The German Retreat and Battle of Arras
(Various) (1917)
The third of three feature-length films made for showing in British cinemas while World War I was still happening, The German Retreat and Battle of Arras has recently been digitally restored by the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in collaboration with the University of Udine. BFI screened it as the centrepiece of a programme that also included various, nearly contemporary short films. IWM’s Toby Haggith introduced the programme. As passionately informative as ever, he supplied excellent context for The Battle of Arras and its restoration, and for each of the three shorts included in the screening. The main film’s restoration marks the completion of an IWM project to restore all three of the feature documentaries about British army campaigns in France and Belgium during the Great War – this last one preceded by Battle of the Somme (1916) and Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks (1917).
The shorts were, in order of screening, Stand by the Men Who Stood by You (1917), Baghdad, Babylon and Baalbec (Advance of the Crusaders into Mesopotamia) (1920)[1] and Milnrow and Newhey Roll of Honour (1918). The first, sponsored by the National War Savings Committee, was propaganda urging immediate action on the part of audiences – to invest in War Loan certificates and thereby generate funding for ammunition for British forces in their fight against ‘the Hun’. Over the course of its five minutes, the film employs several modes of imagery, including actual footage of Belgian refugees, a re-enactment of the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell, and animated sequences. In one of the latter, a War Loan certificate morphs into a British soldier who locks the Kaiser up. Baghdad, Babylon and Baalbec (15 minutes), as well as documenting the British advance into what is now Iraq and (in the case of Baalbec) Lebanon, has interest both as a piece of military history and as travelogue. The reference to ‘Crusaders’ in the film’s sub-title is echoed in one of the more striking title cards, which notes the importance of the biblical connotations of Mesopotamian sites to British Tommies (implicitly as Christian soldiers).
Roll of Honour was sponsored and produced by the Empire Picture Palace in Milnrow, Rochdale: Toby Haggith explained that productions like this were a not unusual means of commemorating, for local cinema audiences, men and boys from a particular area who had died in action. The still photographs that comprise Roll of Honour supplied both a bridge to, and a potent contrast with, the moving (in both senses) images of forces in The Battle of Arras. Sponsored by the War Office Cinematograph Committee and shot by four cameramen (Geoffrey Malins, Harry Raymond, John McDowell, Herbert Baldwin), the film runs 77 minutes all told. There are scenes describing, inter alia, blasted landscape, the devastation of Arras and the reopening of the local railway station, but there are chiefly soldiers – very much alive, though some are wounded, at the point of being filmed. The only dead in evidence, in a single brief sequence, are German soldiers. It seems The Battle of Arras isn’t just a remarkable piece of film in itself: according to Toby Haggith, this and the two preceding films in the World War I trilogy transformed British perceptions of cinema – proved that a medium generally despised as inevitably shallow and ephemeral could also create an invaluable and widely accessible historical record. Haggith went further in making a claim for military documentaries of this kind, along with wildlife films, being Britain’s outstanding contributions to world cinema over the last century and more.
Although this was the latest offering in BFI’s regular ‘Silent Cinema’ slot, Toby Haggith also takes the view that the term ‘silent cinema’ is a misnomer. The components of this screening showed what he meant in good and not so good ways. Like the two earlier films in the trilogy, the music for The Battle of Arras, competitively commissioned, was composed by Laura Rossi. It’s clear that a great deal of thought, research and skill went into her composition, but I found it too rich for the film it was designed to support (the choral elements were particularly intrusive). John Sweeney’s live piano accompaniment to the short films was more discreet and more effective.
12 April 2026
[1] This film was included in the selection of short films comprising ‘Join the Army and see the world: Campaigns beyond the Western Front’, also introduced by Toby Haggith at a BFI screening, in October 2016.