Original subtitles

To enter the trenches of the Western Front was to enter an alien world.

A world's soldiers found it almost impossible to describe.

The German soldier and artist Otto Dix was one of those who tried.

Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves,

corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets.

Mortars, fire, steel.

That is what war is.

It is all the work of the devil.

New Year, 1916.

Fresh troops came to replace the dead and the wounded.

And none could see an end to the suffering.

On the Western Front, the German army was

still entrenched on Belgian and French soil.

On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was in retreat, having suffered massive losses.

There was food rationing in Germany.

Submarine warfare on the high seas.

Air raids on Allied cities.

No one was safe.

But worse was to come.

What happened on the battlefields of 1916 was

to give a new meaning to the idea of sacrifice.

Soldiers summed it up in one word.

As the war entered its 18th month, soldiers feared that

the stalemate of trench warfare could never be broken.

One new and murderous answer to the deadlock came from the

chief of the German general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn.

Germany, he believed, was running out of time.

A decisive victory meant striking at the heart of the Western Front.

That meant France.

Falkenhayn's battle plan called for attacking the ancient site of Verdun,

a city protected by a ring of fortresses.

Falkenhayn knew that the city of Verdun was such a potent symbol

of French pride that they would defend it to the last man.

The Battle of Verdun is the Battle of France.

It's the place of the identity of France.

There was no battle before, no battle after,

which was so important in the French memory.

So you can't understand France without understanding Verdun.

Created for Louis XIV by his master architect Vauban,

Verdun's fortresses were constructed above and below ground.

A fortified camp as far back as the Roman Empire, Verdun had been the last of the

French cities to fall in the Franco-Prussian War.

The French were determined not to see history repeat itself.

Three French soldiers, Falkenhayn predicted, would die for every German.

This was the strategy of attrition.

A strategy not to capture a physical objective, but to bleed an enemy to death.

Now that battle of attrition was unique in history because its initial purpose was

not to win it, but to create a kind of stalemate in which the other side would be

worn down so severely that they would be unable to

attack or maybe even to prosecute the war at all.

It's a form of attrition to yield a victory after a mountain of corpses was produced.

It's a new kind of war.

Falkenhayn's code name for the battle was Gericht, the place of judgment.

In secret, the Germans had assembled their heavy guns north of Verdun.

On February the 21st, 1916, the storm broke.

The fortress town was hit by a massive bombardment from 1,200 guns.

Never before had so much artillery been concentrated around a single city.

The French military command was caught completely by surprise.

And just as Falkenhayn had anticipated, they rushed troops to the front.

We are lost, wrote one new recruit.

They have thrown us into the furnace.

In Verdun, when you got there, you were in the crucible.

There was no way out.

Soldiers could see it for miles glowing in the

distance because of the artillery bombardment.

Doormont was the strongest of Verdun's twelve forts.

Lost by the French in February, winning it back became a matter of honour.

They eventually succeeded in October, but at the cost of over 100,000 casualties.

Three quarters of the French army would be rotated through Verdun.

One of them was 38-year-old Lieutenant Henri Dessagneau.

At every moment we are sprayed with clouds of earth and stone splinters.

How many men are afraid?

How many men are weak at the knees?

It's a void.

We are no longer in a civilised world.

One suffers and says nothing.

Dessagneau spent only two weeks at Verdun.

But he called his time there a glimpse of hell.

A place where men struggled both to stay alive and to keep their sanity.

There's death everywhere.

At our feet, the wounded groan in a pool of blood.

For hours, these groans and supplications continue until they die before our eyes.

Without anyone being able to help them.

The initial German attack had been devastating.

But they quickly lost their advantage as the French moved their guns forward.

40 million artillery shells were fired by the two armies.

About 200 rounds for every soldier killed.

Falkenhayn's plan for a battle of attrition rebounded.

Now the German army too started to bleed to death.

Their trenches ceased to exist.

The woods that once protected them from French observation were gone.

Many German soldiers found shelter in the

underground forts, captured from the French.

But even underground there was no escape.

As German soldier Wilhelm Herrmanns discovered.

It was an enormous place.

Crowded with many hundreds of soldiers.

Some lay on bunks, sleeping, snoring and moaning.

Here a flashlight, there a candle, match or cigarette

dotted the dark with flickering islands of light.

Continually shifting in brightness.

I opened my knapsack to get something to eat.

