Original subtitles

As soldiers across Europe left for war, the

correspondent Philip Gibbs reported home to London.

In those first days of the war, I saw many scenes of farewell.

Hundreds of women were in the crowd, waving handkerchiefs.

The sting of parting was forgotten, in the enthusiasm and pride which rose up

to those who were on their way to fight and to uphold.

Their old traditions.

I could see no tears then, but my own.

I was seized with an emotion that made me shudder.

For beyond the pageantry of the cavalcade, I saw the fields of war.

I smelt the stench of blood, for I had been in the muck and misery of war before.

And had seen the convoys of wounded crawling down the rutty roads.

With men who had been strong and fine, now made hideous by pain.

In Germany, as the army mobilized, a young student named

Walter Limmer was one of those eager to serve his country.

August the third, 1914.

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 those

who belong to us, we shall be petty and weak.

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

All over Europe, soldiers were mobilizing for war, saying

goodbye to their families and rushing to the front.

Our march to the station was a gripping and uplifting experience.

It seemed as if one lived through as much in

that hour as ordinarily in months and years.

This hour is one such as seldom strikes in the life of a nation.

Germany's strategy, the Schlieffenplan, required precision timing.

In the east, the Russian army would be held at bay.

In the west, the German army would avoid France's line of forts by sweeping west

through neutral Belgium and then turning in a huge arc south into France.

The French army would be trapped between Paris and its own frontier.

The war on the western front would be over in six weeks.

Then the German army would turn to Russia.

The Kaiser summed up the plan in one phrase.

Paris for lunch, dinner in St. Petersburg.

My

dear ones, be proud that you live in such a time and in such a nation.

And that you too have the privilege of sending

several of those you love into this glorious struggle.

It is a joy to go to the front with such comrades.

We are bound to be victorious.

We are bound to be victorious.

On the morning of August the 4th, 1914, the

German cavalry crossed the border into Belgium.

Waiting for them was the small and poorly equipped Belgian force.

What the Belgians faced was the world's mightiest

army, one over ten times the size of their own.

Belgium's main hope lay in the ring of forts

that protected the gateway city of Liege.

But the German army had planned for the forts.

They unveiled a secret weapon, the world's largest howitzer, Big Bertha.

Concrete and steel forts, once thought impregnable,

were blown apart by Big Bertha's one-ton shells.

A Belgian commander described the aftermath.

The fort is now in ruins.

We are in complete darkness and scarcely able to

breathe on account of the poisonous and noxious gases.

A truce-bearer demanded the surrender of the fort.

We prefer dying to surrendering.

The German army flooded across the Belgian plains.

They expected no more resistance.

But to their surprise, Belgian snipers started shooting.

Warfare in Belgium soon became a hideous experience,

because civilians took part in the fight.

The German soldier, Fritz Nagel, saw the fear of those around

him turn into acts of reprisal against innocent victims.

Unless they shot first, nobody knew where the enemy was.

Whenever they had the chance, they shot down German soldiers.

There was little defense against that sort of warfare.

Because the streets were full of civilians.

And so were the houses.

It was nerve-wracking in the extreme.

And resulted in savage and merciless slaughter.

But the slightest provocation.

As we marched towards Louvain, frightened civilians lined the streets,

hands held high as a sign of surrender.

Those frightened men, women and children were a terrible sight.

By now, every German soldier was frightened too.

You get the orders from above to be as harsh as possible

in order to stifle this from the very first moment.

And that triggers off then with a wave of rather violent

actions and atrocities against the civilian population.

Ten civilians, the Belgians were told, would die for every German soldier killed.

Hundreds of men, women and children were lined up and shot.

Word of the atrocities spread quickly.

As the number of stories grew, each new version became more appalling.

Wild claims were taken as fact.

Soon, images of a monstrous German Hun began appearing.

And found their way into newspapers.

The British war correspondents in Belgium have

seen little murdered children with roasted feet.

This was done by German troops.

Men with children of their own at home.

Or with little brothers and sisters of the same

age as the innocents they torture before killing.

The things done to Belgian girls and women are so

unspeakably dreadful that details cannot be printed.

