Original subtitles

World War I has always been seen as a war in black and white.

It was the only way pictures from the front and

scenes recreated for the camera could be filled.

But it was not the reality.

The reality happened in color.

The slaughter.

The innovation.

The shock.

The political upheavals.

Victory.

Defeat.

The fields were green.

The mud of brown.

The flames.

Bright.

Now, with the aid of new computer technology, the black and white of World

War I has been faithfully and with my new attention to detail recast in color.

For the first time, this series will tell the story of

the First World War as it was seen by those who fought it.

World War I was war on a scale never known or imagined before.

Between 1914 and 1918, some 65 million men took up arms.

10 million died in battle.

20 million were irachievably wounded in their minds or their bodies.

Nine decades later, the remaining few who remember, who took part, gather at the

Meningate, part of the Old Walls of Ypres in Belgium.

They survived.

They have never forgotten those who did not.

The many of the men who suffered the worst of the dangers and hardships and terrible

experiences, they never got home, did they?

Their bones are still on the battlefields in many cases.

In this war, the millions who died were

statistics to be recorded by future historians.

What mattered were your friends, the men around you, the

men just along in the trench, the men of your gun crew.

The five of us were our little group together, and that's

what worried me most when three, four, and five were killed.

All I can remember is their nicknames, Baldi, Alan, Jack, and Jill.

That's all I can remember.

I wish I could.

World War I was truly a world war, fought from

the shores of America to the shores of Asia.

It was a clash of great empires which destroyed the old and ushered in the new.

Dynasties were shattered, a royal family

murdered and replaced by revolutionary terror.

It was a war that changed the nature of war itself,

a dreaded new expression appears, going over the top.

I always tell the prayer, you know that someone loves you so laugh at me.

But I owe to us God to let me fight like a man and bring back safe and sound.

If anyone tells you he went over the top and he wasn't scared, he's a damn liar.

This brutal war destroyed the very land itself.

Not a tree stands, but a square foot of surface has escaped mutilation.

There's nothing but the mud and the gaping shell house.

And in the bottom of many, the bodies of the dead.

There were fearful weapons, massive mines.

Artillery barrages unlike anything seen before.

I marvel myself sometimes how human nerves can stand the strain of our existence.

Day after day, night after night, hour after hour.

A heavy shell falling every few minutes within a few yards of you.

Half stunning you with the crash of the explosion.

Shrapnel on the ballads were terrible, terrible.

Not anybody ever provided, I don't know.

It was not just the western front.

To the east, Russian soldiers, killed in their millions,

were the first to question the point of it all.

What are we doing in this war?

Several hundred men have already passed through my platoon alone, and at least one

half of them have ended up on the fields of battle, either killed or wounded.

What will they get at the end of the war?

A discontent would fuel the conditions for a revolution that shook the world.

This is no longer a capital, it is a sayspit.

No one works, the streets are filthy.

There are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyard.

It hurts me to say how bad things have become.

There was a new theatre of war.

It was every bit as murderous as the trenches below.

People were being killed every day.

My best friend was there, wasn't he?

He wasn't there the next day at lunch.

You were alone.

You fought alone and died alone.

I kissed my mother.

I cleared everything right up and I said goodbye mum.

I don't think I shall ever see you again.

There was dazzling technological innovation.

Planes which took off from a platform on a ship's guns.

The aircraft carrier came into being.

The first thing we had to do was to learn to fly on and off the fall day.

I remember the captain said, you may as well

take a revolver and blow your brains out.

There were huge battleships, but curiously only one full-scale clash of fleets.

Instead, a stealthy new weapon, the submarine, or U-boat as the Germans

called it, was used for the first time on a

large scale, bringing horrifying destruction.

Above all, it was the cost in human life that remained so staggering.

And it's the names of the battlefields that have stuck in the memory.

Deep, they're done, a psalm, a passion-dale.

Those who fought in these places witnessed suffering like no other before.

We came across this coalition, but he was ripped

from his shoulder to his waist with shrapnel.

As he decided on the grouted, the sight of him in a

pool of blood, and as we got to him, he said, shoot me.

