Original subtitles

Midsummer, 1915.

The war was almost a year old.

A visible thing.

A landscape halfway to desolation.

It stretched from the flats of Flanders,

across the wide plains of northern France

to the mountains of the Vosges and the Swiss frontier,

then through Italy and across Serbia,

along the edge of the Gallipoli peninsula...

..and miles, by hundreds of miles, through the Russian steppes to the Baltic Sea.

A vast circle of flame and hate.

Wherever their armies marched, the Germans seemed to be triumphant.

Together with the Austrians, they summoned pitiless energy to strike down their enemies in the east.

The battle of Gorlice-Tarnow had begun in early May.

On June 3rd, the German and Austrian forces recaptured Przemysl.

On the 22nd, they were in Lemberg -

fourth-largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and scene of Russia's great victory in 1914.

In two months, the combined German and Austrian armies had advanced 150 miles

and inflicted over half a million casualties on the Russians.

It was a moment of triumph.

GERMAN MILITARY SONG

It produced, said Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff...

Immediate and highly valuable consequences, but enough had not yet been achieved.

Any breaking off of operations in the east was out of the question.

The question was how to exploit the victory.

The answer was not hard to see.

For now, the central Russian armies lay within a huge bulge around Warsaw.

Falkenhayn planned to encircle them from south and north.

Russian soldiers fought with undiminished tenacity, and the bulk of them escaped the German pincers.

It took the Germans 17 days to advance 25 miles to Lublin.

But on August the 4th - the first anniversary of the war - they entered Warsaw.

Russia's agony now began as the invaders swept forward.

New hardships fell upon a population to whom hardship itself was nothing new...

The self-control with which these poor people met their trouble made one's heart bleed.

They had lost everything, but they never complained.

The plight of the Russian armies was little better. Their shortage of equipment was catastrophic.

The Russian chief of staff told the French ambassador...

In several infantry regiments, one third of the men had no rifle.

These poor devils had to wait patiently under a shower of shrapnel

until their comrades fell and they could pick up their arms.

A Russian commander said...

Our army is drowning in its own blood.

Falkenhayn seized the moment to put out peace feelers to the Tsar.

Loyal as ever to his allies, Nicholas II rejected them.

But his warlike ambitions were drifting further apart from the wounds and griefs of his people.

SHOUTING

The French ambassador reported...

Disorders in Moscow have been particularly serious.

The agitation assumed such a scale that it had become necessary to suppress it by force.

On the famous Red Square, the mob insulted the Royal Family.

They demanded that the Empress should be incarcerated in a convent

and the Emperor deposed.

The Tsar took no notice.

In September, he assumed command of the Russian armies, saying...

We shall fulfil our sacred duty to defend our country to the last.

We will not dishonour the Russian land.

So the war would go on.

Now the German armies in the north, under General von Hindenburg,

struck eastwards as they had been waiting to do,

and a melancholy roll call of places names signalled Russia's new disasters -

Novogeorgiyevsk,

Bialystok, Kovno,

blazing Brest-Litovsk.

One by one they fell to the advancing Germans.

The Kaiser wrote in a letter...

My victorious sword has crushed the Russians.

Woe to them that yet draw the sword against me!

The furthest German advance was 300 miles.

The Russians lost over 3,000 guns.

Their losses in men have been estimated at over two million.

Even the inexhaustable manpower of the Russian Empire could not stand this rate of loss.

Russia faced collapse and one question echoed in Russian minds...

What are our allies doing?

The Allies were doing their best and they had received an important reinforcement.

On May 23rd, when the battle of Gorlice-Tarnow was three weeks old,

Italy declared war on Austria.

Italy went to war for territory, to expand her frontiers.

A secret treaty, signed in London, promised her the Trentino, the Southern Tyrol

and Istria with the port of Trieste.

The hope of liberating the large Italian populations under Austrian rule in these areas

inspired and excited her.

The Italian Prime Minister called this policy "sacro egoismo" - sacred egotism.

So, war reached out to lay its hand upon fresh landscapes.

Silent mountains bumbled with new thunders.

The stammer of machine guns was heard among the glaciers.

Blood poured out and froze upon the snow.

This style of war was different.

In the high Alps, every movement caused a prodigious effort.

This was the war of big guns. The effort had to be made.

By marvels of patience, ingenuity and sheer hard work,

the Italians prepared their attacks.

The advantages were all with their enemies, in prepared positions along the heights.

An Austrian officer said...

The scenery was really marvellous. Just imagine on top of a 6,000 ft mountain -

something which tourists come from far away to see.

But from the military point of view, the position was marvellous.

We saw everything that went on.

We saw every step, every tree, in front of us.

