Original subtitles

In 1919, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, reflected

on a world that had endured four years of bloodshed.

If a man in 1914 had the misfortune to be wrecked on a desert island, returning to

civilization a week ago, the change would induce him to

believe that his long solitude had unhinged his mind.

He would see Germany, instead of being a confident,

arrogant empire, a timid and apologetic republic.

He would find Russia, now ruled by the exiles of yesterday.

He would see the Austrian Empire, a poor province

lifted out of beggary by the charity of her foes.

But what would surprise him more than all these bewildering transformations,

would be one thing in which there was no change.

Europe is a seething cauldron of hate.

As President Woodrow Wilson set sail from America for the Paris Peace Conference,

hatred and diplomacy were hand in hand.

The brief of the victors, to punish Germany, to redraw the map of Europe,

and to create a system of world politics that would make another war impossible.

A supreme moment in history has come.

The hand of God is laid upon the nations.

It was the first time a sitting president had traveled to Europe.

For Wilson, it was his chance to realize a vision and to remake the world.

Wilson called his vision the 14 points.

He proposed a league of nations that would maintain

peace and put an end to European imperialism.

President Woodrow Wilson's blueprint for a new

world order was national self-determination.

That is to say that peoples should determine their own form

of government and that the peoples should be sovereign.

And that out of the ashes of the old order of imperial

powers there should emerge new self-governing nations.

On his way to meet Wilson was Britain's Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

Lloyd George had a very different aim.

To protect Britain's empire and even expand it.

For him, President Wilson's solution to European problems had no hope of success.

Whilst we were dealing every day with ghastly realities on land and sea,

he was soaring in clouds of serene rhetoric.

This was President Wilson's first contact with Europe.

For ages the favorite hunting ground of beasts of prey and

poisonous reptiles creeping and springing on their victims.

George Clemenceau, France's premier, had just one aim.

To ensure that Germany would never again invade France.

God has his ten commandments, Clemenceau declared.

Wilson his 14 points.

We shall see.

Wilson may have thought that the war had been fought

for national self-determination and democracy.

The French thought that it had been fought for the security of France.

The Italians thought it had been fought for the expansion of Italy.

The British thought it had been fought for the preservation of the British Empire.

And no way was Wilson interested in any of those things.

Lloyd George, the pragmatic imperialist, Clemenceau, the victim, seeking revenge,

and Wilson, the moralizing idealist.

Around them gathered the smaller nations, all wanting self-determination for their

people, all wanting to meet Woodrow Wilson.

Delegations from all over the world came to me to solicit the friendship of America.

They frankly told us that they were not sure they could trust anybody else.

Some of them came from countries which I have, to

my shame, to admit that I never heard of before.

And I had to ask as privately as possible what language they spoke.

During the war, promises had been made to recognize national aspirations.

Now was the time for them to be made good.

The peace negotiations in Paris are like a grand bazaar, where all kinds of merchants

come and spread their wares, what they have to offer, what they want to buy,

what they feel is theirs by right.

But as allied diplomats gathered to talk of peace, their navies continued to wage

war against Germany and her allies by naval blockade.

After the armistice, hunger remained a weapon.

Vienna was particularly hard hit by the allied blockade.

Infant mortality soared.

One out of every four babies was dying.

For us, the war seems only to have begun.

It is said that the French mean to decimate the German population and that in

three months we shall all have died of hunger.

Anna Eisenmenger was an Austrian widow who had lost a son in the war.

She was now caring for her second son, blinded by shrapnel, and for her infant

grandchild who was struggling to stay alive.

There are no longer any swaddling bands in which to wrap the newly born.

People use paper, if they have any, or old scraps of material.

The wife of a doctor whom I know recently exchanged

her beautiful piano for a sack of wheat flour.

We live on hopes, expectations, and promises.

We wait eagerly for the good news which Wilson would send us from Paris.

The diplomats assembled in Paris were dealing with a world they no longer understood.

A world that Lenin's revolution had changed forever.

The victors had no answers.

They put together a peace without foundation.

The British diplomat Harold Nicholson was one

of those called in to advise the inner sanctum.

Nicholson had come to Paris with high expectations for Wilson's ideals.

But his admiration turned to anger as he watched the American president join the

old world game of dictating boundaries to the defeated nations.

The door opens.

A heavily tapestried room with the windows open upon the garden.

And the sound of water sprinkling from a fountain.

Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and President Wilson have

pulled up armchairs and crouched low over the map.

It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia

Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake.

During the afternoon, there is the final revision of the frontiers of Austria.

Hungary is partitioned, indolently, irresponsibly partitioned.

Then the Yugoslav frontier.

Then tea and macaroons.

The signing of the treaty was set for June the 28th, 1919.

Five years to the day after Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot.

The question of responsibility for the war was clearly answered.