Before we could shoot him, 30 seconds, he was dead.

And the last word he altered was mother.

And that haunted me all my life, mother.

Finally, in November 1918, on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th month,

the guns fell silent.

Everything stopped, and there was what I can

only call as a deadly hush over everything.

And we all stopped, looked at one another because we suddenly realised that we had

no objective, nothing to look forward to do.

By the end, human beings had undergone the most devastating experience in history.

And within it, one individual decision could change a life.

As that German came towards me, and I can't kill him.

I must kill him.

I can remember.

When I joined the army, I swore I would serve my kicking country.

And by some measure another, I flashed my mind.

When Moses came down off both sides, I had a sixth commandment he brought down.

I shall not kill him.

And I can't kill him.

I had both faith seconds to make my mind stop.

I shot him above the ankle, and above the knee, I brought him down.

I didn't kill him.

They shall grow not old as we that are left to grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

And I very often wonder whether the sacrifices that we made are worthwhile.

That is, how did the years condemn us?

How did it ever come to this?

A global war of millions, and yet its beginnings seemed just a pinprick.

An assassin's bullet in a faraway place, which would change the world.

The 28th of June 1914, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

A bomb is thrown at a car.

It misses the occupants, the heir to the Austrian

throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

The royal couple continue their official visit.

A few hours later, the car is stopped again.

This time a pistol is fired.

The Austrian Crown Prince and Princess Sophie are murdered.

The assassin is reported to be a member of a terrorist

organization backed by the government of neighboring Serbia.

Austria mourns and determines to punish the Serbs.

Though few realize it, the countdown to war has begun.

When Sarajevo happened, people didn't bother too much and

things like that were always happening in the Balkans.

It was pretty shocking, but after all, in the British perspective, they were all

sort of picturesque savages with great glittery epilates

and unpronounceable names, and no one bothered too much.

The assassination in Sarajevo seemed just a

small interruption to Great Britain's Golden Age.

In 1897, Queen Victoria had celebrated her diamond jubilee.

Dear old Queen, what a cheer they gave her.

I had an overpowering emotion of thankfulness and satisfaction that I,

with husband and sons, had been present at this great, this tremendous occasion.

Victoria's empire covered one-sixth of the world.

The British saw themselves as the masters abroad

and a peaceful, commercial nation at home.

In 1901, Queen Victoria died, the end of an era.

London is almost a city of the dead.

It is as if a magician's hand had suddenly arrested the swift

vitality that courses through the veins of the great city.

The third of the soldiers' feet, the music of Chopin's funeral march,

and third of the drums.

It is as though everyone in England had lost their father and their mother.

But British supremacy still seemed assured.

Only one apparently small threat loomed over the Pax Britannica.

Germany.

A United Nations since only 1871, it was the rising

force of Europe ruled by the ambitious Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Ever since he'd become emperor in 1888, the Kaiser had been determined to use

Germany's new industrial muscle to create an overseas empire.

To first win and then protect that empire, he needed to build a navy.

The Kaiser's ambitions worried the British, and the two nations began to

compete with each other in a naval arms race.

In 1908, in an interview with the daily telegraph newspaper, the Kaiser claimed he

was simply imitating the other imperial powers.

Germany is a young and growing empire.

He has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the

legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds.

Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce.

Germany's emergence had reshaped the European map.

Germany formed an alliance with the much older empire of Austria-Hungary.

Together these central powers now dominated the heart of Europe.

But Austria's Habsburg dynasty was rotting from

within, even members of the royal family knew it.

The sense of self-importance, which has always pervaded the Habsburgs,

wears heavily over Austria and is the cause of its moral downfall.

Opposing Germany and Austria-Hungary was the so-called Chippellantant of Britain,

France and Russia.

France had been racked by revolutions and

defeated by the Prussians in the War of 1870.

But Paris remained the most glamorous city on Earth.

I shall ever remember it as a marvellous city where life is well worth living for

four or five months every year, just to improve one's mind in an

unrivaled, intellectual and artistic atmosphere.

