All language subtitles for 1964-The Great War(BBC)-EP01-On the Idle Hill of Summer-E

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.