Germany was guilty.

She would bear the costs of the war, a debt that could never be repaid.

Her army would be reduced to the size of a police force.

She would lose all her colonies.

When the German delegates were led in to sign the treaty, Harold Nicholson was there.

We enter the Hall of Mirrors.

Through the door, isolated and pitiable, come the two German delegates.

The silence is terrifying.

They keep their eyes fixed away from those two thousand staring eyes.

It's almost painful.

They sign.

The Allies were taking revenge on a German state that no longer existed.

The Kaiser was gone.

So were Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

What they left behind in 1919 was a political

war zone, where rival groups struggled for power.

The brutality of the trenches had been brought home to the streets of Germany,

turning cities into battlegrounds between left and right.

Yet a people in anarchy were obliged to pay for the sins of their former rulers.

One act of revenge creates another.

It's endless.

The way in which Versailles was conducted was disastrous, in that it didn't provide

anything that could be called worth the sacrifice of even

a fraction of those who had died in the First World War.

So the idea of why, what for, has no answer for

someone like Harold Nicholson and for many others.

It becomes a peculiarity, an odd nightmare, a continuation of the nightmare

of the war rather than the breaking of a new dawn.

I look out over the garden towards a tranquil sweep of open country.

The clouds, white on blue, race across the sky.

Clemenceau emerges from the door.

He is joined by Wilson and Lloyd George.

The crowds upon the terrace burst through the cordon of troops.

The big four are lost in a sea of gesticulation.

Celebrations afterwards.

We're given free champagne, at the expense of the taxpayer.

It's very bad champagne.

To German soldiers, the humiliation of the peace treaty was hard to bear.

A German corporal wrote of his anger.

When the old gentleman began to tell us that we were throwing ourselves on the

mercy of the victors, I could stand it no longer.

Everything went black before my eyes.

I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk,

and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

And so it had all been in vain.

In vain, all the sacrifices and privations.

In vain, the hunger and thirst of months, which were often endless.

In vain, the two million who died.

Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open?

The graves of those who with faith in the

fatherland had marched forth never to return?

Would they not open and send the silent, mud-and-blood-covered heroes back,

as spirits of vengeance, to the homeland which had cheated them with such mockery?

The young corporal was Adolf Hitler.

He determined to take revenge for the shame

inflicted upon his country, whatever the cost.

Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made to the

fatherland, when with sore heart she let her best-loved boys march off,

never to see them again?

Hatred grew in me.

Hatred for those responsible for this deed.

In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.

I decided to go into politics.

As the world faced a future of uncertainty, many others struggled to

attach some meaning to the terrible price they had paid during four years of war.

The new medium of motion pictures reflected the public mood.

One of the first films to question the conduct of the war was a French feature,

J'accuse.

The director was Abel Gance.

Turned down for military service because of bad health, he'd

seen many of his closest friends die on the battlefield.

He decided to show his anger at their deaths, and

began to film while the war was still being fought.

Remarkably, Gance had the help of the French army.

What he did to get French army cooperation was to make it appear to be a

justification of war, extremely patriotic, in fact

chauvinistic, so that he had tremendous war backing.

And then one day, he was doing the opening titles, with

thousands of French soldiers forming the title J'accuse.

And a French general said, By the way, what are you accusing?

And he said, I'm accusing the war.

I'm accusing man.

I'm accusing universal stupidity.

The film's hero, like Gance himself, was horrified by the war.

While standing in a cemetery, he witnesses the dead rise from their graves,

not to comfort the living, but to pass judgment on them.

And the corpses come to life and march through the country streets into the

villages to ask, Has our death been worthwhile?

And the hero runs, terrified, ahead of them, warning the inhabitants,

grabbing them and saying, For God's sake, what

have you been doing since your husband died?

You know, how many men have you been living with?

You're going to meet your husband any minute.

And it was so powerful that in some places, certainly in England, women

fainted and had to be taken out of the cinema.

These ghosts were not actors.

They were actual soldiers.

Gance called his cast the dead on leave.

By a sad irony, many of the soldiers who

appeared in the film would later die in battle.

These haunting images are the last visual records of them.

And his son died.

Great perfect And they remembered that in a fantasy We

drank farewell to civilization without an age of finality.

We do not perform Sie capable song Now they could do a biggang with his parents,

who was excluded from the manine to their talents.

We all became confidential and almost emotional.

At such a moment as that, the war felt quite a friendly affair.

As horrible as the war was, it was an experience that

many people found positive, productive, and worthwhile.

They came out very attached to their experience of the war, thinking that this

was the best time of their lives, that they had experienced comradeship with

other men that they had never even thought possible before.

And for many of these men, the road back was just very, very difficult.

Siegfried Sassoon, the British poet, was one of those

who found it impossible to leave the war behind.

