Original subtitles

A summer Sunday, 1914.

All across Europe, the bells were pealing, calling men and women to church.

Sunday, the Lord's Day, and a day of rest.

It was a world of firm beliefs.

The established order was not widely questioned.

Father at the head of the family, the monarch at the head of the nation.

God in his heaven.

Sunday after church was a day of quiet pleasures.

A little darling day, dreams cried of Idaho, so now you know.

And when you go, you see there's something on her mind.

I don't think it's you, because no one's won a kid that girl but me.

In the Bois de Boulogne, the Tiergarten, or

Rotten Roe, the aristocracy displayed themselves.

Carriages, servants, dazzling clothes.

Material progress had marched swiftly in the peaceful decades before 1914.

It was a world of novelties, clashing with established ways.

Wireless and telephones, motorcars and motorcycles,

electric light and electric trains, submarines and airships.

A world humming with new energy and power.

But under the smiles, the relaxation, it was a world of tensions.

The old order, with its economy based on land, and its society based on owning

land, was in conflict with the new order of industry and teeming cities.

Industry had uprooted populations, expanded them beyond belief, tempted them,

enriched them, and impoverished them.

The peace of Europe in 1914 was a fragile thing.

On the idle hill of summer, sleepy with the sound of streams, Far I hear the

steady drummer, drumming like a noise in dreams.

In the Germanic empires lying across the heart

of Europe, the clash of old and new was obvious.

Under the leadership of Prussia, under Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor,

Germany had emerged as a nation and as a world power.

In 1871, her 39 separate states, after centuries of discord, had united at last.

The kings of Saxony and Bavaria, the princes, dukes and electors,

Brunswick, Baden, Hanover, Mecklenburg, Württemberg, Oldenburg, all paid

allegiance to the king of Prussia, the Kaiser.

This unity fulfilled a deep wish in German hearts.

It gave them a sense of destiny.

Even the leadership of Prussia was better than insignificance.

And with unity had come an extraordinary upsurge of energy and expansion.

In 1871, there were 41 million Germans.

In 1913, there were nearly 68 millions, an increase of more than half.

And more than half of them were living in towns and cities.

But it was not merely an expansion of population.

The foundations of economic strength at the turn of the century were steel and coal.

In 1932, Germany had made great strides with both...

Steel production multiplied by twelve in thirty years.

Coal production multiplied by nearly five in thirty years.

Stefan expanding by four.

Exports multiplied by three.

Exports of chemicals multiplied by three.

Exports of machinery multiplied by five.

In thirty years, Germany's share in world trade had risen by a third.

Now, in 1914, Germany was, after America, the

most powerful industrial nation in the world.

The epitome of her industrial might lay in the firm of Krupp.

Essen, city of steel, where the first Krupp factory was built, became, by 1902.

..

A great city with its own streets, its own

police force, fire department and traffic laws.

There are 150 kilometers of rail, 60 different factory buildings,

8,500 machine tools, seven electrical stations, 140

kilometers of underground cable and 46 overhead.

Germany delighted in the prowess of Krupps.

When Alfred Krupp died in that year, the Kaiser attended

his lavish funeral and called him a German of the Germans.

In 1914, the firm employed 80,000 workers.

They lived in Krupp houses.

Their babies were delivered by Krupp doctors.

Their children educated in Krupp schools.

They bought at Krupp stores, borrowed books from Krupp libraries.

Married in the Krupp church and were buried in the Krupp cemetery.

Under Bismarck, Germany had come closer than any

other state to modern conceptions of social welfare.

German workers enjoyed sickness, accident and maternity benefits,

canteens and changing rooms, and a national pension scheme.

Before these were even thought of in more liberal countries.

Yet the life of the workers was hard.

The steel mills operated a 12-hour day and an 80-hour week.

Neither rest days nor holidays were guaranteed.

In Germany, as in every industrial state, there was poverty and protest.

By 1912, the Socialist Party was the strongest party in the Reichstag,

the German parliament.

But the Reichstag did not rule Germany.

The Kaiser ruled Germany through officials whom he personally appointed.

No one, says Sir Winston Churchill, should judge the Kaiser Wilhelm II without

asking the question, what should I have done in his position?

Imagine yourself brought up to believe that you were

appointed by God to be the ruler of a mighty nation.

