Original subtitles

On one of the last nights of the First World War, a

company of soldiers took refuge from enemy bombardment.

Their officer wrote to his mother in a spirit of hope.

My dearest mother, so thick is the smoke in this cellar

that I can hardly see by a candle twelve inches away.

And so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts.

On my left, the company commander snores on a bench.

It is a great life.

I am more oblivious than a less yourself, dear mother, of the ghastly glimmering of

the guns outside and the hollow crashing of the shells.

I hope you are as warm as I am, as serene in your room as I am here.

I am certain you could not be visited by a band

of friends, half so fine as surround me here.

There is no danger down here, or if any, it

will be well over before you read these lines.

A fortnight later, the guns of the Great War fell silent.

It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

One hour later, there was a knock on the door of the officer's home.

As neighbours celebrated the end of the war,

the officer's mother was handed a telegram.

In the war's final week, while taking part in an assault on the German lines,

her son had been killed.

The dead soldier, 25-year-old Lieutenant Wilfred Owen.

Yet Owen was just one of the lost generation.

Nine million people killed during four years of world war.

In which people, land and nations were changed forever.

The years 1914-18 set the violent 20th century in motion.

The first use of chemical weapons.

The first mass bombardment of civilians from the sky.

The century's first genocide.

Never in history had so many taken up arms.

Never had war reached so far beyond the battlefield.

Never had war cut so deeply into society.

Eighty years on, diaries, letters and film from expanding archives around the world,

tell the story of the men and women from five continents,

for whom this war was the defining moment of their lives.

It would be called the Great War, for it coloured everything that came

before, and shadowed everything that followed.

Every search for the origins of the Great War comes back to Germany.

Its state, militaristic and volatile.

Its people, modern, industrious, and determined

to better their position in the world.

Its generals, obsessed with shows of greatness, but

insecure about Germany's status as an imperial power.

All these tensions were symbolised in one man.

The Kaiser.

Wilhelm II.

The figurehead of German imperial ambition.

He was destined to be the living emblem of national pride.

A difficult role for a crippled man.

An accident at birth had made him partly deaf,

affected his balance, and left him with a withered arm.

What medicine could not improve, Wilhelm's parents had hoped discipline would.

Their son's tutor, Dr Georg Hinzpeter, was to make no allowances for his pupil's arm.

He was to force the boy to ride in the posture of a true German warrior.

When the prince was eight years old, a lackey still had to lead his pony by the

rein, because his balance was so bad that his unsteadiness

caused intolerable anxiety to himself and others.

It had to be overcome, no matter what the cost.

Therefore, I set the weeping prince on his horse, without

stirrups, and compelled him to go through the various paces.

He fell off continually.

Every time, despite his prayers and tears, I

lifted him up and set him upon its back again.

After weeks of torture, the difficult task was accomplished.

He got his balance.

England was where the young Prince Wilhelm found an escape from such humiliations.

As a grandson of Queen Victoria, he frequently visited

her seaside estate at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight.

In a specially built playground, with trenches and a miniature fort,

he and his British cousins would fight out their version of an ancient rivalry.

It was here that he began a lifelong obsession with the sea.

I had a peculiar passion for the Navy.

It sprang, to no small extent, from my English blood.

When, as a little boy, I was allowed to visit Portsmouth and Plymouth,

I admired the proud English ships.

There awoke in me the wish to build ships of my own like these some day,

and, when I was grown up, to possess as fine a navy as the English.

When Wilhelm became Emperor of Germany in 1888, at the age of 29, the insecurities

of his youth were played out on the stage of German affairs.

To his commanders, he explained his role.

All of you know nothing.

I alone know something.

I alone decide.

You've got to imagine a man who has all kinds of terrible complexes.

He wants, in a sense, to be as big a figure on the world stage as his British cousins.

He wants to be as striking and impressive a political figure.

And, to some extent, the Kaiser, I think, is cut off from reality.

Wilhelm's dreams of naval glory were exploited by German

admirals who longed to match the sea power of Britain.

By 1905, a huge fleet of warships was in the making.

With such symbols of imperial power and

progress, Wilhelm struck a chord with his people.

The Kaiser was universally seen as being the symbol of the new Germany.

And he did embody it to an amazing extent.

He embodied its old-fashioned militarism.

He embodied its undirected ambition towards a dominance

in the future of a kind which nobody could quite define.

He embodied the insecurity, the uncertainties, the neurosis, which so

dominated German society and which was seen by everybody as making Germany such

an unpredictable and dangerous partner in

the manipulation of the international system.