Many of the stories that rapidly became well known through the press formed the

basis of a very substantial, probably the first

substantial propaganda campaign in history.

And it gave the Allies an extraordinary weapon.

Because what it suggested was that the Germans committed atrocities, not because

they were soldiers, not because they were occupiers

of Belgium, but because they were Germans.

There was something genetic about their viciousness.

And this was made into the imagery of the Hun.

The Belgians had held up the German army for only a few days.

But the real cost to Germany was the image of the

violation of a small nation fighting for survival.

The symbol, the symbol of poor little Belgium,

would haunt the Germans for years to come.

Of all the major powers in Europe, Britain alone relied upon a volunteer army.

The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, believed

Britain's small, regular army would not be sufficient.

The war, he predicted, would take at least three years.

The British army would require millions of recruits.

From town walls to church pulpits, men were urged to take up arms for their country.

The Yorkshire Post reported how even a football match turned into a recruiting drive.

Stirring scenes were witnessed on the Leeds City Football

Club's ground last evening at the end of the match.

The Lord Mayor addressed a crowd of about 4,000 spectators.

There was a spirited rush across the field and rousing cheers.

Up the steps, sturdy young fellows came to receive

an armlet of ribbon with the national colours.

And to win, perchance with their comrades, an imperishable glory on the battlefield.

When the rush subsided, it was found that the number of volunteers was 149.

The Lady Mayoress called for a further 51.

Another dash was made.

Another round of prolonged cheering.

And, to the chorus of it's a long way to Tipperary, the quota was quickly filled.

From the football field, the recruits marched to the town hall to enlist.

Volunteers are to have good health, good teeth, and be aged between 19 and 30.

Join up with your pals, soon became the recruiting slogan.

The pals movement in Britain took off like a rocket.

It became a matter of civic pride and community pride to raise local battalions

of pals who would fight together, enlist together, serve together,

train together, etc.

And so, after the end of September 1914, Kitchener had his expanded army.

CHOIR SINGS ANOTHER LITTLE BING ANOTHER LITTLE BING ANOTHER LITTLE BING ANOTHER

LITTLE BING ANOTHER LITTLE BING Well, I said, I've joined now.

I can't do any more.

Well, she said, you can either have me or the pals.

I said, well, it's got to be the pals.

They asked me my height and I told them.

They hummed in hard about it.

I'm five foot six and worried stiff, so I filled my shoes with papers.

Anyway, I says, well, there's my pals joining,

six of us all joining, all footballers.

So they says, oh, go on, let them go in.

So I was one of the midges.

CHOIR SINGS ANOTHER LITTLE BING ANOTHER LITTLE BING ANOTHER LITTLE BING

The thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few days, Paris was changed,

as though by some wizard's spell.

A hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its orchestras packed up

their instruments and scurried with scared faces to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest.

The Seine was very quiet beneath its bridges.

The women were hiding in their rooms, asking God how they were

going to live now that their lovers had gone away to fight.

Journalist Philip Gibbs was in France when war broke out.

Forbidden to travel with the army, he reported from Paris.

There was no wild outbreak of jingo fever.

No demonstrations of bloodlust against Germany, in Paris, or any town of France.

The call to arms came without any loud clamour of bugles or orations.

The quietness of Paris was astounding.

This was not the first time France had gone to war against Germany.

In 1871, a victorious Germany had claimed two of her

richest provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, as spoils of war.

Now, a new generation was being called upon to defend France's honour.

The continuous stream flows out towards death.

Soldiers pass, singing and shouting to Berlin.

Others go by in silence, fierce-looking and determined.

On this scene of desolation, the sun shone

gloriously, indifferent to the troubles of this earth.

Madame Camille Drummond, of the French aristocracy, was

one of those mothers who watched her son go off to war.

Now that the quiet of evening is falling, I'm thinking more than ever of you,

my darling child.

Where are you?

What are you doing?

This morning, I went into the drawing room, and my eyes fell on your violin.

I burst into tears and ran from the room.

Like many in France, Madame Drummond was not ready for another war.

The French commander disagreed.

Joseph-Jacques César Joffre was a champion of the offensive.