But a putrid smell spoiled what little appetite I had.

Schultzer had told me that under this heap of earth, many French soldiers were buried.

Having been killed by poison gas when we

Germans captured this underground stronghold.

Suddenly, I heard the cry, poison gas!

I saw people around me putting on their gas masks.

Soon, many were dying.

And the bunks and floors were filled with bodies over

which the living stepped and stumbled in search of air.

It was as if the souls of the dead Frenchmen, who were gassed and lay under

the very mound on which I was standing, had demanded and were receiving their revenge.

Fimerich said to me, Remember, Willy, we must not hate the French for using gas.

We used it first.

The battle for Verdun would be the longest of the war.

It lasted nine months and 27 days.

And yet, when it was over, there was no real advantage to either side.

Only in December were Verdun and its forts secured by the French.

And at enormous cost.

Total casualties?

377,000 French soldiers.

And 337,000 German soldiers.

Killed, wounded or missing.

The burden of the Allied effort on the Western Front now shifted to the British

and Dominion forces and their civilian volunteers

who had come forward to enlist in 1914 and 15.

Nearly two and a half million volunteers had answered Lord Kitchener's call to arms.

Civic pride led towns to try to raise more battalions than their neighbours.

Often whole groups of friends and workmates enlisted together.

He made a promise very early on that if you joined

up in a group, the group would be kept together.

And the phrase was, join up with your pals or your chums, your friends.

And so you got what was to prove, I mean, it was potentially this tragic

situation, ghastly situation, of whole streets of young men going off together,

whole sort of little factories of young men going off together.

It was ghastly because they were all going to get killed together.

At first, there were not enough uniforms or weapons.

And there were echoes of amateurism in the training for officers, as Second

Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon discovered, while under instruction in France.

Sometimes a renowned big game hunter gave us demonstrations of the art of sniping.

He was genial and enthusiastic, but I was no good at rifle shooting.

A gas expert from GHQ would inform us that gas was still in its infancy.

Most of us were either dead or disabled before gas had had time to grow up.

But the star turn in the classroom was a massive, sandy-haired Highland major,

whose subject was the spirit of the bayonet.

He spoke with homicidal eloquence.

Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of the Germans.

To hear the major talk, one might have thought

he did it himself every day after breakfast.

Not everyone was eager to join up.

Edward Thomas was one who had doubts, as his wife Helen remembered.

He hated the newspaper patriotism.

He saw through the lies and deception of the

press, as he'd always seen through untruths.

Women rarely recorded their intimate view of the war.

Helen Thomas was an exception when her husband, driven by his sense of duty,

did enlist.

She recalled in her memoirs their last night together.

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

He takes out his compass and explains it to me.

But I cannot see.

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?

He reads one or two to me.

His face is grey and 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 hand falls over my shoulder.

And I hold it with mine.

So we lay.

All night.

Sometimes talking of our love.

And all that had been.

And of the children.

And what had been amiss.

And what right.

We knew the best was that there had never been untruth between us.

We knew all of each other.

And it was right.

So talking.

And crying.

And loving in each other's arms.

We fell asleep as the cold reflected light of the snow.

Crept through the frost-covered windows.

In 1916, Britain's volunteer army would fight its first major battle.

It would happen here, on the plains around the Somme River.

125 miles northwest of Verdun, the British and French armies met.

Here, the Allies hoped to break through the German

lines with a joint attack along a 30-mile front.

The commander of the British army, Douglas Haig, is forever linked to this battle.

Few generals in history have been so fiercely defended or harshly criticised.

Haig is, to me, remains, however much I think about him, and whatever defences of

him I listen to, remains to me a profoundly unattractive figure.

He does seem to have been cursed by some emotional deficiency.

Haig faced a terrifying military problem.

Decisive success on the Somme required him to break through the German lines.

His army of civilian volunteers were patriotic and

brave, but many had never been tested in combat.

Yet Haig was being urged by the French to attack immediately.

He was warned that if pressure was not taken off Verdun, France would collapse.

Haig was very aware all the time of the strain that the French were enduring.

The French, in fact, were becoming desperate.

And he was able to come up with very clear and

crystal-like concepts of what should be done.

And he had immense patience, immense perseverance.

And he was able to stand up to a great deal of punishment and disappointment.

Haig agreed to a major offensive.

By spring, he thought his volunteer army was ready to fight.

