Every summer a group of enthusiasts sets out from near Moshav Tzippori in the lower Galilee to follow the route taken by the Frankish army on 2-4 July 1187 when it marched east from le Saforie to face the Ayyubid army under Saladin, and ultimately to be defeated in battle at the Horns of Hattin. The reenactment is carried out by a group known as the Regnum Hierosolymitanum, with participants from Israel Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Cyprus, Moldova and the United States. Seen from afar this colourful army, though somewhat lacking in numbers, makes a picturesque scene in the parched summer landscape, and from close at hand, though one might hear rather more Russian, than medieval French, the efforts at authentic costume and the recreation of medieval crafts and customs makes for a rather spectacular show.
Even for more recent battles we are occasionally required to rely on reenactment. Two of the most famous filmed scenes of battle in the First World War, scenes that are shown over and over, and are probably believed by most viewers to be authentic, are in fact reconstructions. One that proposes to show the landing of Anzac troops on the western shore of the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915, was actually filmed a few month later at Tamarama beach in Sydney. The scene looks realistic enough. There is a beach and a steep rise, there is smoke, there are men running, and there are fallen bodies. It appears to be the genuine article, and though intended to be part of a fictional recruitment film called The Hero of the Dardanelles, this scene has frequently been regarded as actual footage of the Gallipoli landing.
The other is an iconic scene of troops going ‘over the top’ on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The 1 July 1916 was the British army's worst single day, during which it suffered almost 60,000 casualties, including nearly 20,000 deaths. This short scene formed part of a full-length feature film called The Battle of the Somme, a film that for the first time gave British audiences back home a real sense of what was going on just across the channel. In this scene we see a group of soldiers holding their rifles and scaling the sloped trench. Two of the soldiers, apparently hit, slide back down the dirt slope as their comrades go ‘over the top’ and out into no man’s land, a bleak vista of wooden stakes and barbed wire, and into a mist in which they gradually disappear until just one single figure remains.
So moving was this scene, that it has become engrained in our minds with the idea of trench warfare, and has been shown over and over in documentary films about the war, to demonstrate the terror of the moment when the sergeant blew his whistle and thousands of young men put their lives into the hands of fate.* And though few of its viewers are aware of the fact, like the footage of the Gallipoli landing, this dramatic scene is a reconstruction, made later on, in safety, behind the lines.
There are mixed opinions regarding the value of reenactment, the strongest opposition often being raised by academics, historians and archaeologists who sometimes regard it as play-acting and inevitably inauthentic. It is certainly true that a soldier acting out ‘going over the top’ into ‘no-man’s-land’ while in reality safely behind the lines, or a ‘crusader knight’, dressed albeit in realistic and well-researched armour and wielding a realistically replication of a twelfth century sword, but knowing full well that the ‘Muslim warrior’ he is facing has no intention whatsoever of actually causing him any harm, is undergoing a very different experience to that faced by the subject he is reenacting. However, there is undeniably a value in reenactment as a learning tool, in acquainting the participants in the crafts of the past, and above all as a means of engaging the broader public that might otherwise show no interest in events of the past.
*One unforgettable portrayal of 'going over the top' is the final scene of the last episode of the British comedy series, Black Adder. Coming on the tail of farcical humour, it is perhaps one of the most eloquent depictions of the horror of trench warfare and of the absurdity of war in general.
Thanks to Genadiy Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk use of the photograph above.
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