Speed and bravery were of the essence.

Heavy artillery an impediment.

The bayonet, he told his soldiers, was the supreme weapon for victory.

The infantry bearing their bayonets, their rifles with bayonets, are really

intended to terrify the enemy by the sight of cold steel.

It is believed that an attacking force will look so ferocious and will behave so

ferociously that an enemy will quail before the

sheer valour and the bravery of this oncoming force.

In the dawn and pallid sunlight of the morning,

they came across the bridges with glinting rifles.

And the blue coats and red trousers of the infantry made them look in the distance

like tin soldiers from a children's play box.

I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and glitter of this kaleidoscope.

What does it all mean, this surging tide of armed men?

What would it mean in a day or two, when another tide of men had swept up against it?

Geoffrey was determined to strike out against

Germany and win back France's lost provinces.

Underestimating the strength of the German invasion of Belgium, the French followed

their plan to move east towards Alsace and Lorraine.

One of these French soldiers was Paul Lantier,

who was about to enter battle for the first time.

I felt a choking sensation grip my throat.

The hour had come for me to sacrifice my life.

My bleeding body would lie stretched out on the field.

I seemed to see it.

It was the end.

It had not been long in coming, for I am only twenty-one.

Against heavy artillery and machine guns, Lantier's courage counted for little.

His regiment lined up in a nineteenth-century formation and advanced in full view.

Shells continued to fly over us.

The enemy was advancing.

Entire companies of infantry fell back.

We had lost the battle.

The nineteenth-century tradition of the army

was of the self-sacrifice for the nation.

And the beginning of the twentieth century was still in this mentality.

These bright colors, especially the red of the trousers, of the caps too,

was a sign of this heroic ethic of the war.

It was absolutely, it was a sign of cowardice to fight the enemy in green

colors, which couldn't be seen by the enemy itself.

You had to fight openly.

In four days, over forty-thousand French soldiers were killed.

Twenty-seven thousand of them on a single day.

August the twenty-second, 1914.

The bloodiest day in French military history.

Soon, the French army was in retreat.

A deep sense of shame oppressed us as we filed through

these villages, which we were powerless to protect.

We were abandoning them to the fury of the enemy.

As the French army fell back, Joffre notified his government.

In twelve days, the Germans would be at the walls of Paris.

Would the city be ready, he asked, to withstand a siege?

Everyone who could fled from the advancing Germans.

Railways and roads were flooded with refugees.

Madame Drummond watched them stream past her window.

One can imagine nothing more dismal than the

stream of fugitives along the roads of France.

We saw them, passing by our houses, coming from goodness knows where,

piled up on carts, with their animals, their bedding, and all their household goods.

They had come through Paris, their horses almost dropping with exhaustion,

to seek a refuge in some friendly place.

But where that would be, they knew not.

For the moment, their only idea was to go a

long way away, to the far ends of the earth.

As the German army approached Paris, Camille Drummond chose to flee too.

She escaped by train for the French coast.

Trains full of soldiers, and even of wounded,

were caught up like us on parallel lines.

All this confusion brought home to one the panic, the terror of the herd of human

beings, who, in order to escape from the

enemy, were rushing headlong into the unknown.

Another train had also drawn up, and in the moonlight,

the two trains looked like long funeral processions.

I was crying, my face in my hands.

All of a sudden, the most exquisite song rose in the tragic night.

The voice came from the other train.

It was a man's voice, and he sang the serenade from La Demnation de Faust.

This song lifted my spirits from gloom, and my soul from despair.

In the moonlight, in the midst of all this human misery and distress, it was sublime.

As refugees fled from war, the regular British

Expeditionary Force began crossing the English Channel.

Among them was a 20-year-old Irishman, John Lucy.

Long before the war, he and his brother had joined the

army to escape the boredom of life on an Irish farm.

We were tired of fathers, of advice from relations, of bottled coffee essence,

of school, and of newspaper offices.

The cattle, fowl, eggs, butter, bacon, and

the talk of politics filled us with loathing.

Blow the lot.

As a matter of fact, we were full of life and the

spirit of adventure, and wanted to spread our wings.