Russia was ruled over by the autocratic emperor, Tsar Nicholas II.

The Russians had been defeated by Japan in the War of 1904 and 5, and this had

provoked the first unsuccessful attempt at revolution.

The bitterness of many Russians was summed up in a workers' petition to the Tsar.

We have become beggars.

We have been oppressed.

We are not recognized as human beings.

We are treated as slaves.

We have no strength at all, O sovereign.

We are approaching that terrible moment when death is

better than the continuance of intolerable suffering.

But six years later, the Tsar and his appointed

leaders believed the nation was back on track.

Every year of peace fortifies Russia, not only from the military and naval point

of view, but also from the economic and financial.

By 1914, though the demands to curtail the Tsar's power were becoming louder,

Russia was as strong as it had ever been.

While Russia stood for the old, across the Atlantic stood the new, America.

It was democratic, brash, optimistic and thousands

of miles from the disputes that plagued Europe.

In his inaugural speech of 1905, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt,

had laid out his vision of a blessed nation.

My fellow citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours.

To us as a people, it has been granted to lay the

foundations of our national life in a new continent.

We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties,

which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization.

In 1914, America was a world away from the conflict that was about to engulf Europe.

On July the 28th, exactly one month after the assassination of Crown Prince

Ferdinand by, as the Austrians claimed, Serbian

nationalists, Austria declared war on Serbia in revenge.

Austrians were jubilant, but Europe's complex set of

alliances would trigger an unstoppable catastrophe.

There was immediate feeling that something was really going to

happen, which would cause all the pillars of Europe to rock.

The whole business of the European relationships began to come into play,

the fact that Russia was aligned to France.

That we were aligned to France, that Germany was aligned to Austria-Hungary.

And these relationships, far from halting the move to war, in

fact, really in a sense almost conditioned the move to war.

As Austrian troops moved into Serbia, the Germans warned Russia that if it went

to war in support of the Serbs, Germany would go to war against the Russians.

On the 30th of July, Austrian guns began to bombard the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

The Serbs turned to Russia for help.

The Russians were the protectors of the Serbs, and indeed the Slavic people in the

Balkans, and they could not stand on the

sidelines when Austria was threatening Serbia.

And so Russia was drawn into the international crisis.

Like the Austrians, Russian soldiers could hardly wait to fight.

The spirit of the soldiers is excellent.

They are animated by a firm belief in the righteousness in honor of their cause,

and so there is no ground for nervousness or unease.

Germany now declared war on Russia, but it had other motives.

The aggression had led to it being boxed in by the alliance between Russia,

France and Britain.

War had come at the right time.

People began thinking of what might be ahead.

On the streets, reservists could be seen everywhere.

It seemed as if people were ready to fight the world at the drop of a hat.

I wondered whether this outward show of martial spirit

was like whistling in the dark or whether it was genuine.

Nobody really could imagine what a real war would bring us.

Provoked by Germany, France now mobilized its troops.

The French commander-in-chief, Joseph Joff, drilled his men into order.

But some felt only confusion.

War.

Everyone knows it.

Everyone says so.

It would be madness not to believe it.

War.

The Great European War.

No, it can't be true.

German troops headed for the border with Belgium.

Germany's strategists had concluded that a swift move through Belgium provided the

softest route to break into France and capture Paris.

On August the 3rd, Bank Holiday Monday, the British looked on in disbelief.

This morning at breakfast, we later will protect

her interests in the treaty at the end of the war.

Belgium has indignantly refused, and the King of

the Belgians has appealed to King George for aid.

There was a huge tide of sympathy for the Belgians within Britain.

And a mass of people who said, for God's sake, are

we going to stand by and not do the decent thing?

On August the 4th, the German army marched into Belgium.

At last, I have got my orders.

Dear mother, please try to keep constantly before your mind what I have realized.

If at this time we think of ourselves and of

those that belong to us, we shall be petty.

We must have a broad outlook and think of our nation, our Fatherland, of God.

At midnight on August the 4th, Britain declared war on Germany.

By now, all the great nations of Europe had been sucked into the conflict.