To other nations in Europe, Germany's intentions seem menacing and uncertain.

Yet the Kaiser had inherited a nation that had grown accustomed to peace.

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's astute diplomacy

had kept Germany out of wars since 1871.

Bismarck had no foreign ambitions.

He'd used treaties and alliances to keep on civil terms with the other great powers.

Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary.

But above all, to avoid war with Russia.

But Wilhelm had no respect for Bismarck's delicate balance of power.

The Kaiser felt that he represented the new Germany.

Quite where Germany was going to go, he didn't know.

But at full speed, I heard.

Wilhelm sent Bismarck into retirement and abandoned the treaties.

Military expansion replaced diplomacy.

His announcement that Germany would build a new navy had turned a potential ally,

Great Britain, into a potential enemy.

And now, in 1912, a massive expansion of his army, making it

the most powerful in Europe, challenged Russia and France.

Germany had only one reliable ally.

The fragile empire of Austria-Hungary, ruled by the ageing emperor, Franz Josef.

Germany felt increasingly surrounded.

And as insecure as its ruler.

International war was only one of the powers the century promised.

Other developments pointed to an entirely different future.

A revolution in technology was sweeping the Western world.

Electricity turned night into day.

Motor cars changed the speed of travel.

Aircraft defied gravity.

To the monarchs, rulers and elites of Europe, the technological explosion

heralded a new era they did not understand.

Yet the lives of ordinary people were being altered profoundly.

A fundamental change was taking place in their expectations, their work,

their world.

It is in many respects that the moment when a vision of immense

and unlimited possibilities became available to anybody.

And of course, what that meant is not necessarily hope.

It could also mean intense frustration.

Because with the vision that possibilities are there, comes the question,

why not me?

Why not farmers?

Why not factory employees?

Why not women?

These two elements of imbalance of power, of inequality, between those who have and

those who have not, between those who are running the show and those who feel that

they ought to be running the show, produce this

amazing sense of an approaching storm in 1914.

What storm it will be, nobody knew.

But it was going to come.

The dynamics of change were racing ahead of the

political order that supposedly controlled them.

In Britain, bitter conflicts raged over social injustice.

And high in the headlines were the clashes over women's right to vote.

There was a view that women shouldn't have the vote for all sorts of reasons.

One of them being that a woman's brain was smaller than a man's brain.

Therefore, she couldn't possibly make this

political choice when it came to an election.

That it just was not within her kind of

intellectual capacity to make that kind of a choice.

It sounds ludicrous to us, but this was something that

even the most intelligent people believed very firmly.

The suffragettes spearheaded the drive to win British women the vote.

When peaceful protests did not succeed, they turned

to violence with a campaign of arson and bombing.

They chose as targets those symbols of male authority, church and property.

On Derby Day in 1913, the campaign claimed its first life.

A lone suffragette, Emily Wilding Davison, walked

onto the race track to block the king's horse.

The British government began a campaign to silence the suffragettes.

Men who committed acts of civil disobedience

were given special status as political prisoners.

But the suffragettes were treated as common criminals.

Seven months before the outbreak of war, the leading suffragette,

Sylvia Pankhurst, was sent to prison for breaking a window.

I was torn with a passion of self-contempt that I

had endured the torturing indignity for so long.

My voice, high-pitched and strange, cried out that it was a scandal that four

of us should be serving five months in all for one little three-pound window.

That the government had had their pound of flesh.

And far, far more.

That this torture had been going on year after year.

Woman after woman had been broken and destroyed.

And all because a handful of men stood against us.

Like a solid wall in their sullen, cruel obstinacy.

And would not give way.

Some for the sake of their jobs.

Some for the sake of their pride.

As those without a say raised their voices, a new age took shape.

An age of protest and defiance.

The new banner of socialism was one revolutionary cause, with a growing following.

Socialism tried to address basic concerns.

Wages.

Exploitation.

Terrible living conditions.

Its leader in France was Jean Jaurès.

A socialist who dominated the revolutionary movement.

A third of France voted socialist in 1914.

And nearly a million had joined trade unions.

A visiting journalist from Vienna was struck by Jaurès' unusual figure.

I first noticed his large back, built like a street porter's.

His neck like a bull's.

Short, stocky.

And I felt immediately in him the strength of the peasant.

Unshakeable.

Jaurès saw Europe's arms race as a threat to social justice.

He believed that whilst socialists should defend their homelands, growing arsenals

served only the ruling classes and their hold on military power.

He believed that.

What will the future be like?

When the billions, now thrown away in preparation for war, are spent on useful

things to increase the well-being of people, on the construction of decent

houses for workers, on improving transportation, on reclaiming the land.