We got adventure.

We enlisted.

At first, we could not follow the trend of events on the continent.

Whom were we to fight?

French, Russians, Germans?

What did it matter?

The dose of that rapid fire of ours, followed by an Irish being a charge,

would soon fix things.

On August the 22nd, John Lucy's unit reached the Belgian town of Mars.

The very next day, they faced a German force

that outnumbered them nearly three to one.

The Germans attacked them in waves, advancing shoulder to shoulder over open fields.

Our rapid fire was appalling, even to us, and the worst marksmen could not miss.

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 pleasure.

But within a few hours, John Lucy was astonished to

hear that the British Army was being ordered to retreat.

The soldiers at Mons thought they'd done rather well in

terms of holding off the oncoming masses for some time.

I think the fact that they still then had to pull back added

to this sort of sense of A frustration and B exhaustion.

But simply, the weight of the German advance was too strong for such a small

force, particularly as it had only just got to the front line, basically.

Every cell in our bodies craved rest.

Men slept while they marched, and they dreamed as they walked.

They talked of their homes, of their wives and mothers, of their simple ambitions,

of beer and cozy pubs, and they talked of fantasies.

The brains of soldiers became clouded and their feet moved automatically.

Like the retreating British, the advancing German army was close to exhaustion.

Then, as the German armies advanced deeper into France, gaps opened between them.

To close up, they moved not to the west as planned, but to the east of the capital.

The Germans were just 25 miles from Paris.

This at last gave the French the chance to strike at the exposed German flank.

To fail this time, would be to lose Paris and the entire war.

Paul Lantier was surprised to see even taxi cabs, heading for battle.

Inside the cabs, I caught a glimpse of soldiers sleeping, their heads thrown back.

Wounded?

asked somebody.

No, came the answer from a passing car.

It's the 7th Division from Paris.

They're off to the front.

What followed was the Battle of the Marne.

It lasted six days and involved two million men.

When it was over, the German advance had been stopped.

Paris had been saved.

The Schlieffen Plan was in ruins.

A different kind of war began.

Facing modern weapons, soldiers abandoned their 19th century

tactics of open warfare and began digging into the earth.

Trenches spread for mile after mile.

Stalemate.

And this is the first time that the British

are up against the realities of trench warfare.

And they are absolutely baffled as to why they have not been able to drive the

Germans back, have not been able to break through.

This is for them a whole new phenomenon.

400,000 French soldiers had been killed simply to reach stalemate.

German casualties were just as appalling.

The small British force had been all but wiped out.

John Lucy had survived, but not his brother.

I dreamed of him at night.

And once, he appeared to visit me, laying a hand on each of my shoulders,

telling me he was all right.

I felt relieved after this curious dream.

I was too weary to appreciate my own luck.

My eyes weakened, wandered, and rested on the half-hidden corpses of men and youths.

Proudly and sorrowfully, I looked at them.

The Macs, and the Oars, and the hardy Ulster

boys joined together in death on a foreign field.

My dead Johns.

While the German armies were pushing into France,

German citizens were fleeing from their homes.

They were escaping from a new threat.

The Russian army had mobilised more quickly than expected.

They were invading Germany in support of France.

Now Germany faced a two-front war.

The Russian army outnumbered the Germans four to one.

But its troops were not the enormous threat they appeared to be.

The Russian army is very much the twix and between.

It's been expanding incredibly rapidly.

And that meant an awful strain on the infrastructure with far too few officers

and especially far too few NCOs for what still

to a large extent is untrained peasantry.

Bravery was not enough to overcome these problems.

Artillery shells were rationed.

Some soldiers went into battle without even a rifle.

The Russian commanders, Pavel Renningkamp and

Alexander Samsonov, were not on speaking terms.

To bypass a 50-mile chain of lakes, the Russian generals split their army in two.

It was a mistake.

The Germans moved their forces south, where they outnumbered and surrounded

Samsonov's army at the Battle of Tannenberg.

The defeat of the Russian army during the East Prussian campaign, which in the West

is called the Battle of Tannenberg, was first and foremost caused by the

incompetence of the Russian commanders who led the campaign.