The British battle plan called for a massive

bombardment of German positions over several days.

The German lines were to be pounded to rubble,

their protective barbed wire blasted away.

Then waves of Allied soldiers would simply walk

across no-man's land and capture the enemy's trenches.

You will not need rifles, some soldiers were told.

You will find the Germans all dead.

Not even a rat will have survived.

For the first time, the British artillery had a lot of guns and

large quantities of ammunition, which was an absolute novelty.

They put more guns and more ammunition than they'd

ever dreamt that they were going to possess.

And they thought they could shift heaven and earth with it.

Rimmer says we are to smash the Hun line altogether.

Shove in our army and finish the war.

Rimmer also says that we have given Germany four

days to declare peace or take the consequences.

26-year-old Kenneth McArdle, a second lieutenant

from Ireland, was among the optimists.

After spending a miserable winter in the trenches

on the Somme, he was now ready for a fight.

I am not addicted to boasting, but I think if he could see all the guns

behind, all the grenades, trench mortars, and other stores in front, if he knew how

thoroughly ready we are, and if he could conceive how we are longing for the day,

I think if he knew, the Kaiser would cut his losses and take poison.

It was the biggest barrage that had ever been,

so they were firing over 100,000 shells a day.

And that, of course, gave the soldiers great confidence, because they thought,

how can anybody live under this bombardment?

Stephen Westman, a doctor with the German army, arrived

at the front just as the British bombardment began.

For seven days and seven nights, the ground shook

under the constant impact of light and heavy shells.

Our dugouts crumbled, tumbled on top of us.

Our positions were raised to the ground.

No food or water reached us.

Down below, men became hysterical.

Even the rats panicked and sought refuge in our flimsy shelters.

The bombardment prepared the ground and was

supposed to clear the ground of fighting soldiers.

It never really achieved this aim.

The more heavy the shelling, the deeper the dugouts became.

And it was certainly a nightmare to have to survive.

But soldiers did survive.

On July the 1st, 1916, at 7.20 in the morning, there was an enormous explosion,

filmed by an official cameraman.

The British had detonated the first of five

massive mines planted underneath the German line.

These very few seconds of silence set in, and this was the signal.

Everyone on the German side knew this was the beginning of the

rising of the Allied soldiers from the trenches and the attack.

Shoulder to shoulder for about 10 or 15 miles.

And proceeded to advance across no man's land.

And as they did so, the Germans, who, of course, had been waiting in terror

in their trenches, realized when they heard the

bombardment stop that the attack was coming.

So they rushed up from their dugouts beneath the trenches and set up their

machine guns and began to fire for their lives, literally for their lives,

because, of course, it was kill or be killed.

It was a kind of relief to be able to come out, even into

air still filled with smoke and the smell of cordite.

They started firing furiously, and the British had frightful losses.

By now, Lieutenant McArdle was in the middle of no man's land, leading his

soldiers straight towards the enemy's guns.

As we advanced, German shells littered the battlefield with dead and wounded.

All around us and in front, men dropped or staggered about.

I found a sergeant, and shouting in his ear, asked, where were his officers?

All gone, sir, he shouted back.

The attack had been a disaster.

Thousands of wounded soldiers waited for sunset to turn into darkness.

As night fell, no man's land came alive as they began crawling back to their trenches.

The ones that made it were taken to dressing stations and hospitals behind the lines.

The operating rooms were ablaze.

The place by one o'clock in the morning was a shambles.

The air was thick with steaming sweat.

Mary Borden was an American nurse who had been

travelling in France when the war broke out.

Instead of going home, she volunteered to run a field hospital.

It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the

ambulances, and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms.

If I made a mistake, some would die on their stretchers

on the floor under my eyes, who need not have died.

It was all, you see, a dream.

The dying men on the floor were drowned men cast up on the beach.

And there was the ebb of life pouring over

them, sucking them away, like an invisible tide.

There are chests with holes as big as your

fist, and stumps where legs were once fastened.

There are eyes, blind eyes, and parts of faces, the nose gone, or the jaw.

There are these things, but no men.

I thought, this is the second battlefield.

The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of these men.

It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies.

July the 1st, 1916, would be remembered as the

single worst day in British military history.

There were 57,000 British casualties overall, 19,240 of them fatal.

Some pals' battalions suffered terrible losses.