Imagine succeeding in your twenties to the prizes of Bismarck's three victorious wars.

Imagine feeling the magnificent German race bounding beneath

you in ever-swelling numbers, strength, wealth and ambition.

And imagine on every side the thunderous tributes of the crowds and the skilled,

unceasing flattery of the court.

With this background, subjected to these pressures, trying to hide a left arm

withered from birth, for 30 years, Wilhelm II had vexed

and perturbed the peace of Europe, but always short of war.

His first public utterance when he came to the throne

was addressed not to the people, but to the army.

We belong to each other, I and the army.

We were born for each other, and will indissolubly cleave to each other.

I promise ever to bear in mind that from the world above the eyes of my forefathers

look down on me, and that I shall one day have to stand

accountable to them for the glory and honour of the army.

These were not empty words.

The German Kaiser was also the king of Prussia.

And it was precisely for the sake of Prussian strength that the other Germany,

the Germany of the merchants, the industrialists, the musicians,

the philosophers, had accepted her rule.

The Prussian influence was seeping through the whole nation.

It was, above all, a military influence, well described by one of its advocates,

General von Hindenburg.

The army trained and strengthened that mighty organising

impulse which we found everywhere in the fatherland.

The conviction that the subordination of the individual to the good of the

community was not only a necessity but a positive blessing, had gripped the mind of

the German army, and through it, that of the nation.

With Prussia as the core, the German Empire was

the most powerful military organism in the world.

And at its head, posturing, gesturing, stood the all-powerful Kaiser,

challenging Europe.

Without Germany, and without the German

Kaiser, no great decisions must ever be taken.

If this should happen, the position of Germany in the world would vanish forever.

And I do not purpose that this should ever happen.

To employ suitable, and if necessary, violent means ruthlessly, is my duty,

my fair privilege.

Germany's neighbours watched her clamorous progress with alarm.

The Republic of France uneasily remembered her

overwhelming defeat at Germany's hands in 1870.

Then, the rich lands of Alsace and Lorraine had been torn from her.

Patriotic Frenchmen bitterly resented the loss, and

the bitterness was passed on to new generations.

Think that the motherland is your second mother.

That she weeps and suffers over the children they have torn from her bosom.

France had her iron, her coal, her industry.

But the French were, above all, tillers of the soil.

The produce of her fields and vineyards made France self-supporting.

The French cared for good food.

The specialities of each province acquired international fame.

And while the plough land and pastures of the provinces fed Paris, Paris itself

fertilized not only France, but Europe, too.

The curiosity and enthusiasm of Parisians matched a

period which seemed to produce new novelties every day.

Louis Blériot was the first man to fly the channel.

I began my flight steady and sure.

I have no apprehension, no sensations, nothing.

I am making at least 42 miles an hour, traveling at a height of 250 feet.

Below me is the sea.

There is nothing to be seen, neither France nor England.

I am alone.

For ten minutes I am lost, and then I see the cliffs of Dover.

There were flying experiments of another kind, not so successful.

Cranks or pioneers, the French greeted them all expectantly.

A moving pavement was displayed at the exhibition of 1900.

Looking down from it, Paris was truly sovereign of cities, seemliest in sight.

The wide-bustling boulevards, the cafés, the

Louvre, storehouse of Europe's treasures.

The imprisoned sunshine of the Impressionists.

The acting of Sarah Bernard, the Moulin Rouge, and the legs of Mistin Guette.

Dinner at Maxime's.

Picasso and Matisse were painting.

In her quiet laboratory, Madame Curie was discovering radium.

Paris was the Mecca of the West.

But Paris is not France.

The glamour of Paris did not reflect the deepest truths about the French.

It encouraged their optimism, but it concealed unrest and violent agitation

among the industrial classes, who felt left out of a rising tide of prosperity.

It concealed the backwardness of French industry

in a world where this counted more and more.

It concealed a declining birth rate in a world which paraded its millions.

It concealed the canker at the heart of French politics, memory of the defeat of

1870, and fear of the rising might of Germany.

Because of this memory and this fear, the army

played a special part in the life of France.

Shattered in 1870, it had made a remarkable recovery.

It became a national army based on universal conscription.

It schooled itself in colonial wars, but its eyes were fixed on the German frontier.

