I'd think that there must have been at least a fair number of anarchists, socialists, and working-class men who knew about anarchism and socialism and were sympathetic to their tenets among soldiers on all sides in World War 1. Historians can probably find such men on the left among, for instance, those who helped organize the Christmas truce in 1914 (cf. "The Christmas Truce," <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_war_i/197627.stm>, November 3, 1999; Harvey Thompson, "War, Football and the 1914 Christmas Truce," <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/xmas-j17.shtml>, July 17, 2003). And, of course, by 1917, the war itself must have radicalized many soldiers, sparking mutinies in the Russian, French, German, Italian, British, and other forces in 1917-1919. (Of course, the Russian Revolution itself could not have happened without mutinous soldiers who refused orders to crush strikers and protesters and deserted from the front.)
_A Very Long Engagement_ begins with the sentencing of five soldiers for self-mutilation in January 1917, as they are marched down the trench to Bingo Crépuscule. That's mere four months before mutinies in the French Army that began on May 27, 1917, involving as many as 30,000 French soldiers:
<blockquote>Official archives give the figures of 3,427 soldiers convicted of offences relating to the mutinies, some 554 receiving death sentences of which 49 were executed.65 However, these figures have been contested by historians of the mutinies.
<blockquote>_..executions involved in the suppression of revolt could be covered up by listing the death under some category other than execution, such as 'died of wounds' or 'killed in an accident.66_</blockquote>
(Peter Edwards, "_'Mort pour la France'_: Conflict and Commemoration in France after the First World War," _University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History_ 1, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/history/documents/1._edwards_mort_pour_la_france.pdf>, 2000, p. 8)</blockquote>
>I did not like the movie. It reminded me of too many other french
>romantic movies, only this one had a slightly different background.
>In any case, a vast improvement over his mellifluous "Amelie".
>Jeunet is no Genet and it was revealing, in a recent NPR interview,
>that Jeunet stated that he had previously worked in advertising.
If the director had eschewed a point of view character and romance and presented stories of five soldiers and individuals whose lives are entangled with them in a realist or experimental style, the result would have been interesting, although fewer people would have seen it.
Back to disability, Jean-Pierre Jeunet has previously represented a disabled individual in an unconventional fashion. Do you remember the mechanic in a wheelchair played by Dominique Pinon in _Alien: Resurrection_ (1997)? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>