The latest film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s plea for pacifism written a decade after the First World War, is stunning and horrific. Director Edward Berger depicts both the actual gore and the gored young German minds with a graphic realism which subjects the viewer to an overwhelming and brutal watch. There have been other similarly excellent portrayals of the two World Wars in recent times - 1917 from (loves his cricket) Sam Mendes and Dunkirk from Christopher Nolan - but there is something next level raw and unsettling about Berger’s masterpiece, a filmic vision the Boche soldiers’ hell every bit as traumatising as the one painted by Bosch.
The evocative score by Volker Bertelmann contributes hugely. Towards the, spoiler alert, tragic and traumatic conclusion, there is some gut-melting and beautiful piano minimalism, similar to how you might imagine Kane Williamson would play the instrument. The main motif, though, sounds as if Bertelmann has taken Hans Zimmer’s industrial dystopia for Dune and played it through a speaker full of tasers and corpses. Not a criticism. Against my standard high-minded practice for foreign films, I watched it dubbed into English, but was glad to have done so. Hearing the German soldiers, these children really, speaking English before they were mown down added to Remarque’s original point of that these could be any nationality. Putting aside Germany’s actual culpability for the First World War, when dubbed it makes the viewer wonder, like David Mitchell's Nazi about the Second, who the bad guys are. Not least when at one point their living flesh is sprayed with flame-throwers the way fire is normally sprayed with fire extinguishers.
The film centres, as it happens, on recruits around the same age as Rehan Ahmed, who at 18 in Karachi became England’s youngest ever Test debutant. The trumpet has long been synonymous with going into battle, and Ahmed’s arrival at the top of his mark was greeted with the same instrument blasting out Rehab by Amy Winehouse, a decent musical pun from England’s herald if possibly not quite the most appropriate song, ode to booze as it is, for a Muslim. Still, the Barmy Army in general have been pretty impressive in their embrace of their host country, basically functioning as the provisional wing of the Pakistan tourist board for England’s first tour of the country in 17 years. On the trumpet front, in particular, if you bother to learn Dil Dil Pakistan and play it with gusto to thrill the home fans, you’ve probably got enough cross-cultural credit in the bank to get away with anything.
Anyway, after an opening spell where Ahmed’s shoulder was clearly too nervily tight and his length just too short, he was inevitably brought back on by Stokes and conjured - it is a series of leg spin wizardry - two wickets. Under Bazball, well in this case it’s more about Benball, bowling badly rarely means you’ll have a long rest. It means you’ll soon get a chance to redeem yourself even if you get carted again. Ahmed second time up bowled with a panache, control and aplomb worthy of the earlier splendid scenes when his father - in the city of his birth - was invited into the England huddle to witness at close quarters his son receive his England cap. Ghosts of Crane and Borthwick aside, it should be the first of many. Penny for the thoughts of Matt Parkinson, back home after collecting just one last summer, watching England’s immense faith in a young leg spinner.
To quote Michael Scott, my heart was very full at the moment I watched Ahmed give his post-match interview with Mike Atherton, who is completely terrible at hiding his absolute joy and pride at seeing young cricketers do well for the country - well, any country, to be honest - he commanded at such a young age. Not only because England might finally have a leg spinner of genuine, let’s get carried away, world class ability, but because of, well, just the unrefined youth, promise and niceness of Ahmed. He does interviews the same way he bowls, twinkling and self-confident, and this in a week where the additional struggles faced by Muslim players in England has again been highlighted.
On Twitter there was mention of Ahmed having a net session with Shane Warne five years ago so I put that on when Athers had finished his doe-eyed questions. A genuinely awed Warne tells the 13-year-old Ahmed he’ll be keeping an eye on him and predicts he’ll play first class within two years. Warne was good at making people feel good, but he clearly wasn’t laying on the soft soap here, just using his immense aura and charm to help a fellow wrist spin traveller. It was quite upsetting to watch, in truth.
A while back when it looked as if Twitter might go completely belly up and people were casting around for alternatives, the long-departed Kicca Sport platform came to mind. This was a site where you could supposedly chat directly to sporting celebs in a respectful environment. The launch publicity involved Jonathan Agnew, who later luckily remembered to use the more earthy forum of Twitter DMs to call Jonathan Lieu a c*nt (all friends now), flying his plane over the “beautiful Rutland countryside”. Kicca Sport is dead but its YouTube videos are all still up and offer quite an eclectic selection (scroll down past all the slightly jaundiced looking rugby players). There’s Mark Nicholas - very on brand in a nice way - giddily discussing the number of times he’s seen Springsteen in concert. There’s AB live commentating a net session. Warne is there, too, chiding England for preparing docile pitches to combat Mitchell Johnson in the 2015 Ashes. That time it’s more maudlin than upsetting to watch him, particularly in such an unglamorous setting, sat on a hotel sofa in dank lighting, although not even that can stop the gleam of his smile.
Another video aired this week, with Adam Gilchrist breaking down when discussing Warne and another prematurely departed former team mate, Andrew Symonds, as the Big Bash began. Gilchrist’s relationship with Warne was a particularly special one, not because they were the greatest of friends, but because they weren’t yet still inseparable. On playing fields as in trenches, cast-iron allegiances develop due to circumstance. There were difficulties, barbs and gripes, as acknowledged in Gilchrist’s autobiography. Yet they were bonded by having a relationship that only one other man on earth, Ian Healy, can ever understand and their moments of antipathy towards each other were, ultimately, mere air pellets bouncing off the armour of their iconic partnership.
“Well, you really got me this time. And the hardest part is knowing I’ll survive.” Emmy-Lou Harris wrote this about her feelings of despair at the loss of Gram Parsons. It’s perhaps the most brutal thing about death, that those left behind do find a way to carry on living, however broken. This will be the first Christmas for Warne’s family, his children, without him. The game itself will also be particularly confronted by his loss on Boxing Day when Australia take on South Africa at his own personal amphitheatre of the MCG. A Boxing Day Test without Warne there in some capacity will be a peculiar thing, however much we may have mocked his commentary for focusing as much on pizza toppings as topspinners.
Many of those millions mown down in the trenches of the First World War were simply too young to leave a legacy behind beyond the love of their bereft relatives and the heroism of their sacrifice. More 19-year-olds died than any other age. Warne, though also taken far too soon, was at least granted time to forge his staggering one, and you could see it in the fizz, the spit, the drift, and in the sheer swagger of the English boy he anointed in 2017. The unique allure of leg spin meant it was a fantastic day for English cricket, but for cricket in general it has been a wonderful couple of weeks. In the Second Test, Abrar Ahmed, though at the positively antiquated age of 24, marked his own debut for Pakistan with a superlative display of the same art. He may not have met Warne but in essence there is no leg spinner alive, at any level, who hasn’t. Warne, of German heritage, would surely be immensely proud to see two youthful ripples of his revivalist cricketing zeitgeist making everyone so incredibly happy.