The fever of imperialism has become a sickness.

It is the disease of a badly run society, which

does not know how to use its energies at home.

He knew how to take action, real action.

First of all, he had parliament.

Second, Jaurès was trying to set up international

arbitration in case there were a war.

Third, and that was Jaurès's strongest card, call an international workers' strike.

A general strike in all the countries that might go to war.

In 1912, Jean Jaurès organised an emergency socialist congress in Switzerland.

War appeared to be near.

Local feuds in the Balkans, between Slavs and Austrians,

threatened to escalate into a full-scale conflict.

500 delegates from 23 nations filled the hall of Baal's great cathedral.

Jaurès climbed the pulpit, determined to inspire the

delegates to return to their homes with a message of peace.

I think of the words which Schiller inscribed

at the head of his beautiful Song of the Bell.

I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunderbolts.

Then Jaurès leaned forward, and appealed to the sea of upturned faces.

I summon the living, to resist the monster which would ravage the land.

I mourn the countless dead, now buried in the

east, whose rotting stench fills us with remorse.

I will break the thunderbolts of war, now hurtling across the sky.

Then Jaurès paused, and in a final theatrical coup, the strains of

Beethoven's ninth symphony filled the cathedral.

Let us leave this hall, committed to the salvation of peace and civilization.

The Baal Congress asserted that workers would

not fight in a meaningless Balkan quarrel.

In Berlin, a quarter of a million people marched against war.

As governments backed away from war, Jaurès became convinced

that Europe was on the brink of a new age of peace.

But within two years, he would be proven wrong.

The forces of change were undermining societies that had endured for centuries.

In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II's Romanov dynasty

symbolized a world that appeared impervious to threat.

But now Russia, too, was on the brink of a new age.

Communications, I think, opened people's eyes no end to what the possibilities are,

and to what is wrong with present circumstances.

And then it was perfectly true to say that large numbers of peasants living in the

far-flung bits of Russia would think very warmly of little father Tsar who will

protect us from the nobility and from his own bureaucrats.

But as telegraphs grow, and as newspapers grow, and as the peasants begin to read,

and as the socialist revolutionaries get around

the villages, these ideas get very much weaker.

Peasants could now travel to the capital and see their Tsar at first hand.

The writer Maxim Gorky recorded one peasant's

experience upon meeting Nicholas in 1902.

This is what happened to me when I met the Tsar.

Imagine to yourself that you believed in some inaccessible person, thought that in

that person were united all the finest qualities, all the strength, the wisdom,

and holiness of Russia.

And all of a sudden, at the bidding of fate, you

are placed eye to eye with that person, and you see.

With sorrow and fear you see that he is not what you supposed.

The glitter around him and the splendour are all there, but it is all a sham.

Thus I saw in front of me, not the Tsar of my imagination, not the sovereign of my

dreams, not even a big man, just a little fellow, and on very ordinary legs.

From the east of Europe to the west, a social revolution was underway.

In Germany, workers were experiencing the fastest changes of all.

In just 30 years, Berlin had been transformed from a backwater

of 700,000 to a mechanised metropolis of over 2 million.

Many middle-class Germans shared their Kaiser's

belief in the supremacy of German culture.

For them, it was necessary to secure Germany the continental domination it deserved.

And in that sense, the Kaiser is in some ways representative

of that generation which comes of age in the 1890s.

Bismarck regarded colonies as a distraction.

Well, for younger people, this was all a little bit fuddy-duddy, and if the Kaiser

was going to give them colonies, they liked the sound of that.

German workers were the most militant and best organised anywhere.

Workers' power here was more than a vague ideal.

It had found real expression in the million-strong Socialist

Party that now appeared ready to challenge the state.

The old order dreamed of imperial glory.

Their challengers demanded equality.

This created an extraordinarily explosive mixture where the most powerful nation in

the world, Germany, had the most powerful revolutionary movement in the world,

the German Social Democratic Party.

And it's a function of the pace of change and the pace of urbanisation that you both

had this amazing militarisation and growth of military power and proletarianisation,

growth of working-class power.

And they were both evident together.

The Kaiser would have demonstrations for his birthday, the Social Democratic Party

would have demonstrations for the 1st of May, and they were about the same size.

It was not at all surprising that anybody who lived in Germany would find this the

most dynamic, the most robust, and the most terrifying nation in the world.

The wealthy Germans who controlled the country saw socialism as a sinister force.

Socialism threatened their prosperity and might

prevent Germany from becoming a world power.

Socialists argued for progress through peace.

