Blackadder thirty-five miles from the front, where he is aided and abetted by his assistant, Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny), pencil-pusher supreme and Blackadder's nemesis, whose name is played on for maximum comedic value. The series' tone is somewhat darker than the other "Blackadder"s; it details the deprivations of trench warfare as well as the incompetence and life-wasting strategies of the top brass. For example, Baldrick is reduced to making coffee from mud and cooking rats, while General Melchett hatches a plan for the troops to walk very slowly toward the German lines, because "it'll be the last thing Fritz will
Lions led by donkeys Donkeys" The musical "Oh, What a Lovely War!" (1963) and the comedy television series "Blackadder Goes Forth" (1989) are two well-known works of popular culture, depicting the war as a matter of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of "Blackadder") lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque's novel (and subsequent film) "All Quiet on the Western Front", which have been criticised by revisionists such as Brian Bond for having given rise to what he considered the myth and conventional