The man who endured the war at his worst was everlastingly

differentiated from everyone, except his fellow soldiers.

Millions of soldiers joined veterans' associations.

They kept their memories alive and helped their less fortunate comrades.

An army of the walking wounded returned home to

societies ill-equipped to deal with the traumas of war.

An American military film tried to show how even

amputees might still enjoy a game of baseball.

An army of the people.

Does it matter losing your legs?

For people will always be kind.

And you need not show that you mind when the others

come in after hunting to gobble their muffin and eggs.

Does it matter, losing your sight?

There's such splendid work for the blind.

And the people will always be kind as you sit on the

terrace remembering and turning your face to the light.

Do they matter, those dreams from the pits?

You can drink and forget and be glad.

And people won't say that you're mad.

For they'll know that you fought for your country.

And no one will worry a bit.

These were the soldiers who continued to show

what suffering in the trenches had meant.

They were a continuous reminder of what they had gone through in the gas attack,

in the bombardment, in being buried for hours under the

earth and being at the brink of psychological collapse.

And many of the population did not like to have to face these war cripples.

They did not wish to be remembered continuously of what war was really like.

And these bodies were really sites of remembrance.

Among the most tragic victims of the war were

what the French called the men with broken faces.

When medical science failed to help these mutilated men, artisans took over.

The skills of the sculptor were called upon in special clinics.

Using pre-war photos of the patients, sculptors

fashioned thin masks to cover the worst wounds.

The men who helped these men cope with their injuries was the British orderly,

Ward Muir.

It is difficult to convey a fair impression of the extraordinary sort of

precision with which these membrane-like but strong metal

masks adhere to the face and cover the grisly gap beneath them.

Figure what this means to the patient.

Instead of being a gargoyle ashamed to show himself on the streets, he is almost

a normal human being and can go anywhere unafraid.

Self-respect returns to him.

His depression departs.

Concealing war wounds was one way of coping with a war that refused to go away.

Drawing attention to them was another.

The German artist, Otto Dix, knew what disfigurement could do to a man.

He had been a soldier during the war and was now suffering from nightmares.

I am obsessed with the devil.

That is how I know what is up in the world.

He painted, he said, to rid himself of the demons of war.

After the war, he is actually painting the effects of the war on human bodies.

Really, the psychological effect as well, and

the mental devastation on the human being.

But he images it in the flesh, in this really crude, deliberately grotesque manner.

Because he really wants to shock people.

The effects of war are when you see somebody with half their face scoured

away, walking down the street, and you try and look away.

The people were already beginning to forget what

unspeakable suffering the war had brought with it.

It is not the task of artists to correct and convert.

They are much too small for that.

But they must give their testimony.

The effects painted what he saw around him.

Former soldiers reduced to selling matches on the street.

Disfigured amputees with horrid head and facial wounds.

And women forced to become prostitutes to avoid starving.

Once the war is over, the prostitute and the war cripple are the two most trenchant

ways in which you could actually image on a human

body the horrors and the degradation of the war.

So, he implies that the brutalising done to you, whether as a soldier or as a

prostitute in that war, was savage and real.

The streets of post-war Berlin became drawn into the chaos of defeat,

revolution and counter-revolution.

The German artist, George Gross, described the anarchy.

Inhabitants, half-crazed with fear, could not

stand the confinement of their own four walls.

So, they went up on the roof to shoot pigeons and people.

The whole city was dark, cold and full of rumours.

The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine traffic.

All moral codes were abandoned.

A wave of vice, pornography and prostitution enveloped the whole country.

George Gross was one of a growing number of painters in Berlin, drawn to art as a

way of expressing his disgust with what he saw around him.

My art was to be gun and soared.

I considered all art senseless, unless it served as a weapon in the political arena.

Grotz embraced a new artistic movement called Dada.

Begun in Zurich during the war, Dada exhibitions outraged post-war Berlin.

Dada artists like Grotz declared, The kunst ist tot, art is dead.

Values like reason, beauty and obedience, all

prized before the war, had lost their meaning.

We derided everything.

Respected nothing.

Spat upon everything.

That was Dada.

It was not mysticism, not communism, not anarchy.

We were complete nihilists.

Our symbol was non-existence.

A vacuum.

A hole.

As time passed, the battlefields of the Great War became hallowed ground.

Thousands tried to retrace the footsteps of their loved ones.

Those who made this pilgrimage soon after the war found the landscape still an open

wound, the trenches still littered with human remains.

Two years after the war ended, the British journalist

Stephen Graham took a walk across those desolate fields.

The stagnancy has not dried up.

But festers still in the black rot below the rushes.

Double shell holes.

Charred ground.

Great pits.

What is it now?

The abode of rats.

Lizards weasels.

Unexploded stick bombs.

Rusty grog bottles.

Helmets lie there still in plenty.