It was said they were two years in the making, and ten minutes in the destroying.

The first news of the battle to reach England would be encouraging, but false.

Newspaper headlines reported, Great Day on the Somme, and New Armies Make Good.

But a patriotic press gave readers little

understanding of a battle that would last four months.

The world's first war documentary would change all that.

The Battle of the Somme is, without doubt, the most

important film in the social history of the British cinema.

It was a great test of how realistic an image of the war

the British public could bear to see exposed in public.

Cinema-goers were stunned by the brutality of these first images from the Somme.

A few were staged, most were real.

The film was intended as a morale booster.

It wasn't.

At the height of emotion, when the soldiers go

over the top, the cinema orchestra stopped playing.

So, suddenly, in the cinema, there was silence.

Suddenly, you were presented with an empty space.

And images of British soldiers being killed.

You were invited to fill that space with your own emotion.

There are numerous accounts of, on one occasion, a

wounded soldier having to be led crying from the film.

Of a woman's voice shouting out, in the silence of the cinema, My God, they're dead!

The film was seen by an estimated 20 million people,

half the entire civilian population of Britain.

The British government, like governments everywhere,

quickly realised the power of the moving image.

Never again in wartime would an official portrayal of battle be so real,

or so uncensored.

The film ended in the autumn of 1916.

But on the fields of the Somme, the battle continued.

Men fell in their hundreds, sometimes their thousands, every day.

The British would attack, and the Germans would counter-attack.

So it went on.

It's probably true to say that the men who

fought it had never seen anything like it before.

The generals who planned it had no precedent.

The other side of looking at it is more critical.

This was not supposed to be an attrition

battle, a battle to wear the other side down.

It was stated as a breakthrough battle.

But the longer the battle went on, the more

evident it was that no breakthrough was possible.

And yet, the battle continued.

In some ways, it led to a redoubling of efforts.

It didn't lead away from the war.

It led to its deeper, more profound, more vicious prosecution.

The regiment was crumbling away.

All the world was forever dead to Vaudry and Kenworthy.

To Chesham, Sprout, Ford, and of the other ranks.

We did not know how many.

Vaudry used to enjoy early morning parades.

Chesham had loved to hunt the buck in Africa when

the heat was shimmering with the birth of the day.

Young Victor was killed.

His problem of marriage to a woman six years a senior finally settled.

General Shea has wired, Well done, 90th Brigade.

You will attack again soon.

We are about 400 strong today.

We who went in 800.

This was Kenneth McArdle's last diary entry.

Within days, he too would be dead.

Only in November, when the weather turned bad, did Hague call off the battle.

The Allied army had advanced exactly six miles, four miles short of the objective

Hague had hoped to take on the opening day.

There were over one million total casualties.

620,000 British and French soldiers and 450,000 German soldiers were killed,

wounded or missing.

Siegfried Sassoon left the Somme with a bullet in the shoulder, the military cross

for bravery and a growing doubt about the war.

I looked across at Albert.

Its tall trees were flat, grey-blue outlines and the broken tower of the

basilica might have been a gigantic clump of foliage.

Only the distant thud of gunfire disturbed the silence,

like someone kicking footballs a soft bumping miles away.

Low in the west, pale orange beams were streaming down on the country that receded

with a sort of rich, regretful beauty, like the background of a painted masterpiece.

For me, that evening expressed the indeterminate tragedy

which was moving with agony on agony toward the autumn.

I leant on a wooden bridge, gazing down into

the green glooms of the weedy little river.

But my thoughts were powerless against unhappiness so huge.

I couldn't alter European history or order the artillery to stop firing.

I could stare at the war as I stared at the sultry sky, longing for life and

freedom and vaguely altruistic about my fellow victims.

But a second lieutenant could attempt nothing,

except to satisfy his superior officers.

And, altogether I concluded, Armageddon was

too immense for my solitary understanding.

Like most of the infantry, I had expected too much of the Battle of the Somme.

Troops moved in and out of the front line according to a rotation system.

After a few days at the front, they would spend some time in the reserve trenches.

Then they would move three or four miles further back to the rear areas,

where they could take some rest and relaxation.

Behind the lines, resting or training, an entire social network arose among men

determined to forget the worst of trench warfare.

Cavalry regiments organised jumping competitions.

The infantry formed football leagues and staged boxing tournaments.

The Canadians, and later the Americans, played baseball.