The ruling elite disagreed.

One of the trendy ideas of the pre-1914 world is social Darwinism.

You take the ideas of Darwin about natural selection and you apply them to human

society and you come to the conclusion that the only way that human society can

advance and progress is by being subjected periodically to the ultimate test of war.

War weeds out the weeds and replaces, or rather, leaves behind only the fittest.

One man who sensed the increasing tensions in pre-war

Germany was a 28-year-old painter, Ludwig Meitner.

Amid fears of war and revolution, Meitner lived and

worked in a Berliner attic, painting at night by gaslight.

From his brush came disturbing visions of an approaching apocalypse.

It was a time unlike any other in the brooding metropolis of Berlin.

I was poor, but not unhappy.

I had made a home for myself in a cheap studio with an

iron bedstead and a number of boxes that served as tables.

Food was a minor matter, but canvas seemed the most valuable thing there was.

I was in love with it, and I was not ashamed to kiss it with

trembling lips before painting those ominous landscapes.

I did not paint from life, but what my imagination bid me to paint.

I felt like a hound racing along in a wild

chase, mile after mile, to find his master.

A finished oil painting filled with apocalyptic ruin.

I feared those visions.

Other artists, musicians and writers across Europe shared

Meitner's sense that a great cataclysm was at hand.

There's a fever and there's a feeling everything had to come to an end.

I mean, Duchamp said, you know, we need the great enema in Europe.

And if it's going to be war, then if we need war, we need war.

But we need a great enema.

But they actually sing it in social terms.

Meitner, he was like everybody else, he was reading Zarathustra at that point.

And there is a famous text in Zarathustra where Nietzsche produces the idea that the

cities literally, they are the melting pot of the modern humanity and they literally

have to almost explode for this revolution to happen.

Meitner had painted Germany's future.

His country was about to explode.

Not into social revolution, but into war.

In 1914, tensions were again running high in the troubled region of the Balkans.

Tensions that would cast the fate of the world.

The Austrian Empire was a patchwork of nationalities.

Among them were Serbs.

Some wanted to break away and join the independent and growing kingdom of Serbia.

Gavrilo Princip was one of them.

A member of the secret Serbian society, the Black

Hand, he aimed to force Austria from Slav lands.

On June 28th 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

paid an official visit to the city of Sarajevo with his wife.

At 11 o'clock, a wrong turn by the Archduke's driver

brought him face to face with Gavrilo Princip.

The murder of the heir to the Austrian throne was the

ultimate insult to Austria's ruler, Emperor Franz Josef.

Austria issued an ultimatum designed to humiliate Serbia.

One of its demands, acceptance of an Austrian inquiry

into Serbia's responsibility for the assassination.

The rejection of this one demand was the

excuse Austria had been looking for to invade.

The Austrians issued their ultimatum to the Serbs on the assumption that the Serbs

would reject it and the Austrians would then

be able to declare war on them and crush them.

However, they realised that if they did that, there was a strong danger that

Russia would come in on the side of the Serbs.

So, therefore, before issuing their ultimatum at all, the Austrians cleared

their rear, as it were, by going to Berlin and

getting from Berlin what was called a blank cheque.

Yes, go ahead and we will back you as far as you want to go.

Now, the Germans issued that blank cheque because they felt they could not afford to

see their only ally in Europe humiliated and destroyed.

By giving Austria her blank cheque, Germany had

brought into play the established alliance system.

One pair of great powers, Austria-Hungary and Germany, were

allied against another pair of great powers, Russia and France.

War between Austria and Serbia would mean war between Austria and Russia.

That would mean war between Russia and Germany.

And that would mean war between Germany and France.

The stage was set.

As the prospect of international war grew closer, the French leader, Jean Jaurès,

found he was unable to unite socialists behind peace.

He climbed aboard a train for Paris and, exhausted, fell asleep.

Sitting in the compartment across from Jaurès were two friends.

They both found themselves staring into his face as he slept.

All those fortunate enough to know Jaurès personally had always

been inspired by his good humour and inexhaustible vitality.

But now it seemed to us he was deeply sad, full of grief, brought on by his clear

vision of the horrible catastrophe about to overtake mankind.

As we looked at his wonderful face, we were each

suddenly overcome with a feeling that he was dead.

I froze with fright.

How often I had thought to myself, what would we do if we lost him?

Events were moving too fast for Jaurès, for diplomats, and even heads of state.

On the deadline, the day Austria had set for war, the Tsar cabled his cousin,

the Kaiser.

July the 28th.

To the Kaiser.

