Original subtitles

For all we have and are, for all our children's fate, stand up and meet the war.

The Hun is at the gate.

Now the Germans were west of Brussels, and still they came on.

It seemed that nothing could stop them.

The Schlieffen plan was working beautifully.

The plan designed to carry the Germans through Belgium, brushing the Channel

coast, then down through France, right round west

of Paris, to attack the French armies from the rear.

Now, everywhere, the French were in confusion.

From Verdun to Charleroi, they were falling back.

And the German right wing, three armies, three-quarters of a million men,

was coming into position to make its sweep.

This was the loaded tip of von Schlieffen's flail, and the heaviest

weight in the tip was General von Kluck's first army.

They skirted the historic battlefield of Waterloo, where 99 years before,

British and Germans together had fought the French.

Ahead lay a dreary industrial region.

As they entered it, coming straight towards them without knowing, oblivious of

danger, believing that they were joining in a great allied advance, marched the

four divisions of the British Expeditionary Force.

Only the cavalrymen, under General Allenby, cautiously scouting ahead,

were aware of the German presence.

Then, suddenly, amid the slag heaps and straggling villages of a mining area,

the army was ordered to halt and dig in.

Field Marshal Sir John French had received new information.

There would be no advance, but instead, a defensive battle.

The British line formed a broad angle.

The left flank, where the danger was greatest, was wide open.

At its apex stood the little red-brick town of Mons.

Sunday, August the 23rd, came in with mist and scattered showers of rain.

Church bells were ringing, calling the devout Belgian people to early mass.

In their Sunday best, they stopped for a moment to stare at

the strange-looking foreign soldiers, who filled their town.

They found it hard to believe that war was upon them.

But these were the men of General Smith Dorian's 2nd Army Corps, digging in along

the banks of the Mons Canal, preparing an awkward position for defence.

Quite suddenly, out of the blue, we saw cavalry coming towards us.

They'd come out on our right flank.

Ah, it's a good gracious.

It's Germans.

So we immediately started to fire.

We fired Fusenort.

And they got about three, 300 yards, I suppose,

from the guns, and they wouldn't face it.

By nine o'clock, the guns were in full cry, and the British Army began to learn

about Jack Johnson's and Black Mariah's and coal boxes, the names the soldiers

gave to the deafening, shattering explosions of the German heavy shells.

We were in the trenches waiting for them, but we didn't

expect anything like the smashing blow that struck us.

All at once, the sky began to rain down bullets and shells.

I saw shells bursting to right and left of me, and I saw many a good comrade go out.

Then the German infantry began to come forward, surging

towards the canal banks and the crossings at locks and bridges.

There was a surprise in store for them, too.

They were in solid square blocks, standing out sharply against the skyline,

and you couldn't help hitting them.

We lay in our trenches with not a sound or sign.

They crept nearer and nearer, and then our officers gave the word.

The Germans seemed to stagger like a drunk man, suddenly hit between the eyes,

after which they made a run for us, shouting

some outlandish cry that we couldn't make out.

Poor devils of infantry.

They advanced in companies of quite 150 men, in files five deep.

The first company was simply blasted away to heaven by a volley at 700 yards.

And in their insane formation, every bullet was almost sure to find two billets.

They had absolutely no chance.

This was the mad minute.

15 rounds of aimed rifle fire per minute that

the British infantry alone were trained to do.

At Mons it worked the trick.

The Germans were shot flat.

Our first battle is a heavy, an unheard of heavy defeat.

And against the English.

The English we laughed at.

Well entrenched and completely hidden, the enemy opened a murderous fire.

The casualties increased.

The rushes became shorter.

With bloody losses, the attack gradually came to an end.

But it was all to no avail.

On the left flank of the British and on the right flank of their French

neighbours, German pressure was building up.

Sir Henry Wilson, the deputy chief of staff, clung

obstinately to the hope of actually advancing.

And then...

At 11pm, news came that the French 5th Army was falling back still further.

Between 11pm and 3am, we drafted orders for

retirement to the line Mauberge Valenciennes.

The retreat from Mons had begun.

We were very disappointed when we got the order

that we have to break off battle and retreat.

To do this is not an easy thing.

It's quite easy to join battle, but it's not easy to break it off.

However, we put down a curtain fire between us and the

Germans, which enabled the infantry and cavalry to get away.

After all the tricks of the trade from their experience of small wars,

the English veterans brilliantly understood how to slip off at the last moment.

On they came again.

The Schlieffen plan was still apparently going like clockwork.

The whole Allied line was going back.

The end of a dream.

And for thousands of frightened, homeless people, the end of a way of life.

On the other side of Europe, the story was rather different.

Here, it seemed, the Schlieffen plan was not working out so well.