In 1914, there was a socialist government.

Anti-militarism, pacifism and internationalism

were being proclaimed with swelling voices.

The delegates of the workers' organizations judge that wage earners

obliged to go to war have this alternative only.

Either to take up weapons in order to menace other wage earners, or to take up

battle against the common foe, capitalism.

Anti-militarist and anti-patriotic propaganda

must become ever more intense and audacious.

Discordant voices in France, strident voices in Germany.

For as Germany pursued the destiny preached

by her thinkers, another neighbor took fright.

The Germans were not content with military might and industrial supremacy.

They still felt cheated.

They wanted a place in the sun, an empire.

Between 1884 and 1890, German sovereignty was proclaimed over

an area more than four times larger than Germany herself.

And on the pretext of protecting these colonies and her expanding trade,

Germany began to build a battle fleet.

This was a threat that any British newspaper reader could understand.

The sea served Britain in the office of a wall or as a moat

defensive to a house against the envy of less happier lands.

Now envy was reaching across the sea.

Winston Churchill spoke for all Britain when he

said, Our naval power involved British existence.

If our naval supremacy were to be impaired, the whole fortunes of our race

and empire would perish and be swept utterly away.

Britain awoke to the truths of the 20th century.

Reality jarred against the romantic image of merry England.

Yet the image lived on, reinforced by the

royal family in its role of country's choir.

Englishmen liked to think of themselves in these terms.

They attached magical virtues to walking over fields.

They also found virtue in royal pageantry, jubilees, coronations, state openings,

funerals.

The funeral of King Edward VII in 1910 provided a

last glimpse of royal Europe in all its panoply.

Nine kings followed Edward's coffin through the streets of London.

King George V, his successor, the Kaiser, his nephew, the king of Belgium,

the king of Spain, the kings of Portugal, Denmark, Bulgaria, Norway and Greece.

The watching, awestruck crowds were reminded that Britain

was the centre of an empire on which the sun never set.

The most glittering jewel of all was India.

The great Durbar at Delhi in 1911 seemed to set the seal on British rule.

Wearing their purple coronation robes and preceded by attendants carrying peacock

fans, yak tails and golden maces, their majesties took their thrones and

faced the tens of thousands of their subjects.

King George V wrote in his diary, The most beautiful and wonderful sight I ever saw.

I wore a new crown for India which cost £60,000.

The amphitheatre contained about 12,000 people and about 18,000 troops.

119 princes and maharajas bowed and retracted in a ceremony which lasted a full hour.

The Delhi Durbar affirmed the bond between the king

emperor and more than 300 million Indian subjects.

Africans too were subjects of the British crown.

To Cecil Rhodes had come the dream of linking British

possessions with a railway from the Cape to Cairo.

The almost unbroken pink up the map of Africa

showed the dream well on the way to realisation.

And there were the white dominions, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

These were the lands where men of British stock had driven down new routes,

creating British populations in far distant places,

half as numerous as the Britons who stayed at home.

In the British Isles, life for many was a struggle for daily bread.

The national wealth of the country in 1914 has been computed at £14,300 million.

But in the black deserts of Britain's industrial towns, working-class families

could not afford decent clothes or enough to eat.

In London, at the turn of the century, 30.7% of

the population were living below the poverty line.

In York, 28% existed on a diet less generous than that of the workhouse.

Small wonder that the chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, wrote...

Our working populations, crushed into dingy and mean streets, with no assurance

that they would not be deprived of their daily bread, by ill health or trade

fluctuations, were becoming solemn with discontent.

As in Germany and in France, the workers turned to socialism.

The Labour Party was born.

But 40 Labour MPs could not provide a remedy.

Only through the rapidly growing trade union

movement could the workers assert their demands.

In 1911 and 1912, Britain was swept by a wave of

strikes more complete and embittered than any yet seen.

The trade union leader, Ben Tillett, said...

It was a great upsurge of elemental forces.

It seemed as if the dispossessed and disinherited classes were all

simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.

The ruling classes reacted with furious incomprehension.

In Liverpool, troops were brought in to fire over the heads of the crowds.

A man told Sir Austin Chamberlain...

I think the situation is so serious that I went this

morning to a wholesale armour's to buy five revolvers.

The shopman said, we had 100 yesterday.