And we thought if the Italians should attack...

they can't get through.

It was not against the Alpine barrier to the north that Italy made her effort in 1915.

Instead, General Cadorna - the Italian chief of staff -

threw his forces at "The Castle" - the high plateau blocking the way to Trieste.

It has been called an enormous natural fortress,

a howling wilderness of stones as sharp as knives.

At the foot of the plateau ran the river Isonzo.

Four battles of the Isonzo were fought during the year.

Four times Cadorna sent his men over up the gaunt, bare hillside,

where every shellburst sent out fragments of stone as well as iron.

The Austrians, heavily outnumbered, made full use of their advantages of ground.

Two battles, fought in June, July and August, cost the Italians 60,000 men.

And the map showed no change...

Two more battles in October, November and December produced small dents in the Austrian line,

but Italy lost another 117,000 men.

Cadorna had stated his doctrine...

The Supreme Command desires that in all times and in all places

an iron discipline should reign throughout the army.

The iron discipline - the war - swiftly seized the Italian soldiers in a merciless grip.

Their losses of 180,000 men had hardly advanced the allied cause at all.

In truth, the cause was not advancing.

At the far end of the Mediterranean on the Gallipoli peninsula,

the last British landing, the last big attempt to break through the Dardanelles, came to nothing.

The defeat at Suvla Bay in August spelled the defeat of the whole enterprise.

As the summer of 1915 wore away, it became clear that nothing that the Allies could do on minor fronts

would avail to check Germany's run of victory.

The Western Front was never still.

Somewhere or other along its 475 miles - in Champagne, or Picardy, or Flanders -

there was always some action. Always danger.

And between battles, if you were lucky, if you were in a quiet sector, life might not be too bad.

On a nice summer's day, you could think there wasn't a war on, really.

Looking through the periscope out into no-man's-land,

you'd see the sandbags of the German front line, grass and flowers.

The birds would sing if the sun was up.

Early in the morning, you'd have the first planes coming over.

And generally, out of barminess and ease, breakfast would come up.

You'd settle down to a day of laziness in the sun if you could.

The lads would sit on the fire step and talk and sing.

Coming towards the evening, they'd get sentimental, talking about their homes.

And then there was old Cornet Joe over in the German front line

who used to play the British songs.

And he'd play a song and we'd shout over to him,

"Damn good! Give us another, Joe!"

He'd ask what we wanted. We'd say, "Give us The Old Bull And Bush!" He'd play that and we'd sing it.

But during those summer months of 1915, you could forget that there was a war on.

You really could. And it did happen sometimes.

People would forget and get careless and, before you knew it,

they'd get a bullet through the head on the latrine, or something...

Snipers. Even in quiet periods when there was no battle in progress,

the British were losing 300 killed, wounded and missing, every day.

It was a new sort of British Army that was coming into existence on the Western Front - territorials.

The first of Lord Kitchener's new army divisions began to take over,

their good humour and endless jokes concealing inner doubts and fears.

I think you are chiefly afraid of how you will behave

when you meet the worst things that war can produce.

I became afraid of seeing my first dead man. I'd never seen a dead man.

I knew that there was an old stretch of German trench between our first and second line

where there were a lot of German and Canadian corpses.

And in order to find myself, I think,

I decided one day that I would go and look at this

and see what I felt about it.

Suddenly around a bend in the trench, I came to a great bay.

It was full of dead Germans.

But they weren't a bit horrible.

They'd been dead for about six weeks

and weather and rats and maggots and everything had done their stuff,

and they were just shiny skeletons in their uniforms,

held together by the dried sinews that were round their bones...

It was the most extraordinary picture. I was absolutely fascinated.

A skull grins at you in a silly way.

It laughs at you,

and more or less said, "Fancy coming here terrified of dead men! Look! How silly we are."

The meaning of war unfolded day by day, each day producing new enigmas.

One thing was clear to anyone who thought about it - this war was not going in favour of the Allies.

The advantages won by the German armies in 1914 enabled them to call the tune in 1915.

Everywhere, they stood upon the soil of their enemies.

CHEERING AND WHISTLING

They could afford to sit tight.

MILITARY MUSIC PLAYS

They had only to wait for the compulsions of war to bring their enemies to them.

Once again, Joffre planned to hurl his armies at the flanks of the great bulge of the German line,

attacking from the south, in Champagne, and from the west, in Artois. There must be no mistake.

But the British Army was not yet ready.

There was not enough guns. There was not enough ammunition.

There were very few trained soldiers.

Lord Kitchener inspected the eager volunteers of his new divisions with pride, but also with doubt.

He and commander in chief Sir John French knew how unready they were.

Yet four of these divisions were earmarked for the fight.

