main characters. . . (Rattigan 136).
The era of World War I is detailed by Paul Fussell, who notes that this was a very literary war because of the number of writers who fought in it and then recalled their experiences later in their writings. He also finds that reading was a major preoccupation among officers and enlisted men in this war, and the preeminence of British culture was more or less assumed by all. After the war, many tried to capture their experience, and yet they also found that they could not do so adequately:
Whatever the cause, the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war (Fussell 170).
The film of Gallipoli is able to show the horrors of trench warfare more directly than any novel or written account could, and another issue captured well by the film is the way the British tended to look down on members of their colonies, even those who, like them, spoke English and were in many cases transplanted Britons. The regiment from Australia is sacrificed unnecessarily in the battle. The Australians themselves lived by a myth which was also prevalent in England, and that was that warfare leveled the social classes:
The workers and the landowners--the representatives of the extremes of social strata--are revealed to share a common image: Australia's egalitarian myth. Archy and Frank, despite social differences, run against each other,
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