In Flanders Field, a Meditation on War

“The best way to carry out good propaganda,” wrote the late British Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman, “is never to appear to be carrying it out at all.”

Crossman’s words echo through the arched chambers of Ieper’s Cloth Hall in a provocative exhibition that explores the relationship between media and warfare in the 20th century--from the recruiting posters of World War I to the latest digital images from Afghanistan.

Titled “Dead.lines,” the multimedia show explores frontiers between reportage and propaganda.

It confronts the moral dilemmas of those who earn a living providing close-ups of war’s horror, and shows how governments--both democratic and dictatorial--have sought to exploit the mass media that grew up alongside the machinery of war over the past 100 years.

Piet Chielens is the coordinator of Ieper’s award-winning In Flanders Fields Museum, which is dedicated to the battles that reduced this medieval city to dust during World War I.

The inspiration for “Dead.lines” stemmed from the discovery that a third of the museum’s visitors had never met anyone from the 1914-1918 generation.

“We realized that living in this Western European paradise ... we have been spared direct contact with war,” Chielens said in an interview. “What contact we have comes only through the media.”

The exhibition begins in the early 1900s, when photography, film and radio were in their infancy. It draws visitors along a winding path through the iconography of modern conflict that unfolds in stark images and scatter-fire sound.

French posters denounce atrocities by spiked-helmeted German infantry; Robert Capa shows a falling soldier in the Spanish Civil War; Winston Churchill, on the BBC, promises blood, sweat and tears; 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc runs naked from a napalm attack in Vietnam.

The final exhibit is an Associated Press monitor flashing real-time satellite-delivered images from all corners of the world at 21st century speed.

The show illustrates an “incredible link” of continuity running through media coverage of war over the past 100 years, according to Chielens. “War changes technologically, but the real nature of war, the real face of war, does not differ.”

“Dead.lines” shows you a giant poster urging British men to defend the children of Belgium in 1914 as well as a November 2001 front page from Britain’s News of the World tabloid. Its headline, “Why we’re at war,” is placed over a photo of William Larkey cradling an urn of dust from New York’s World Trade Center, where his father died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

There can be few more apt settings for any exhibition dedicated to the story of 20th century warfare than Ieper’s Cloth Hall.

Once the largest secular building in medieval Europe, it was blasted into rubble during one of the most destructive battles of World War I. At the time, Ieper was better known by its French name, Ypres. The vast hall was painstakingly restored to its gothic glories after the war--along with the rest of the devastated city.

All around this westernmost corner of Belgium, the remains of many hundreds of thousands of young men lay under little white crosses, gray stone slabs or unmarked graves still undiscovered beneath the heavy Flemish soil.

World War I provides the starting point for the show with a display of poster art portraying how the Allies demonized German troops and their leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, after the 1914 invasion of neutral Belgium.

Journalistic self-censorship is illustrated by Philip Gibbs, correspondent of London’s Daily Chronicle, whose 1920 description of the war’s “great carving of human flesh” stood in contrast to his patriotic wartime reports from the front line.

The exhibition links a dominant media to each period of 20th century history--graphic art with World War I, film in the years between the wars, radio during World War II, television during the Cold War and the Internet in the most recent conflicts.

Questions about the nature of propaganda are raised by sometimes brutal juxtaposition.

A mock-up of a 1930s movie theater has two screens simultaneously showing Charlie Chaplin’s spoof of Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator” and footage of the real Hitler receiving the adulation of Germans during a Nazi rally.

Minutes later, contrasting images from the Spanish Civil War flicker onto the screens. Extracts from Ernest Hemingway and Dutch Director Joris Ivens’ anti-Fascist documentary, “The Spanish Earth,” are shown side-by-side with film from the nationalist camp denouncing “red atrocities.”

The World War II section bombards visitors with snippets of radio reports within huge cubic tents suspended from the ceiling: Joseph Stalin exhorts Soviet troops; military choirs bellow Nazi marching songs; British radio sends encrypted messages to French resistance fighters; and Vera Lynn croons, “We’ll meet again.”

The exhibition has its heroes, like veteran American reporter Martha Gellhorn, or Tim Page, the British combat photographer whose pictures of the Vietnam War get a wall to themselves.

As it explores the line between propaganda and information, “Dead.lines” asks questions about the role of governments and those who report on wars.

President Franklin Roosevelt saw “The Spanish Earth,” Ivens’ 1937 Hemmingway-narrated documentary, at a White House screening but was not moved by it enough to lift a U.S. ban on exports to Spain where Francisco Franco’s fascists, backed by Nazi Germany, defeated republican forces. In fact, the film earned Ivens a reputation in the U.S. as an anarchist.

Spain’s civil war saw Nazi Germany carrying out the first saturation bombing of a civilian target, destroying the town of Guernica.

“The Spanish Earth” was screened in Ivens’ native Netherlands. However, a scene showing a downed warplane bearing German manufacturing markings, was edited out so neighbor Nazi Germany would not be upset.

A picture of Western photographers crouching around a tiny Somalia refugee baby brings accusations of “war pornography.” New Zealand-born Life magazine photographer George Silk disagrees.

“Perhaps if people got a good look at how wars are fought, they might stop future wars,” he notes.

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“Dead.lines” is on view at the In Flanders Fields Museum until Nov. 17.