We had 50 when we opened this morning.

We have not one left now.

This was England, facing a class struggle such

as she had not seen for over half a century.

Facing also the dispossessed who had nothing to do with class.

The women.

The old fight for women's rights received a new

impetus from the militant suffragette movement.

Nothing was safe from their attacks.

Churches were burned, public buildings and private residences destroyed.

Bombs were exploded.

The police and individuals assaulted.

Meetings broken up.

At Epsom, on Derby day, a suffragette waited to throw herself under the King's horse.

She died of her injuries.

Workers and women.

There were others too whose discontents were coming to a head.

Southern Ireland was clamouring for home rule.

Her spokesman was Amon de Valera.

The militarist power which has kept Ireland within its

grasp for centuries can never be persuaded to let go.

If liberty is not entire, it is not liberty.

The Irish struggle brought Britain to the very edge of civil war.

Poverty and envy, riches and arrogance, ambition and frustration, doubt and demand.

These were the tensions of every industrial state.

And to them were added the tensions between states themselves.

In Britain, alarm grew with the growth of the German fleet just across the water.

Public opinion, disunited on almost everything

else, was united on the need for battleships.

Each launching, whether in Barrow or in Bremen,

drove Britain and Germany further and further apart.

Even men as sympathetic towards Germany as Lord Haldane could

say, Peace was to be preserved, but preserved on what terms?

On the terms that the German was so strong by land and sea that he could swagger down

the high street of the world, making his will prevail at every turn?

In 1908, Lloyd George met the German ambassador.

I explained to him that the real ground for the growing antagonism in this country

towards Germany was not jealousy of her rapidly

expanding commerce, but fear of her growing navy.

But the Kaiser did not care.

I do not wish for a good understanding with England

at the expense of the extension of the German fleet.

So, Germany's naval dreams made Britain a potential enemy, just as her military

might had kept alive the hostility of France.

The two nations were drawn together by Germany's challenge.

The Entente Cordiale was forged.

By 1914, when King George V paid a state visit to Paris and rode with President

Poincaré through cheering crowds, the Entente was ten years old.

In both countries, men welcomed the end of centuries of rivalry.

It seemed a good omen for peace.

But the security offered by the Entente Cordiale was delusive.

For France had another ally on the other side of Europe.

Russia.

Britain, in turn, made an agreement with her.

Thus, Germany found herself faced with what her statesmen had always most dreaded.

Encirclement.

Potential enemies in the West and in the East.

In the summer of 1914, it was not Britain, nor France, nor

Russia, which held the real threat to the peace of Europe.

The real threat lay in the alliance of Germany's making.

Her alliance with Austria.

This was a shackle linking the swelling vigour of Germany

to the irresponsible policies of an old, decaying empire.

Bismarck foresaw the danger.

I shall not live to see the Great War.

But you will see it.

And it will start in the East.

For centuries, Austria had been the leading

German state, Europe's shield against the East.

By 1914, her empire was an anachronism, whose fatal ambitions died hard.

At the head of this ancient realm stood the Emperor Franz Josef, 84 years old.

He had reigned in Vienna since 1848, Europe's year of

revolutions, when the Austrian Empire had come near to collapse.

Franz Josef held it together by a mixture of compromise and repression.

But nothing could disguise its decrepitude.

Lord Lansdowne wrote, To human calculation, the Habsburg Empire cannot

survive the decease of the Emperor Franz Josef.

The anachronism lingered on, upheld by this old man.

Its ceremonies, its displays, its brilliant uniforms, the rigid protocol of

the Imperial Court, the high-sounding titles, the wit, the music, the culture of

Vienna, all belonged to a past which was becoming ever more at odds with the present.

For this Empire was not merely Austrian.

It was, in the first place, a dual monarchy.

The Austrians shared power with the Hungarians,

who kept their own Parliament and their own laws.

Austrians and Hungarians together ruled over a mixture of peoples.

Italians, Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs.

Nearly half of Franz Josef's subjects were Slavs, who viewed

their masters with sullen hatred and yearned for liberation.

They looked for aid outside the Austrian Empire to the free Slav countries,

the rising Kingdom of Serbia and the Russian Empire, protector of Slavs everywhere.

Tribal memories and tribal fears agitated all these

people, whose borders stretched to Europe's edge.