But the established view was that it would all be over by Christmas.

The situation is absolutely unparalleled in the history of the world.

It is estimated that when the war begins, 40

millions of men were being engaged in the conflict.

I don't think Britain really had a choice.

They were a superpower.

They were the superpower of Europe.

If there was going to be a big showdown in Europe, surely they had to be part of it.

They couldn't just sit there and watch Europe implode.

There was an atmosphere then of almost jubilation.

Now we are going to fight and do something useful.

We didn't realize what war really involved.

They were enemies with England.

And that was all that was interesting to the boy of that age.

And he was going to fight for England.

The German army cut a sway through Belgium.

On August the 14th, the Germans entered the capital, Brussels.

As civilians tried to resist, the German army took its revenge.

In one instance, executing 600 innocent Belgians.

Some German soldiers began to fear what they had unleashed.

To see those frightened men, women and children was a really terrible sight.

By now the German soldier was frightened too, expecting to be shot from all sides.

Ordinary Belgians had to flee.

There are families of seven, eight children watching along the road.

The railway is their only hope.

The youngsters don't understand.

The others ask where they will be taken.

It's an indescribable mess.

As the Germans marched on, Britain was about to

fight its first major European war for 99 years.

For over 100 years, ever since the Battle of

Trafalgar, Britain's navy had dominated the sea.

In July 1914, it lined up at Spithead off the

Isle of Wight, for review by King George V.

It was an impressive sight, but Britain's army had

always been seen as much less important than the navy.

And it was far smaller than its continental rivals.

Now, in the autumn of 1914, the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the people

of Britain and its empire, they were facing the greatest emergency in their history.

Every man and woman must do their duty.

I remember, in particular, one's coffee straightment in Paul Kilts.

And it was absolutely thrilling to see a Scottish

restaurant on the march to the backpipes.

And there's something about the way the kilts were all moving together,

which thrilled me and all of us.

Lord Kitchener of Cartoon was put in charge of raising a volunteer army,

initially of 100,000 men.

By the end of 1914, a million had joined up.

I enlisted as a volunteer in 1914, September the 2nd, myself, and about 30 of

my colleagues at Ibroke were joined on the march.

As the new young soldiers left for the front from all over the Empire,

their families left behind could only wait and hope.

Now, dearest Mav, keep your heart up and trust in Providence.

It is a great and glorious thing to be going to fight for England.

The greatest thing you can do for me is to keep cheerful and

don't forget to write often and tell me all the scraps of news.

Husbands and wives dreaded the moment of partying.

I sit and stare stupidly at his luggage by the wall.

Then he takes a book out of his pocket.

You see, your Shakespeare sonnets are already where they always will be.

Shall I read you some?

His face is grey at his mouth trembles, but his voice is quiet and steady.

And soon I slip to the floor and sit between his knees,

and while he reads his handfalls over my shoulder.

So, talking and crying and loving in each other's arms, we fall asleep.

The British Expeditionary Force was sent to Belgium to block the advancing German army.

On the 23rd of August, it literally collided with the Germans at the town of Mons.

Their first day of action astonished them.

They crumpled up, moaned down as quickly as I tell it.

Their reinforcing waves, coming on bravely and steadily, to

fall over as they reached the front line of Selena wounded.

Our rapid fire was so appalling, even to us.

Such tactics amazed us.

And after the first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they

were hit, gave us a great sense of power and of pleasure.

It was all so easy.

Though the British held their ground and inflicted huge casualties at Mons,

French forces along the line were pushed back

and the Allies forced into a general retreat.

The German army marched on, driving through Belgium and into France.

At the same time, along the German-French border to the southeast, the French army

had gone on the attack in an attempt to advance into German territory.

It became known as the Battle of the Frontiers.

The pre-and-I riveted our gaze on the lofty line of hills to the east,

which stood between us and destiny.

Yonder were others like ourselves.

Men who would kill us if we did not kill them.

French soldiers marched head-on into German guns.

All around us, high explosive and shrapnel shell of every caliber kept bursting and

strewing the position with bullets and splinters.

