in its way, for sure. There are fresh insights, there is information that is new, at least to me.

For instance: the outcome of the battle of Midway turned much more upon sheer chance than you might want to comfortably imagine. One fighter pilot, leading a squadron in search of the Japanese fleet lost in the great blue empty expanse, banks to follow just a shadow and a hunch and now at last at the outer limit of their range they locate the ships and they wreak havoc. It’s more than a lucky break; but for that destruction they are able to rain down, their own ships would have soon been in the greatest peril.

For instance: the death and horror of Stalingrad is familiar ground in all these histories, and always comes with two things: an acknowledgement of unimaginable suffering but also the pivotal significance of the turning of Wehrmacht fortunes.  

And yet until now I had somehow failed to grasp just how much the whole thing turned on matters of ego. Hitler, on his way south to seize oil fields apprehends: well, we could take a sideswipe detour here and take Stalingrad. How gratifying it would be to knock over the city that bears the name of my enemy. And in turn, as it becomes apparent that the city that bears his name is in peril, Stalin declares: no one leaves here alive, we defend it to the last man. Jesus.

Also with reference to Midway, there's a cool story, again new to me, about the Yorktown aircraft carrier, badly damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea but needed by Admiral Nimitz for the imminent decisive battle. They tell Nimitz that repairing the Yorktown will take ninety days. He gives them three, they deliver.

Also, with reference to D-Day and the Normandy landings I learn more about the wild equipment they created to get armoured vehicles ashore, most notably the Crocodile: a tank with flame-thrower of a very great range; a powerful psychological weapon that proved highly effective at clearing bunkers, trenches and other German fortifications. For the Omaha landing, General Omar Bradley more or less passed up on any of that sort of equipment, thereby exposing many more men to fatal fire. In this telling he does not come out looking so great. 

You can go on and on forever with this stuff but let’s turn again to my motives and my viewing choices.

What might count as an acceptable motive? Wanting to see good prevail? Taking great satisfaction from seeing evil punished and Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler getting what's coming to them? It is never not a thrill for me to watch the furious thunder of the guns at Kursk as vast Soviet forces begin their vengeful push west all the way to Berlin. You are so screwed, you hateful Nazis.

Irrationally I still get nervous every single time I watch the Normany landings, even though I know how it ends, even though I know that so much will go wrong at Omaha, and it will be  much more heavily defended than they thought and men will just fall in the water and nothing will really come right until the naval artillery starts cleaning out the Nazi defences.

What might count as an unacceptable motive? I feel unease at feeling so much at ease with this.  You get to the end of the episode, the credits roll, you maybe doze. All those millions upon millions of deaths, all that carnage, all that suffering and here's Tony eating ice cream and me comfortably sprawled over a king size bed with a laptop and if you like I can tell you a harrowing story about a small surgery wound I’ve got that wouldn't stop bleeding for days but yeah nah.

You think of the way lives in their millions were ruined beyond all hope of mending, all those broken people, and it feels, if not wrong, then at least not right to be watching in comfort.

But the tone for this, for how to watch, for how to regard this has been there all along in the Olivier narration. 

Watch on, never forgetting for a moment that this should be the last thing in the world you should ever want to happen to anyone at all. 

They never rebuilt Oradour, he says.