What Goes Around...

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2020)

So many heartfelt reviews here. I want to focus on what delighted me most about this beautifully-shaped tale of a horrible war. English lit lovers take note!
The story opens in a lush April meadow where young Corporal Schofield blissfully dozes amid red poppy flowers, calling to mind an iconic WWI poem
which begins:
"In Flanders fields the poppies grow/
Between the crosses, row on row/
That mark our place, and in the sky/
The larks, still bravely singing, fly/
Scarce heard amid the guns below./
We are the Dead. Short days ago/
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset,/
Loved and were loved, and now we lie/
In Flanders fields."
Corporal Schofield, so pale and reedy, seems doomed beside his friend Corporal Bates, who looks much more vivid, alert and capable of pushing forward into their uncertain future. Later on, for instance, the two young men walk through a cherry orchard that's been deliberately destroyed by the retreating enemy: Bates confidently observes that the orchard can be restored with proper care and grow even better than before.
Soon after this scene, we encounter a war-battered officer, who quotes a popular verse from Rudyard Kipling's much-loved 1888 work "The Winners:"
"A friend in a pinch is a friend indeed,
But a fool to wait for the laggard behind
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne
He travels fastest who travels alone."
One corporal falls by the wayside, the other proceeds alone. Does the survivor reach his goal unassisted? The movie's closing moments find us in another spring meadow beneath a ravaged but still living tree. What the corporal takes out of his pocket is a resounding answer to Kipling's poem and a message of hope.
PS: In response to remarks that no Africans fought in WWI and the appearance of black soldiers in some scenes is "too PC." Britain, France, Belgium and Germany all had African colonies at the war's outbreak, and those colonies sent support troops. One million soldiers from 50 countries are buried in Flanders Field, which lies across southern Belgium and NW France. The US didn't enter the war until near the end, but segregated black American troops were among our contribution. After the Armistice, some black soldiers stayed in Europe rather than return to the US, where Jim Crow law reigned. Race riots broke out in northern US cities when returning black vets pushed back against the outrageous racist treatment that black Americans had taken for granted before WW I.