Death seemed inevitable.

As the French army was repelled, the Germans in turn went on the offensive.

The Battle of the Frontiers turned into a French disaster.

The French lost something like 200,000 men in the first month of the war alone.

And this is one of the great images of the old French army, attacking in colorful

uniforms, officers wearing white gloves and they were

massacred as they came up against the rifles and machine guns.

The defending Germans.

As thousands of French were led into captivity, German

soldiers swiftly advanced deeper and deeper into France.

Paris was in their sights.

By early September, they were crossing the River

Marne, just 30 miles east of the French capital.

The French commander-in-chief, General Joff, received a desperate appeal

from the military governor of Paris, General Galieni.

Our artillery is old-fashioned.

Ammunition is lacking.

The troops are insufficient and pouring quality.

Our capacity for resistance is small.

Galieni then did something extraordinary.

Short of proper military transport, he commandeered all of Paris' taxis to

carry his troops to the front line and join Joffre's armies.

Joffre now unleashed a French and British

counter-attack which stunned the German army.

We had the Germans on the run.

Our tails were up now, and we were different men, veterans in a way.

A good many of us had fought three battles at the age of 20.

The battle of the Marne was the turning point of the first year of the war.

The German advance was stopped in its tracks.

Germany's commanders knew it was a crushing blow.

The German offensive on the western front has been wrecked.

The miracle of the Marne has saved France.

Why it was called a miracle was that it was so well disguised, so well delivered,

that the Germans were taken entirely by surprise.

Suddenly, all their plans, all their ambitions were shattered.

And in fact, at that moment, the war really became a war that was destined to run.

For a very long time.

At the same time, on the eastern front, on the other side of Germany, these first

weeks of the war had seen fast-moving waves of attack and counter-attack,

involving Germany, its ally Austria.

It had begun with the Austrian invasion of Serbia, which

had triggered the outbreak of war in the first place.

It had not been the smooth operation the Austrians had hoped for.

The Austrians, when they invaded Serbia, were full of a mood of, let's punish these

wretched Balkan monkeys, and we'll show them what the army of a great power is worth.

And they forgot that the Balkan monkeys had been fighting for quite a time and

were much more experienced than the poor old Austrians were.

They hadn't really fought a war at all since a very little one in Bosnia,

a generation before.

So they maneuver rather pretentiously when

they attack Serbia and got very bloody noses.

Within six weeks, the Serbs drove the Austrians out of Serbia.

At this time, the other half of Austria's army was also in action, engaged in a

savage fight with Austria and Germany's far more significant enemy.

Russia.

When war broke out, the Russian army was the strongest regular force in Europe,

with nearly one and a half million troops.

But despite the modern-looking armored cars proudly

displayed by the Zars commanders, his army was cumbersome.

One British observer wrote that it seemed rather like...

a heavyweight muscle-bound prize fighter who, because of his enormous bulk,

lacked activity and quickness, and would therefore be at the mercy of a

lighter but more wiry and intelligent opponent.

But the Russian army surprised everyone by quickly advancing 150 miles into Austria,

to the shock of Austrian soldiers.

We were thunderstruck that the Russians had penetrated so deeply, but the

despondency which followed this startling revelation was quickly replaced by the

intense excitement of meeting the enemy so soon.

Fritz Chrysler quickly saw action.

A man about 20 yards to the right of my company leapt into the air with an

agonizing cry and fell in a heap mortally wounded.

Then, I suddenly felt a gust of cold wind strike my cheek as a big shell fragment

came holding through the air, plowing the ground viciously as it struck.

We lay on the ground, panting and exhausted.

My heart almost bursting with exertion.

In the face of the Russian onslaught, the Austrians lost 350,000, dead,

wounded or taken prisoner.

At the same time to the North, the Russians were also invading Eastern Germany.

The German commanders, Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorf,

gathered their forces to resist the Russian advance.

On August the 26th, the Russian and German armies collided

at what would become known as the Battle of Tannenberg.

An English eyewitness described the unprecedented scale of the fighting.

The front of this terrific battle was very extensive,

and the Russians claimed to have 3 million men in action.

