The Long Gray Line

Sentimental ode to the virtues of the transgenerational memory, spirit and discipline of military training institutions, concocted by marrying Irish folksiness with American patriotism, and with a bit of Christmas jollity thrown in at the end to round things off. If that’s your thing, it’s probably going to work for you. Whatever pain and sacrifice is involved only reinforces the message, of course, and while at the beginning there are a few roguish remarks by the protagonist about how the labours of the poor exist solely for the benefit of the rich, when, eventually, the chronology arrives at the First World War, all that is long forgotten and there are certainly no hints that, to put it in the words of a French novelist, this “great” war “had risen to an unprecedented level of absurdity, and […] had also been, if one compared, as one could not help doing, the suffering of the private soldiers in the trenches and the profits of the ones who had stayed behind, quite stunningly immoral”.