War is always ugly. Lucky then that for the most part, humankind has historically been spared the pictures.
Overwhelming, unceasing scenes of massacre such as those of the current Gaza and Ukraine conflicts appearing in our homes and now on our phones were not available to ordinary citizens during the biggest of all 20th-century wars - WWI and WWII.
Pathé News, which started in 1896 with silent news films, was the main producer of newsreels from the various battlefields. Pathé also made short and long cine documentaries of world events.
Even after TV arrived in the 1960s, bringing news into our homes, seeing the Pathé newsreels (named after French founder Charles Pathé) was one of the welcome attractions of going to the cinema in Trinidad, since it was where most people gleaned their pictorial knowledge of the world and the people inhabiting it.
An important part of waging war is the propaganda element. War is never popular and winning support is critical, so how those men and women report and for which network is also important.
The news of the mounting number of deaths of journalists in the Gaza war is disturbing, since it seems they are being targeted, which is a new departure. Once upon a time the war correspondent was almost deified. Their well crafted and presented pieces on audiotape or on camera were highly prized.
The role requires great intelligence, self-control, empathy and a keen sense of independence despite being embedded with the fighting forces. It is not surprising that the silver-tongued Winston Churchill was a war correspondent in the 1890s, and so were the world-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
Stories have always been part of the reality of violent conflict. They once came as long, recited tales of victory and defeat of the enemy, battles gaining legendary status as the storytellers mythologised their heroes. Then the stories appeared as great literary works such as Caesar's Gallic Wars, the Odyssey, and the Iliad. Over millennia they evolved into latter-day newspaper and magazine reports.
Photography in war really grew with the Crimean War of the mid-1880s to become commonplace and a major and powerful source of information. All one needed was a single picture to tell an irrefutable story, but the start of modern photojournalism, in which written accounts are married to photographs, occurred only in the 1920s.
Another form of war coverage was, and remains, the painting, and perhaps the most iconic and influential evocation of war's horrors is Picasso's Guernica. The 25-foot-long canvas captures the nullifying effect upon human beings, the devastation and danger of war. In 1937 the Nazis carried out the first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population on the Basque town of Guernica in support of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, which segued into WWII and four decades of dictatorship in Spain. The painting, not actually set in Guernica, has come to symbolise anti-war protest, its political heft augmented by Picasso banning its showi
