A.A. Milne in the World War (www.royalsignalsmuseum.co.uk) |
The seemingly wistful author of Winnie the Pooh and
other children’s stories was a morose war veteran trying to figure out how to
amuse a lively young son. This bitter-sweet story is the heart of the 2017 film
“Goodbye Christopher Robin,” which appeared recently on cable television. Scenes
of cozy home front life suddenly explode into battlefield mayhem and back to awkward
social scenes, as Milne and fellow trench warfare veterans try to maintain British
composure. Astute film reviewers alerted audiences that this is not a warm and
fuzzy story.
“A. A. Milne fought in the epic Battle of the Somme,
in 1916, when a million men were killed or injured. It was one of the bloodiest
battles in human history. Milne, already a playwright and a novelist, was among
those wounded,” The New Yorker’s Robin Wright noted. “He went home
shell-shocked, with all the haunting symptoms of what is today diagnosed as
post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D.”
Hollywood Reporter reviewer Sheri Linden observed: “When a popped champagne cork or
opening-night spotlight triggers flashbacks, he does his best to maintain a
stiff upper lip.” But Milne’s flashback flinches at home and on walks in the
woods make his preschool-age son, Christopher Robin, who prefers the nickname
Billy, “as watchful and wary as he is hungry for paternal affection … Billy
is an old soul with a knack for empathy, skillfully talking his war-damaged
father out of his occasional panic attacks.”
Father-son adventures of creating playful tales
involving a teddy bear and other stuffed animals romping with a boy named
Christopher Robin evolved, through Milne’s playwriting skills, into a wildly
popular set of books with lively illustrations by E.H. Shepard, an artist who
served as an artillery officer in the war. Billy later resented his father for
turning private moments of childhood glee into glaring fame that triggered
brutal harassment in boarding school.
As the children’s books showered the reclusive author
with fame and fortune, Milne’s wife savaged his plan to write a blockbuster book
denouncing war. “What’d we fight that war for? Nothing’s changed,” he shouts.
“I’ve had enough of making people laugh. I want to make them see!” His wife
retorts: “You know what writing a book against war is like? It’s like writing a
book against Wednesdays.”
Milne’s antiwar book, Peace with Honour, was brushed aside by the massive acclaim for the
children’s stories and Europe’s militaristic marches toward another round of
war. His son bitterly rejected royalties from the Pooh books and insisted on joining
the army in the Second World War. In the end, in a throat-catching scene, Milne
warily greets a battered young veteran who wearily trudges back home.
“The House at Pooh Corner stands in a glade between
two dark shadows – the aftermath of one war that had just finished and the
dread of one coming,” Frank Cottrell Boyce, the film’s screenwriter, wrote in
The Guardian. “No one who fought in the first world war knew it was the first
world war. On the contrary, they had been told that they were fighting the war
that would end all wars. It must have been with the most bitter irony and
failure, then, that Milne’s generation watched their children march away to a war
that they had been told would never happen.”