A Russian steamroller was on the move.

Gathering slowly from the distant provinces of the Tsar's empire,

the limitless manpower of Russia assembled and marched to war.

Movement was slow across the endless plains, with

their bad roads and their railways few and far between.

Army by army, with ponderous deliberation, the Russians gathered on the Galician

Front, where the equally slow-moving Austrians were taking up their positions.

But in East Prussia, where the Schlieffen plan, counting on the slowness of Russian

mobilization, allowed only nine divisions to

hold the enemy off, the Germans received a shock.

On August the 17th, the Russians invaded East Prussia.

This, the Germans had not expected.

Now, German people tasted the tragedies which Belgians

and French were already learning to know too well.

It was the fear of the Muscovite hordes, the ancient, savage reputation of the

Cossacks, the terror of men with slant eyes that drove these people out of their

neat homes, away from the fields and farms on which they had worked so hard.

Orderly, submissive, sick at heart, they made their painful part in it.

On August the 20th, the day the Germans entered

Brussels, their eastern army was defeated at Gumbinem.

Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, was threatened by the Russian advance.

And on August the 23rd, the day of Mons, the

Russians won another victory at Frankenau.

But it was their last.

The telegraph wires bore their messages right across

Germany and as far as Belgium to summon new German leaders.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff were sent post-haste by Moltke to stop the rot.

Out of the confusion of retreat on a battlefront

over a hundred miles wide, they shaped a bold plan.

The Russian Second Army was now dangerously ahead of the First Army,

with the Masurian lakes lying between them.

Using the well-developed railway system of East Prussia to its limits, the Germans

would strike at the isolated Second Army, now

nearing the insignificant village of Tannenburg.

A German general with a French name, François, a Russian general with a German

name, Rennenkampf, a German general with a Scottish name,

Mackinson, and a Russian general with a tragic name, Samsonov.

These were the chief actors in the scene which followed.

The lesser actors were some half a million soldiers who did the fighting and marching.

This time it was mostly marching, particularly for the Germans, racing to

cut Samsonov's line of retreat to smash his

army before Rennenkampf could bring him help.

It took five days to do it, but at the end

of them, the Russian Second Army was a wreck.

90,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner, rounded up

like stock in a corral, and the head cowboy was Francois.

General Samsonov walked away into a wood and shot himself.

So East Prussia was saved.

The trimmed towns would not be shattered.

Cossacks would not burn the farmsteads.

Instead, the war would now flow eastwards.

What was more, Schlieffen's plan had stood the test, which was ironical indeed,

since it was on the point of being abandoned.

Not that any weakening of the German purpose was yet visible in the West.

Each day brought new discouragements for the Allies there, as the flail thumped

harder and harder against the left of the Allied line, while the centre continued to

give way and the right held on only by the skin of its teeth.

On one man, the pressure intensified daily.

The Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Joffre, each

day bringing him new questions, but never an answer.

My first task was to seek the cause of these failures in order to find a remedy.

Was it the enemy's numerical superiority?

It appeared that, as regards numbers, we were considerably superior to him.

Was it the French army's leaders who were at fault?

If so, Joffre knew what to do.

The Minister of War told him, eliminate the old fossils without pity.

And this Joffre would do.

But there was another question, which was more disturbing.

The French soldier is very impressionable, losing confidence as readily as he

acquires enthusiasm, yielding to depression as quickly as he becomes exalted.

Would he be able to hold out under this terrible strain?

And Joffre also asked himself a question which went to the very roots of everything.

Does the trouble lie in the strategic disposition of our forces?

On August the 24th, General Joffre reached a conclusion which shaped history.

What concerned me most was the encircling movement

which the Germans appeared to be developing on our left.

Now, it was the British alone who could offset this menace, and yet it was

precisely this army to which I had no right to give orders.

I had to content myself with suggesting.

It seemed to me necessary, above all, to place on the left of the British army

French troops to which I had the right to give orders.

This simple proposition contained a mighty seed.

And everything that happened confirmed the strength of Joffre's idea.

On August the 26th, he went to his second meeting with Sir John French.

The scene was witnessed by a young liaison officer, Lieutenant Spears.

Joffre began to explain the purport of an

order extremely important that he had issued.

Whilst he was doing so, in Walk Lansac, bustling in, then Joffre went on

explaining this order of his when Sir John French said, what about this order?

I haven't seen an order.

Whereupon, General Wilson, the sub-chief of staff, explained to Galva, awkwardly,

I thought, that some order had been received during

the night, but it hadn't been dealt with yet.

I got the impression it hadn't been translated.

When General Joffre realised that his orders hadn't even been received and read

by the British, he seemed overwhelmed with discouragement.