In this most serious moment, I appeal to you to help me.

I beg you, in the name of our old friendship, to do

what you can to stop your allies from going too far.

Nicky.

To the Tsar.

With regard to the hearty and tender friendship

which binds both of us from long ago with firm ties.

I am exerting my utmost influence to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with you.

Your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin, Willy.

The Kaiser basically wants to avoid the general war.

It then becomes clear that the Kaiser, far from being the supreme power in

Germany, doesn't matter at all, because effectively the chief of the

general staff says, I am terribly sorry sire, but the war is going to happen anyway.

On July the 29th, 1914, Austria attacked Serbia.

As Germany had anticipated, Russian military commanders

demanded action when Serbia, their ally, came under attack.

The next day, the Tsar's staff told him there was no longer an option.

Russia must mobilise.

Think what an awful responsibility you are advising me to take.

Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their deaths.

Nicholas held out until 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

Then he signed the order.

The hidden element in the war crisis of 1914 is the word honour.

Honour is something you defend.

Sometimes irrationally.

Sometimes even when it isn't at issue.

In fact, I would say, in every case, it was in

no great power's interest to go to war in 1914.

And yet they all did it.

One answer may be because their honour was at stake.

Russian mobilisation was just what the German general staff wanted.

Now Germany could mobilise, under the pretense

that it was only responding to a threat.

On the evening of July the 31st, as France planned its response to the

crisis, Jean Jaurès and his colleagues gathered at a café on the Rue Montmartre.

The group sat at a table near the window,

listening to Jaurès' thoughts on the coming war.

I gave my full attention to him while he gave

his vision for mankind and of things to be.

The expression on his face held enough for a Rembrandt.

As Jaurès sat talking, a man stood on the pavement staring at him.

He was Raoul Villain, a patriot who was thrilled by the prospect of a war.

A war that he thought Jaurès would try to stop.

As Villain watched, a man from a nearby table

showed Jaurès a photograph of his little girl.

At that moment, Villain leaned in through the window.

Behind me, a revolver slid by, held in a hand.

Then, a reddish flash, like the flame from a cigar, stiff, brutal.

I did not see any blood, just a painful shudder.

There was a silence.

Then I heard a heartbreaking cry.

Next came four words, yelled, screeched, repeated over and over.

They have killed Jaurès!

They have killed Jaurès!

The assassination of Jaurès coincides with the French mobilization the next day.

And with general mobilization, how can you call a workers' strike?

The idea was a strike not of soldiers, but of workers.

And now all the workers have become soldiers, so how can you call them out on strike?

The international general strike was what gave Jaurès his hope.

The one man who called for that option in France was Jaurès.

Whether he could have achieved it in July 1914, the fact is, he didn't manage it.

He didn't do it.

The death of Jaurès draws a line.

Everyone thought of it as, Jaurès is dead, so it's war.

That's what they all said.

On August the 4th, the Germans made their

move against France, invading through Belgium.

The Great War was born with the mobilization of Britain.

There had been in England for the last ten years a growing sense that sooner or later

we've got to have a showdown with the Germans.

And so there was no great surprise when this crisis arose.

But in addition to that, the really clinching argument which brought the

country into the war totally united, was Germany's invasion of Belgium,

which was not simply the invasion of a neutral country.

It was a country whose neutrality the British themselves had guaranteed.

So it was a matter not just of international morality and international

law, but of Britain's honor being at stake.

And all those things put together created virtual unanimity in the country,

behind Britain, back in France.

Germany had accepted the risk of a major war, and her rivals had responded in kind.

Better now than later, was the view of the general staff.

War it was to be.

As news of the war hit the capitals of Europe,

thousands of people surged into the streets.

Counter-demonstrations evaporated, lacking popular support.

It seemed to the artist Ludwig Meitner that his

fellow Berliners had suddenly become possessed.

And out of the depths of the earth rose dreadful

fiends that settled in everyone's brains.

And in their madness, they turned their scourge into a joyous festival.

In each of the warring nations, citizens were convinced

that their country was fighting a just and defensive war.

Internal conflicts that had threatened to divide society were set aside.

The great socialist movement found that the world of 1914 put patriotism first.

The suffragettes decided they would support their

fighting men and fight for their own rights later.

Disaster lay ahead for the great monarchies on the continent.

All their houses would fall.

Tsars.

Kaisers.

Emperors.

With less fanfare, millions of ordinary lives would also be changed forever.

And the next episode of 1914 to 1918 is here on BBC4 on Thursday evening at 20 to 8.

Next tonight, all aboard the last steam train from Liverpool Street Station.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.