Close fighting is more often and more extensively resorted

to than ever it has been previously, even in the open field.

Tannenberg was a famous victory for Germany.

Its commanders celebrated.

One of the most brilliant battles in the history of the world had been fought.

The battle was a glorious triumph for every officer and man and the whole country.

Germany and Austria-Hungary rejoiced.

The world was silent.

Nearly 100,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner.

50,000 more were killed or wounded.

Within weeks, Germany had repelled the Russian invasion.

Now it was determined to try again for a breakthrough in the West.

On October 19th, 1914, the Germans attacked British

and French forces at the town of Ypres in Belgium.

The first battle of Ypres was in many ways the defining

moment of the conflict on the Western Front in 1914.

It was the last spasm of mobile warfare, the last

real opportunity for the Germans to break through.

A great grey mass of humanity was charging.

Running for all, God would let them.

Straight onto us, not 50 yards off.

One saw a great mass of Germans quiver.

I have never shot so much in such a short time.

The three weeks of this first battle of Ypres

brought a new and awful scale of slaughter.

On our front we appear to have lost thousands, killed, wounded or captured.

And what have we to show for it?

One trench.

What a waste of life.

Not only life, but young life.

Ypres defined the war on the Western Front for the next three and a half years.

A stalemate fought from trenches and dominated by death and discomfort.

At that particular time, there was no drainage system in the trenches,

so that most of the time the trenches were leading deep up to your thighs,

slapping them out in water and mud.

The trenches begin to look gloomy now, with

the dripping of rain and darkness coming on.

Nice, scuttle over the path as I go to my rounds.

And a rat pops over a sandbag on top of a parapet.

Work begins again at stand-down.

There are more centuries, a party for water, a working

party to improve the parapet and wire and so on.

Several of our men were awakened to find a rat

snuggling down under the blanket alongside them.

There are millions.

Some are huge fellows, nearly as big as cats.

You had to stretch whatever rest you could from purely social.

And only to find their starving rats running over you, annoying at your equipment.

Those blasted lice keep quiet if you're nearly frozen.

As soon as you warm up, they start to bite like the devil.

You were ushered all over.

The time fix used to feed all the blood.

You perhaps turn your vest inside out to get rid of it.

Well, at the next morning, you would be just as nosy as ever, because the

excellate ate and latched out during the night.

So just as nosy as ever, you might just as well save your time.

One sees things from a very different standpoint out here.

The seeming uselessness of it.

Day after day in the trenches with great exposure and very little really happening.

Of course, occasional bombardments.

And it is wonderful what men can put up with.

There is little sleep for the officer.

There is a continual round of duty, continually on the watch for any signs of attack.

As autumn 1914 turned to winter, to the men on the front

line, the early promises of a quick war had all but faded.

You don't know how boring and nerve-wracking this trench business is,

and how long off the end of the war seems.

It would appear that it has to go on until the Germans are quite exhausted,

which might take some little time.

Well, Flume, this is a dreadful war.

And now they started using grenades and bombs with great frequency.

It's a little worse than before.

Some of the lines were only 25 yards apart and are full of water and mud.

It's awfully cold and wet too.

And I'm sure that none of the 10 million or so

combatants would mind if peace were declared tomorrow.

At Christmas 1914, such thoughts of peace led to

one of the most remarkable incidents of the war.

In some parts of the line, soldiers on each side

put down their guns and met in no man's land.

And there in the searchlight they stood, Englishmen and German, chatting and

smoking cigarettes together midway between the lines.

A rousing cheer went up from friend and foe alike.

The group was too far away for me to hear what

was said, but presently we heard a cheery.

Good night and merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all, with which the

parties returned to their respective trenches.

After this we remained the whole night through, singing with the enemy,

song for song.

Both sides high commands would ensure that such fraternizing never happened again.

The soldiers who had rushed to war were beginning

to realize what their leaders had let them in for.

For those days, your brave, what should I say,

wasn't he fell up to death to realize what war was.

And everybody said it'll be over by Christmas.

When Christmas came, there wasn't.