Two Scottish divisions would take part in the attack. Two others would be in reserve.

They were completely untried. They'd only had their rifles for two months.

They'd only just landed in France. General Haig said...

I question the suitability of new divisions for this duty on first landing.

Lord Kitchener told Haig...

He had decided that we must act with all our energy to help the French,

even though we suffered very heavy losses indeed.

Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Square.

Even the familiar paintwork of the buses was scarred and dulled by war.

# Goodbye, Piccadilly... #

Upstairs and down, the rumours passed that a new weapon was to be used in the attack - gas.

Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Square...

The place where Joffre wanted the British Army to fight was dismal -

Loos - a shattered mining village.

Slag heaps, derelict machinery, ruined cottages...

The great twin pylons of what the army called Tower Bridge, looming.

Loos - there was something chilling even about the name.

The hour drew near.

Much depended on the gas which would, it was hoped, make up for the shortage of guns and shells.

Haig wrote... The greatest battle in the world's history begins today.

Some 800,000 French and British troops will actually attack.

An anxious night wondering what the wind would be in the morning.

Wondering what the wind would be... The prevailing wind blew towards the Germans.

Would it prevail on the day?

Captain Gold, the meteorological officer, joined Haig to observe.

I went up to see Sir Douglas Haig, who came out with a light and saw the charts.

Uh...this was about 3am on the morning of September the 25th.

We looked at the charts

and I said the situation had changed as expected,

but the wind had fallen lighter than had been expected, but it was still favourable.

Sir Douglas Haig asked me, "Well, what do you advise?"

And I naturally demurred,

and...said that...

I...I thought that my job was restricted to telling him... what the conditions were expected.

He said, "Somebody's got to make a decision."

I said, "In view of the conditions, I think it should be as soon as possible."

So, he then gave instructions for the attack to be just after 5am. Fire!

We opened up with a terrific bombardment to break through the wire, then the gas was let loose.

And our infantrymen, all clad in these Ku Klux Klan helmets with a little thing to put in their mouth,

went off with fixed bayonets and they had to charge. No loitering with those things.

What happened was a lot of them thought they were suffocating,

and they pulled the helmets off.

Unfortunately, just at that moment,

the wind saw fit to change and to blow back and the gas came back on our infantry.

Where this happened, the attack was checked at once.

But elsewhere, Londoners and Scottish troops of the new armies stormed through Loos village,

as far as the Germans' second line.

The chance of victory seemed good and Haig was hopeful...

The enemy had no troops in his second line, which my plucky fellows entered without opposition.

Prisoners state the enemy was so hard put to it for troops,

that the officers' servants were pushed forward to hold their second line.

If there'd been even one division close up, we could have walked right through.

But the reserve divisions of the new army were at least six hours' march away,

struggling to Loos along congested roads. We hadn't the faintest idea where we were going.

We sang the usual soldiers' songs - Tipperary and all those - and we were enjoying ourselves.

We had the usual halts for... supposed to be ten minutes in every hour.

But actually, we halted far more than that because of the chaos on the roads.

Traffic going up and down, ammunition limbers, ambulances, the walking wounded...

They said that we were laughing and talking - eager to get at them sort of business.

They said, "You'll laugh the other side of your ruddy faces when you get up there."

The next morning, these soldiers stumbled into their first battle.

Tired out, wet through, unfed, bewildered...

Against an enemy who'd had time to bring up supports and throw up new barbed wire.

The new army men were in dense marching formation.

They didn't know they were on a battlefield, where the Germans were, or what to do.

After a while, the exhausted, stunned regiments broke and fled.

If you can imagine a flock of sheep lying sleeping in a field, they were as thick as that.

Some of them were still alive, and they were begging for water,

and plucking at our legs as we went by.

One hefty chap grabbed me round both knees and held me.

"Water, water," he said. I was just taking out my water bottle, because I had a little left,

but I was immediately hustled on by a man behind.

"Get on," he said. "We're going to get lost in no-man's-land."

Compassion had to give way to discipline.

I had to break away from this man and catch up the men in front.

60,000 British troops fell during the three weeks that the battle dragged on.

Field Marshall Sir John French was blamed for keeping the reserve divisions back for too long.

French was removed from his command, and his place was taken by General Sir Douglas Haig.

This battle marked the end of a phase of Allied hopes, for neither in Artois beside the British,

nor in Champagne, had the French army found their expected victory.

Joffre's attack was the largest single effort of the French army since the start of the war.

18 divisions were assembled in Artois, 35 in Champagne -

more than the whole BEF.

The French were supremely confident.

Joffre told his men... You will carry all before you. In one bound,

you will break through the enemy's defences. Give him neither rest nor pause until victory is gained.