The soldiers wrote and published their own newspapers, and in improvised cinemas,

they watched the new stars of the silent screen.

They formed their own amateur dramatic troops, and

gave them names like the Duds or the Shrapnels.

Lacking women for their vaudeville shows, they created their own.

The journalist Philip Gibbs reported back to the Times newspaper in London,

from behind the lines.

Five hundred men were there, packed tight, and all with their eyes fixed with

fascination upon a little lighted stage, where there was a world of comedy and song

which witched those men's souls away from the war zone.

A topping show, said an officer.

It brightens up the men to no end.

Those weeks away from the front were seen as crucial to a

soldier's endurance during his days under fire in the trenches.

Now that power of endurance was about to be put to the test yet again.

As 1917 began, the Allies were confident of a

decisive breakthrough before the year was out.

This time, there was new reason for optimism.

Hague's army was developing new tactics.

Better gunnery techniques and shell production

meant more accurate and reliable artillery fire.

The creeping barrage, a moving wall of shells to protect the advancing infantry,

was being perfected.

The infantry platoon was reorganised and was given greater

firepower, so they stood more chance of keeping an attack going.

Greater use was made of aircraft to bomb and machine gun ground troops.

Tanks were now helping the infantry get through the German wire.

Grim as the Somme had been, great improvements did become evident in 1917.

People were thinking about what they were doing and not just accepting futile attack

after futile attack without some sort of evaluation.

On Easter Monday 1917, the new techniques paid off.

The Canadians seized Vimy Ridge.

Just to their south, near Arras, British and South

African troops advanced three and a half miles.

Now, just think of it, three and a half miles in one morning is a tremendous

achievement by Western Front standards at that time.

Now, that to me, above all, illustrates that

something had been learned from the Somme.

Preparations began for a new attack, this time in Belgium.

Hague's ambitious plan called for breaking through

the German lines, overlooking the town of Ypres.

Then he would sweep across the low plains and swing west to the sea.

On the 7th of June, the British army made its first move of the offensive.

It was dramatic.

After two years of tunnelling beneath the Flanders countryside, Allied soldiers set

off a series of 19 giant mines planted under the German line at Messines Ridge.

They go off simultaneously, and they completely disrupt and disorder the German line.

This is a major Allied victory.

What happens?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The positions are occupied, and the Allies stop.

The British army doesn't attempt to link this major

victory with movements in other parts of the front.

Instead, they take six weeks to sort out the problem of command, who's going to run

it, with what destinations, and to move their artillery further north to hit the

other two major centres of German resistance.

King George V paid a visit and was treated to a tour of the battlefield.

The offensive resumed just in time for the

onset of the wettest summer and autumn in years.

Aircraft could not fly.

Tanks could not move.

Hague and his commanders ordered repeated attacks across what was now a swamp.

There is one enduring memory of the battle that came to be known as Passchendaele.

Mud.

Men caught in the mud could be found a day or

two later, lower down, and with their minds gone.

Horses would go.

Whole carts would go.

Drowning in mud is, in many respects, the signature of Passchendaele.

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood.

Why should jolly soldier boys complain?

God made these before the roofless flood.

Mud and rain.

Mangling crumps and bullets through the brain.

Jesus never guessed them when he died.

Jesus had a purpose for his pain.

I, like abject beasts, we shed our blood, often asking if we die in vain.

Gloom conceals us in a soaking sack.

Mud and rain.

Passchendaele is often remembered as the most tragic battle of the entire war.

One man who witnessed it was Paul Nash.

He was sent to the front, not as a soldier, but as an official war artist.

Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous.

They are mockeries to man.

Only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter

black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land.

The rain drives on.

The stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow.

The shell holes fill up with green white water.

The roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime.

The black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.

Three months passed before Haig called off the campaign.

Instead of a breakthrough, his army had advanced only five miles further,

into a swamp.

Total casualties for both sides.

Half a million men killed, wounded or missing.

By now, many soldiers were beginning to question why they were fighting at all.

Out here, men have been thinking.

The most insistent question is, why am I here?

The greatest wrong is, I am still here.

But an end will come.

And the next will be a day of reckoning.

Everyone knows that out here.

Do they know it at home?

I wonder.

They will.

The next episode of 1914 to 1918 is here on BBC4 on Tuesday evening.

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.

project for recovery, the C св тzu.

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