I recall the Brits had a special project interviewing WWI survivors before it was too late to lose their stories forever.
>They even had a mouth reader and injected the words into the documentary.
It went beyond that. They looked at the unit patches and insignia and went and got people for the voiceovers from that part of Great Britain, so they’d have the right accent. The attention to detail was incredible. And since Tolkien was mentioned earlier, this attention was in part made possible by all the money Peter Jackson made from Lord of the Rings.
I love the part in the Peter Jackson interview at the end when he’s talking about getting the sound for the artillery battery scenes, so they put a microphone on HIS piece of artillery “that one has”, and worked the breech. LOL
The thing I got from watching They Shall Not Grow Old, was how those men actually looked forward to fighting. Life for the working class at that time was so monotonous and dreary that they welcomed any diversion from it. War was the “great adventure”.