Forward with a good heart, to free the soil of our fatherland

and in the name of justice and liberty.

General de Castelnau prophesied... The guns have done their work so thoroughly

that the men can go forward with their rifles at the slope.

Through the drenching autumn rain, across the muddy wastes of no-man's-land,

towards the wire, stormed the French infantry.

RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

HORN BLASTS

MACHINE GUN FIRE

Again, the wire and machine guns were the masters.

A French airman observed the fate of the infantry...

Our first line was still advancing when enemy machine guns crackled.

Their sinister tak-tak-tak, like a sewing machine, was ploughing holes through our battalions.

In Champagne, the deepest advance was under two miles.

In Artois and Champagne together,

the French lost nearly 200,000 men.

General Joffre drew up a gloomy balance sheet...

It can thus be seen that 1915

was closing under conditions that brought small comfort to the Allies.

Our armies everywhere had been either kicked or beaten,

and they needed to be reorganised before any new effort was demanded.

On the contrary, the enemy appeared to have succeeded in all his undertakings.

The fall of the year drew on with yet another triumph for German arms.

As Joffre's guns boomed out in Champagne, their bombardment was echoed in another part of Europe.

Germany and Austria were preparing to fall on the Serbs with crushing might.

The Serbs begged for Allied help.

But how could they help this landlocked country in the Balkan mountains?

Only with the aid of Serbia's ally - Greece.

The Greek premier, Venizelos, was agreeable.

He mobilised the army and appealed for 150,000 British and French troops.

The place selected for their landings was Salonika.

Salonika - a seedy, cosmopolitan port at the head of the Aegean Sea -

was chosen by the Allies for its good harbour, because it was only 50 miles from the Serbian frontier,

and because of its railway lines leading upcountry.

The first French division landed on October 5th,

but on that very day Venizelos was dismissed by King Constantine who declared Greece would stay neutral.

She'd not honour her alliance with the Serbs.

A British division, rushed from Gallipoli, followed.

As the Allies came ashore, they looked around with mixed and curious feelings.

Their position was unenviable.

It was reported... German spies sit in rows at Salonika,

smoking large cigars and note down every man,

horse, gun and ton of stores landed. This is a NICE way to make war.

A naval officer greeted some disembarking British troops...

Well, your war's over. In two days, you'll be disarmed and interned by the Greeks.

It was not quite so bad, but it was an uneasy situation,

which made effective help for Serbia well-nigh impossible.

And the Serbs were in sore need of help.

On October 6th, the Austro-German offensive began across the Danube and the Sava.

October 9th, they entered Belgrade, this time for good.

Two days later, without any declaration of war,

the Bulgarians struck in the Serbian armies from the east.

Bulgaria was drawn into the war by greed for Serbian territory,

and by hatred from the Balkan wars.

The savagery of those bitter conflicts was revived as her army advanced.

No quarter was asked and none given to soldier or peasant

in this bitter conflict of tribal hate.

The Serbs had no chance.

Towards the frontier with Albania,

the remnants of a proud army trudged into the barren, rocky hills.

An English naval officer from Belgrade watched their retreat...

Here was no ordinary march of troops. They crawled, staggering, bent to the ground,

supporting themselves on sticks. Many were without boots and their clothes hung in rags.

Some, who were too weak to walk alone, were helped along by friends.

Many were dying of hunger, fatigue and the last stages of dysentery.

Here and there was a huddled heap -

the body of some lad too weak to go further who turned aside to die.

The haunting thing was that their faces were all exactly alike.

Starvation had reduced them all to the same mask of pain.

The Serbian retreat was also the flight of a people.

Through the inhospitable mountains, the Serbian calvary dragged on.

"Oh, pray that your flight be not in winter." Seldom had Christ's words seemed more appropriate.

Oh, people who bow down to see the miracle of Calvary,

the bitter and the glorious, bow down,

bow down and pray for us.

Still for them and all of us, who the world over suffer thus.

Who have scarce time for prayer, indeed, who only march and die and bleed.

By the end of 1915, one-sixth of Serbia's entire population would be dead.

100,000 men out of 400,000 were all that remained of her army to reach the sea and safety.

All their allies could do for them

was to take them off and give them a haven on the isle of Corfu.

The fall of Serbia symbolised a year in which much hope had died.

The Allies knew the war would never be won this way.

General Joffre convened an allied conference at Chantilly...

It was agreed that a result should be sought through offensives on three fronts -

Russian, Franco-British and Italian.

These offensives were to be launched simultaneously,

to prevent the enemy moving his reserves from one front to another.

This conference marks a vital date in the history of the conduct of the war.

So, a bleak year ended with hope revived.