There are broken rifles.

There are graves.

Death and the ruins completely outweigh the living.

There is a pull from the other world.

Lying in an old trench.

Behold.

A skull.

It is clean and polished.

A soldier's head.

There is a frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium.

The simplest way to pick it up would be to put a finger in the eye hole and lift it.

Friend or foe.

The more you look at the skull, the more angry does it seem.

It has an intense eternal grievance.

This one does not grin.

For the mouth has been destroyed.

It is just blind and senseless.

Forever and ever.

By 1922, the battlefields were cleared and national

cemeteries for the dead of the Great War had been created.

But the pull from another world still held millions of survivors in its grip.

One was Keita Kollwitz, one of the gifted artists of her time.

In the early days of the war, she'd watched her 19-year-old son, Peter,

march off to battle.

He was killed on his second day at the front.

I knew it all even then.

I sat on the bed and wept, wept, wept.

Where do all these women find the courage to send their dear ones to the front to

face the guns, when they have watched over them all their lives with loving care?

Kollwitz's art had always portrayed the hardships of her and the anguished.

With the death of her son, she joined them.

She tried to express her grief in a monument to her dead son.

But her guilt made the work so painful that she put it aside for years at a time.

Is it a break of faith with you, Peter?

If I can only see madness in the war.

But I shall do this work for you and for the others.

Dear Peter, I ask you then to be around me.

Help me.

Show yourself to me.

The real impetus comes when she visits the graveyard in

Belgium, where her son's remains were placed in 1926.

And she goes away and she decides the only thing she can do for this sea of crosses

is two figures of her husband and herself.

And she chooses this mourning, grieving father.

And the grieving mother.

Who she places in the centre of this graveyard, so that they encompass,

they grieve for every young man who lay in that field.

And when she goes to install it in 1932, she describes in a letter home how she

goes to look at it, then she goes to her son's grave, and then she walks back to

her own image, and she weeps, and she strokes the cheeks of the figure she's

carved to look like herself, with her own tears.

And it seems to me that that reconciliation,

that redemption, is what that statue's about.

My husband stood close behind me.

I heard him whisper.

Yes.

How close we were to one another then.

Keita Kollwitz drew solace from being able to visit her son's grave.

But millions were less fortunate.

Those who could not afford to make the journey,

and those whose sons had vanished without trace.

In Britain, the government's solution was

to unveil a memorial in the heart of London.

An empty tomb.

The Cenotaph.

It commemorated the nearly one million dead of the British Empire.

But for some, this was not enough.

They needed assurance that their loved ones had not

gone forever, that their spirits lived on after death.

One of those seeking solace was Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the

flower of our race, and the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around

one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception where their loved ones had

gone, I seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous.

A breaking down of the walls between two worlds.

A direct, undeniable message from beyond.

A call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock

Holmes, was one of the leaders of spiritualism.

He had lost several loved ones in the war, including his son Kingsley.

Like millions of others, Conan Doyle found comfort in the

belief that it was possible to communicate with the dead.

Conan Doyle believed that this blurred image, floating above his head,

was that of his dead son.

Thousands of others who saw similar visions were equally convinced.

In the wave of mourning that followed the war,

millions were caught up in the spiritualist resurgence.

Spiritualism gave people a chance to have a ritual interment of members of their

family whose graves were not known, or who had literally been blown to pieces.

Maybe half of the men who were killed in the First World War had no known graves.

The families had no place to go through the rituals of separation.

A séance was one of them.

Six of us, all personal friends, sat in a semicircle.

My wife being on my left.

Presently, a voice came quite close to my face.

Both my wife and I cried out that it was our boy.

He began to talk.

He tried to console me for his death.

I asked, Are you happy?

He answered, I am happy now.

He put his strong, heavy hand on my head and pressed as solidly as possible.

And I can assure you that he left me a good deal happier than he found me.

Arthur Conan Doyle never escaped the shadow of loss.

He spent the rest of his life searching for an

explanation, for a way of justifying his grief.

There were millions like him.

To understand this century, we must return to the Great War and remember the millions

who shaped the world in which we live today.

Siegfried Sassoon died in 1967, still a soldier in his mind and in his memories.

He was unable to forget, but feared the rest of us would.

Have you forgotten yet?

For the world's events have rumbled on since those gag days,

like traffic checked while at the crossing of city ways.

But the past is just the same.

And war's a bloody game.

Have you forgotten yet?

Look down and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Nametz?

The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

Do you remember the rats?

And the stench of corpses rotting in front of the frontline trench?

And dawn coming, dirty white, and chill with the hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, is it all going to happen again?

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack?

And the anger?

The blind compassion that seized and shook you as you

peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher cases lurching back?

With dying eyes and lolling heads?

Those ashen-gray masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?

Look up and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.