So they’re at grandmother’s house?
This discussion, while relevant and interesting, ignores the much bigger hole of how the Germans cut the telegraph lines in the first place. Advancing armies can cut lines, retreating ones can’t. Even if by some miracle this was accomplished by a sabotage or bombing mission it would be repaired within the hour, if not sooner.
In WWI, German communication wires were 3mm multi strand bundles, with the signal and ground wires insulated and bound into a single line. UK was still using a pair of separate 20-ga solid copper wires. The two were completely incompatible. Further, the Germans were in the habit of recovering their wire upon withdrawal for later use, and so there would be nothing left behind for the allies to use in the event they were able to retrofit their hardware to be compatible with the German stuff.
I’m not sure if there is a difference between “plot hole” and “weak, hard-to-believe premise”, but this one was definitely a weak premise.
I’m not the most critical person, but as soon as the two guys got their mission and were told “he who moves fastest moves alone” or something, I was kind of getting confused. Wait, what? Alone? Just the two of them? Tons of mens’ lives are on the line and these two guys are sending the message? Insane.
I enjoyed the movie after that, but it was a hurdle to overcome.
Which would be doubly true if the retreat was a feint, and not the result of a genuine rout.
No, in the real WWI, the Germans really did withdraw to a better-defended line many kilometres behind the one they had been holding. At least this part of the movie was inspired by historical events.
Let me rephrase… To disrupt the wire signal communications of the Allied command the Germans had to cut the Allied wire. Which is behind the Allied line. Defended by Allied soldiers, from which the Germans are moving away.
Edit: Regarding repairs, they are repairing their own system, with their own surplus.
I haven’t (yet) seen the movie, but I don’t see the problem here. As I understand it, the battalion in question is advancing on German soldiers that they believe to be retreating. However, the Germans are actually drawing the Allies into a trap. They have not actually withdrawn to the extent that the advancing battalion believes.
Now, the advancing battalion is stringing telegraph wire behind them as they advance so that they can maintain contact with units behind them. However, the Germans are still present in the ground covered, so it doesn’t seem like a stretch that they would cut the wires. This would be especially important to the Germans if they believed that the wires might carry news of the trap they are about to spring. Don’t the messengers encounter various German units as they journey to their destination? Seems those Germans are there to prevent messages from going through by either wire or foot.
What a world. Today, guys (and gals) in Nevada can bring down a world of hurt on people on the other side of the world and still go home at the end of their shift. In 1917, they couldn’t even tell a unit of a few kilometers away to watch out!
Again, I haven’t seen this film yet, but was there an artillery barrage by any chance? In WWI, artillery was routinely used to cut both telegraph lines and barbed wire.
Given Speckled Jim’s unfortunate demise at the hands of the Flanders Pigeon Murderer, this would likely have been Plan B.
Here’s something else I couldn’t understand. Why shoot off the flair gun? The dispatch officer gives them a flair gun and tells them not to lose it. Or throw it back to them in the trench afterwards. ( I think he was joking) I’m guessing so they could know the two had reached the German trench?
But why? So they would know to send out another two guys if the Germans were still there?
Wouldn’t the flair gun tip off any surrounding Germans if they were worried about that? Why shoot off the flair gun at all?
Flare. Flare. Flare. Flare.
The point of the flare was to signal they’d got through the barbed wire and reached the former German trenches.
The point of which was to confirm that the Germans weren’t there any more. Which is extremely useful and important information.
Incidentally I was also wondering whether it was possible to fire messages using artillery shells.
From Wiki I found this:
Could something like this have been used? I suppose there is a danger that it could have fallen on German territory but in this case I don’t think that would have mattered so much. It was much more important to alert the British troops not to attack than to keep the message secret. If they lobbed enough “carrier shells” surely they could have gotten the message through and I would imagine it would be a lot easier to arrange than finding an airplane.
Well, maybe they could leave a message at grandma’s house.
Thanks. For someone who hasn’t watched the movie, what you say makes a lot of sense, and explains to my satisfaction yet another plot point I had been wondering about.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think carrier pigeons work like that. The pigeons can find their home over long distances, but they can’t be instructed to send a message anywhere else. It’s just vaguely possible that the British were breeding homing pigeons in the trenches, and if the advancing battalion took a pigeon with them, it would be able to send a message back to the trenches. But a pigeon released from the trenches wouldn’t be able to fly orders to the battalion at its new position.
I’m pretty sure the Allied general who issues the order to the two soldiers says something to the effect of “Before retreating the Germans cut our lines”, implying this isn’t some field wire across no man’s land the advancing battalion laid out, but the actual field communications behind the Allied trench system. I’d have to watch again to be certain though.
They encounter some enemy soldiers, yes. On screen we see very few. That is a standard delaying tactic to achieve a successful withdrawal by the Germans. There’s not enough actual information on the military situation given in the movie to understand the overall tactical situation (nor was that required for the film they wanted to make).
I see you don’t like to talk about my flair.
I think the most likely explanation for why they sent two runners is because radios weren’t in common use at that point, jeeps hadn’t been invented yet, the telegram/phone wires had been cut, and in all likelihood, any air assets weren’t in the chain of command of the general Colin Firth plays in the movie. So he works with what he has- runners.
The thing is that it’s only a crazy adventure from the perspective of the two runners; to the General, sending runners is probably extremely commonplace. They’re probably just two of any number of runners he’s sent off at various times when the wires get cut by artillery, marauding Germans, etc…
I haven’t seen the movie. The premise based on TV ads/coming attractions was so unbelievable that it turned me off completely.
A couple of soldiers are sent by HQ on an urgent mission to prevent a few hundred (or however many) troops from being wiped out? Really?
High Allied command had a long-established pattern of conducting and prolonging hopeless offensives in which tens of thousands of men died. They would hardly have cared about a much smaller number being sacrificed unnecessarily.