They made serious mistakes, which were exploited by the German commanders,

Hindenberg and Ludendorff.

The German machine guns were deadly.

Mowing down rows of Russians immediately as they raised

themselves in the potato fields to fire or to advance.

Colonel Alfred Knox was a British officer assigned to observe the Russian advance.

Instead, he witnessed the annihilation of Samsonov's army.

Samsonov said repeatedly that the disgrace

of such a defeat was more than he could bear.

The Emperor trusted me.

How can I face him after such a disaster?

He went aside and his staff heard a shot.

They searched for his body without success.

But all are convinced that he shot himself.

The Battle of Tannenberg was Germany's greatest victory of the war.

100,000 Russians were taken prisoner.

30,000 were killed.

As the weapons of war became more deadly, soldiers

tried out other ways of defending themselves.

chain-mail visors to protect eyes from flying shrapnel.

Bulletproof body armour.

Mobile encasements for advancing across no-man's land.

These ideas provided little protection.

The best soldiers could do was to continue digging into the earth.

The first thing was, it smelled bad.

It smelled bad because there were open latrines everywhere.

They weren't always used by the troops.

There were bodies rotting everywhere.

Both the Germans and the British were troubled with rats.

The rats ate corpses.

Then they came in and snuggled next to you while you were sleeping.

Sky study becomes one of your few amusements.

You never see a dear enemy and the only thing

you can see is the sky up above, actually.

I have a little wet home in a trench, where the rainstorms continually drench.

There's a dead cow close by with her feet in towards

the sky, and she gives off a terrible stench.

Underneath, in the place of a floor, there's a massive wet mud and some straw.

But with shells dropping there, there's no place

to compare with my little wet home in the trench.

Simply to stay alive, soldiers on both sides found ways to limit the killing.

The command made it clear that a certain number of shells had to go over every day

in order to make life miserable for the enemy.

But okay, you sent them over at that time of

day when the enemy would not be having dinner.

You wouldn't fire it at a position where you were likely to hurt many of the enemy.

You actually hadn't done the enemy a lot of damage, but then he hadn't done you a

lot of damage, and therefore you would live to fight another day.

On Christmas Eve 1914, temperatures on the Western Front dropped below freezing.

In some places, it began snowing, obscuring the moonlight.

Then, right across the German lines, lights began to appear.

The British braced themselves for an attack.

But instead of rifle fire, the sound of singing drifted across no man's land.

The Germans would be heard singing, stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

The British would respond with a British Christmas carol.

In some places, food was lobbed over into the opposing trenches.

One or two instances, the Germans erected Christmas trees.

And there was a kind of mutual curiosity.

Certainly instances of soldiers applauding each other's singing.

In one or two places, on Christmas Day itself, the first curious, slightly

headstrong people, perhaps from both sides, poked their head above the

trenches, and being made aware that somebody over the other side wasn't going

to shoot it off, then clambered cautiously out.

Captain Charles Stockwell was one of the first to take part.

I ran out into the trench and found that the Saxons were shouting, Don't shoot.

We don't want to fight today.

We will send you some beer.

A German officer appeared and walked out into the middle of no man's land.

So I moved out to meet him amidst the cheers of both sides.

We met and formally saluted.

He introduced himself as Count something or other, and seemed a very decent fellow.

The Christmas truce was the last twitch of the 19th century.

By that I mean it was the last public moment

in which it was assumed that people were nice.

It was the last gesture that human beings are

getting better the longer the human race goes on.

December the 26th.

At 8.30, I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with Merry Christmas on it.

The Germans put up a sheet with Thank You on it.

And the German captain appeared on the parapet.

We both bowed and saluted.

He fired two shots in the air.

And the war was on again.

1914 to 1918 continues here on BBC4 next Tuesday.

And the BBC's 90 Years of Remembrance website gives you the opportunity to share

your family members' personal stories on the BBC Remembrance Wall.

Next tonight, we're off on another railway walk with Julia Bradbury.

Thank you nor have six speakers on the fence.

For the most orphans in the Tuesday evening, conosco is from a parkta gang.