History and the movies.(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: In "Questions of History" (January-February 2003), Neil McDonald is right to point out that Saving Private Ryan is a bit out of whack with historical reality.

When Steven Spielberg is doing serious, non-Indiana-Jones drama, he nearly always tries a bit too hard. Everything is seriously overdone. Every story point, every incident, is played up like the climax of an old Bette Davis movie.

Saving Private Ryan is far from historically plausible. As it goes on, more and more stuff is rigged to prop up the melodrama. It's a bit more solid than, say, The English Patient, or that seriously dopey episode about the damaged Flying Fortress in Spielberg's Amazing Stories television series. It's a lot less solid than, say, The Cruel Sea, or The Way Ahead, or They Were Expendable, or The Great Locomotive Chase, or Gettysburg, or In Which We Serve.

In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg tries too hard in that early scene where General Marshall reads Lincoln's letter for Mrs Bixby to his staff, and he comes a cropper. "I have been shown in the files of the War Department," Lincoln wrote,

 
   a statement of the Adjutant 
   General that you are the mother 
   of five sons who have died 
   gloriously on the field of battle. 
   I feel how weak and fruitless 
   must be any word of mine 
   which should attempt to beguile 
   you from the grief of a loss so 
   overwhelming. But I cannot 
   refrain from tendering you the 
   consolation that may be found 
   in the thanks of the republic 
   they died to save. I pray that 
   our Heavenly Father may 
   assuage the anguish of your 
   bereavement, and leave you 
   only the cherished memory of 
   the loved and lost, and the 
   solemn pride that must be yours 
   to have laid so costly a sacrifice 
   upon the altar of freedom. 

This is one of the best-known documents in American history. General Marshall seems to know it by heart, although his staff officers all look as if they've never heard of it. Maybe they're dim, or maybe they're just being well disciplined.

Apparently, none of them have ever come across the full story of the Lincoln letter. That's pretty well known, too. It turns up in Facts about the Presidents, by Joseph Nathan Kane. "The reports upon which Lincoln based his consoling letter were inaccurate," Kane says;