Russia would stand by the Slavs.

Against Russia, Austria would need strong help.

Germany had promised that help.

Whatever comes from the Vienna Foreign Office is a command from me.

Yet there were those in Germany who felt misgivings.

In 1914, the German ambassador in Vienna said, I constantly wonder whether it

really pays to bind ourselves too tightly to this

phantasm of a state that is cracking in all directions.

But the Austro-German alliance was a fact, leading to inescapable conclusions.

In 1914, the Kaiser noted, as a soldier, I have no doubt, on the basis of

information reaching me, that Russia is systematically preparing for war against us.

And I frame my policy on that assumption.

Russia also was a troubled anachronism.

The Tsar of all the Russias ruled over countless millions of people.

More than 130 millions of them had been counted in the census of 1897.

How many more were contained in the deep hinterlands of the Russian Empire?

None could say.

This was the largest state in the world.

A sprawling giant.

Communications across it were primitive and difficult.

During the thaw, almost impossible.

A British diplomat wrote, No one can have the slightest idea what the country tracks

in Russia are like during the spring and winter.

It took me 16 days to traverse 80 miles.

Over these limitless distances, the Romanov dynasty, in the person of

Nicholas II, emperor and autocrat, ruled absolutely.

In 1895, answering a demand for more representative government, the Tsar said,

Let all know that in devoting all my strength to the people's well-being,

I shall preserve the principle of autocracy as

firmly and as undeviatingly as did my father.

In 1905, Russia suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan.

The very foundations of Tsarism were shaken.

The peasants, the vast illiterate masses of Russian people, living on a chancy

borderline of famine and ruin, rose in revolution.

They found allies in the growing industrial proletariat.

But the 1905 revolution was bloodily crushed.

In 1906, the principle of autocracy was restated

by the imperial council more firmly than ever.

To the emperor of all the Russians belongs supreme autocratic power.

Submission to his power, not from fear only, but as a matter of conscience,

is commanded by God himself.

With this imperious rejection of democracy, the regime recklessly tightened

the tensions, exasperated the feelings and embittered the thoughts of the people.

There were riots and strikes.

A strike in the Lena goldfields was ruthlessly suppressed.

The Tsar and his court consumed their time with

simple pleasures, heedless of the Russian people.

Interior tensions were coming to the boil in this

pious, passionate, intensely patriotic nation.

And as they did so, external tensions also grew.

The Balkans, where the Slav lands lay between the scowling frontiers of three

crumbling empires, were their point of impact.

In 1908, Austria, with outdated ambitions, annexed the Slav

territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the borders of Serbia.

Russia, still weak after defeat by Japan in 1905, let that pass.

Then in 1912, the small Balkan kingdoms joined together

to inflict a crushing defeat on the Turkish Empire.

But they quarrelled among themselves.

Out of the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, Serbia emerged as the strongest of the

Balkan states, an inspiration for all Slavs.

Austria watched her inconvenient progress with a jealous, calculating eye.

The British ambassador in Vienna reported in 1913.

Relations between Austria and Russia are growing worse day by day.

Serbia will one day set Europe by the ears and bring about universal war.

The French president, Poincaré, came to a similar conclusion.

Whatever be the issue, small or great, which may arise in the future between

Russia and Germany, it will not pass by like the last.

It will be war.

In Austria, the issue was clear.

The Austrian chief of staff, Konrad von Hotzendorf,

said openly, We must crush this viper of Serbia.

By 1914, Europeans had learned to live with fear.

And fear is the midwife of war.

On Sunday, June the 28th, Europe entered upon her final, fatal crisis.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne and his wife, were

visiting Sarajevo, capital of the recently annexed province of Bosnia.

From Serbia, just across the border, a group of Slav terrorists had also come

to Sarajevo, pledged to kill Franz Ferdinand.

As the Archduke and his wife took their departure, one of these terrorists,

a Slav schoolboy called Gavrilo Princip, fired two pistol shots.

They hit Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

A quarter of an hour later, both were dead.

The peace of Europe died with them.

The family was here!

The hello of Israel.

And his wife was behind the sidewalk.

The second one.

And his wife was behind the sidewalk.

He came to his dormant.

The other day, one of these people's guards were near the sidewalk.

The two of them who felt very close to rue.