From Exhibitors Trade Review, October 27, 1917, 1644.
D. W. Griffith, who has been abroad for seven months co-operating with the British War Office in securing film records of events on the French and Belgian battlefields, arrived at an American port October 15.
Mr. Griffith modestly admits that he has brought back with him some official war pictures which are to be woven into a spectacle of the world conflict [Hearts of the World] and that he is indebted to the English government for its great aid in making it possible for him to get up to the front line of the trenches with his cameraman, but asked to be excused from commenting upon this phase of his work until it is completed. He is to add an American finish to his story of the great war.
Mr. Griffith looked none the worse for his dozen or more trips up to the front or the several nights of aeroplane raids on London. Asked for some description of the battles he saw about Ypres, the director who has guided thousands of mimic warriors in his past spectacles said that any effort at personal description would be as futile as attempting to brush back the sea with a fan.
“Shakespeare, Hugo, Zola, in fact, all the great descriptive writers of wars that have gone in the past, would be unequal to the task of giving one an accurate idea of the things that daily happen ‘out there,’” said Mr. Griffith. “You came away from it all with an imperishable recollection of depths of mud and vermin, of decay and stench and horror piled on horror, but also inspired by deeds that attain such heights of bravery and fortitude and heroic devotion to a cause that you wish everybody could know it and understand the spirit that is maintained behind those long lines. If this message could get through to every fireside there would be no question about the success of our Liberty Loans or our concerted efforts to see this war through to a finish. Every man, woman, and child who cannot get over to the front would want to do his bit to succor those who are doing this heroic work.”
“Were you able to get pictures of actual battle scenes and their attendant details as you describe them?” he was asked.
“We got some wonderful scenes, but whether our camera caught the spirit and the message of it all depends upon how our story turns out,” was Mr. Griffith’s reply. “You cannot work there without striving for this effect, however. Thanks to the assistance of the British officers at the front we caught actual scenes in the first line trenches and the surrounding panorama which often covered a view forty miles long and from ten to fifteen miles in depth. This is where the motion picture camera is going to be important in writing the history of this war. It is not within the limit of human possibility for a dozen pairs of eyes to grasp half of what takes place in a modern battle. No one man, not even the general in command, can see a tithe of it. But the camera has been perfected to such an extent that it possesses a thousand eyes and reaches out in every direction so that it can catch the grand panorama one instant and the next it can disclose a minute detail of the most illuminative and atmospheric ‘close-up.’”
“What modern improvements did you find that assisted most in this work?”
“The new French lenses with their fourteen-inch depths come first,” was his reply. “You see they help materially in getting what are technically known as ‘long shots’ in motion picture work. Then also comes the gyroscope, a miniature combination of the aeroplane and box kite which is controlled by an electric wire from the field and which can be sent up a considerable height and get bird’s-eye effects which a short time back would have escaped the most painstaking camera expert.
“In this way,” he continued, “one is able to show a charge along a two or three-mile front and also to picture the grim work in the mud holes called trenches close enough to reveal men actually wounded at their work, or to see groups of two or three straining to toss hand grenades over the ridge to the opposite German line, but fifty yards removed, or to take a chance rifle shot through a three-inch aperture in the soggy wall— and all the time they are wondering how soon they can go forward to that obstructing wall of steel and fire and death only a few yards away. But they are ever going forward.
“It was wonderful work and more exciting than any drama you ever read or dreamed of. I suppose because I am an American I was struck most by the unusual number of American boys I saw in the thickest of these frays.
“An amusing bit of by-play happened on the St. Julian road just beyond Ypres. There was a view I particularly wanted to sight through one of the trench periscopes, so I crept along the ridge and got up to a first line trench just in time to hear in unmistakable accents a stirring song being sung by a husky veteran operating a Lewis gun who was on sentry duty. The song wound up its refrain, ‘Take me back to Boston, Mass.’ There was all the din of battle about us, but I was compelled to smile.
“We got our camera up to this point, but later fell back to a dug-out near the road and were clicking away when a shell burst just behind and all but smashed the instrument. That camera is now on exhibition in London. Some workmen were rebuilding a demolished dug-out apparently secure in the thought that shells, like lightning, never strike in the same place, but this was a perverse shell. A few minutes later they took eleven dead out of that one hole. It was one of the worst days along the St. Julian road, but I can truthfully say that it appeared to me that for every shell they dropped over the Allied lines I could count from eight to ten that were hurled in their direction from the artillery bases several hundred yards in our rear.
“The air was strident with these shell songs of death whining funeral chants in many different keys. It was like a testing ground for the souls of mankind. When you are up there and see human beings being put to the test of the last fibre of the least infinitesimal nerve, you come to understand why the ancients always were sure their departed comrades went to heaven. Such testing makes you understand that anyone’s soul would be purged in such a fire. Surely this purging will burn the dross from all humanity and leave a world wherein to build a new brotherhood. And what a brotherhood it must be! As modern war is carried on, the need of brotherhood becomes more apparent. Each fellow is to a very great extent dependent upon the fellow next to him. You see infantrymen shoulder to shoulder with bomb throwers. As individuals caught in these terrific charges they are almost certain to meet death, but if there are two or three of them they are more liable to escape. So you see one is both helpless and hopeless without his brother. I have often wondered since seeing these things if we are not welding a greater tie of universal brotherhood which is to outlast the lives of these men who are so heroically finding new truths in the great struggle for the cause of democracy.”
Mr. Griffith was asked if he saw the arrival of the first American forces under General Pershing’s command.
“Yes and it would have done your heart good to see the reception accorded our boys. They are getting a different idea of America in England and France since we came in and I am sure that our effort there will strengthen these ideas.”
[With one or two minor changes, this interview also appeared in the British publication, Pictures and the Picturegoer, November 14–December 1, 1917, 659, under the title of “Griffith Returns to America,” and in Motography, November 3, 1917, 923, under the title of “Griffith Has European War in Films.” Motography, October 27, 1916, 873, contains a four paragraph item, in which Griffith announces that “only a camera can see war.” It does not constitute an interview, per se, and is not included here.]