On This Day, 11 June 1917

Birmingham Mail

Monday 11 June 1917

BATTLE OF ARRAS FILM

The cinema is providing a wonderful pictorial record of the war which will bring to present and future generations faithful impressions of its incidents and of the bearing of the men taking part in it. To the first official collection of pictures and to those showing the battle of the Somme there is now added a long film depicting the German retreat and the battle of Arras. These latest, exhibited privately at the Picture House, Birmingham, this morning, are not so intensely interesting as the previous pictures-or is it that, even in such viral events, the imagination becomes dulled and the capacity for wonder exhausted? They give a wonderful impression of the destruction wrought in Arras, Monchy, and other places by the artistry duel and the retreating Hun, of the road craters big enough to drop Birmingham Town Hall into, which he blew up to impede the advance of our Army, of the devastated orchards and shattered villages, of the resource by which our military engineers overcame the obstacles in their way. But they did not help one to realise any more clearly……and they gave very little general idea of the topography of the country over which the battle was fought.