David Bounds’ letter (The Tablet, 17 May) is somewhat misleading about the making of the film of the film of the Somme, which I mentioned in my review (“Ghosts of war”, The Tablet, 10 May). He says the sequence of the men going over the top was reconstructed and not genuine. The Imperial War Museum, whose archives hold the film, refer to the fact that “a few [unspecified] scenes were, of necessity, reconstructed of the event”. In 2009 the museum, the National Army Museum and Scotland Yard attested, as a result of scientific analysis, to the fact that little of the film was faked. The Tablet’s own Francine Stock, on the BBC website, talks of “live footage”. Mr Bounds’ point applies much more to the German equivalent, to which I also refer, where action was shot after the battle.
Terry Philpot, Limpsfield Chart, Surrey
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