It was the only time I've ever known that he seemed to lose heart himself,

to be completely deflated.

This was an abject moment for General Joffre.

When I left British headquarters in the early afternoon, I carried away with me a

serious impression of the fragility of our extreme left, and I anxiously asked myself

if it could hold out long enough to enable me to regroup our forces.

If this manoeuvre was to succeed, two essential conditions had to be fulfilled.

First, our fourth and fifth armies must interrupt their retreat with partial

offensives and counterattacks to give me time to assemble a new army on our left.

Secondly, the British would have to resist

tenaciously and yield ground only very slowly.

Joffre didn't know it and neither did Sir John French,

but that was exactly what the British army was doing.

General Smith Dorian had decided to fight at Le Cato.

Second Corps was exhausted.

It would have to stand and fight.

It was strengthened by a new division from England on the left, and Smith Dorian

hoped that Haig's two divisions would show up, sooner or later, on the right.

And so, on August the 26th, the anniversary of Crecy, Le Cato joined the

company of the many insignificant French townships, which

had been pitchforked into history on a summer morning.

Things didn't start too well.

It was not the British 1st Corps which appeared on Smith Dorian's right,

but the German 3rd Corps.

They come up like a football crowd leaving Hampstead Park.

They come marching up in droves, firing their rifles from their right hips.

They have absolutely no idea of aim.

The British cavalry and horse artillery were driven in.

The infantry, in crude trenches and rifle pits, were taken in enfilade.

But they held on.

And once again, their rifles had wonderful targets.

We'd hardly got our head covered before the ridge, about three quarters of a mile

away, was literally swarming with Germans in their field grey uniforms.

And they advanced, and we received the order to rapid fire.

It was probably three quarters of a mile away, an extreme range for a rifle.

But we rapid fired at 15 rounds a minute at these advancing Germans.

And they broke up into smaller groups of probably six or eight,

advancing through a corn fill where the corn was in stooks.

As we rapid fired, they took cover behind these stooks of corn.

The line held.

But the morning hours passed slowly as more and more German units came into action.

The last British reserves were thrown in.

We were in reserve.

The brigade was formed up.

And orders came that we were required on the left of the line.

We would go fast.

And we marched four miles over the left of the line,

came to a village whose name I don't really remember.

And found Smith Dorian standing outside his headquarters.

And he waved to us as we passed.

And said, I think we're holding them all right.

It won't be wanted here.

And everything's going fine.

The exposed artillery batteries on the right flank lost heavily.

Men began to drift away from the battle.

It was time to go, if it could be managed.

The great problem was to extricate the guns.

Many of them silent now.

Standing at all angles on the skyline.

Amid smashed limbers, dead horses and dead men.

The Royal Artillery does not willingly abandon guns.

The teams dashed forward through cheering infantry.

As they came within view of the enemy, they were struck

by a hurricane of shrapnel and bullets from machine guns.

But still they went on.

The officer in charge of the teams was killed.

One team shot down in a heap before the position was reached.

But two guns of the 122nd battery were carried out without mishap.

A third was limbered up, but the horses went down instantly.

The rest had to be left.

The Germans were only 200 yards away.

Incredibly, in the broad daylight of mid-afternoon,

Smith Dorian's three divisions slipped away.

And the Germans did not even know which way they had gone.

This was the British Army's first real battle.

And the cost was considerable.

Nearly 8,000 officers and men.

And 38 guns.

And now they were retreating again.

Although they had done everything expected of

them, and they had no sense of being beaten men.

But tired troops can look like beaten men,

especially to those who don't understand them.

General Smith Dorian understood them perfectly.

It was a wonderful sight.

Men smoking their pipes, apparently quite

unconcerned, and walking steadily down the road.

No formation of any sort, and men of all units mixed up together.

I likened it, at the time, to a crowd coming away from a race meeting.

Joff's liaison officer at General Headquarters,

Colonel Huguet, did not understand the British Army.

Joff was appalled at his report.

The situation is extremely critical.

For the moment, the British Army is beaten, and is incapable of any serious effort.

The 3rd and 5th Divisions are now nothing more than disorganized

bands, incapable of offering the smallest resistance.

Conditions are such that, for the moment, the British Army no longer exists.

It wasn't true.

It was just that they were tired.

When we marched and marched, day after day, we got very little food.

We had... I'd eaten my emergency rations at

Bleeker 2, which, of course, I shouldn't have done.

We had a tin of bully beef.

I'd eaten that as well.

And we were all very, very hungry.

We certainly did get a cup of tea occasionally, or a canteen of tea.

And we marched through a forest, which was very cold and dank.

We were marching during the daytime.

Very big forest.

It was very cold in this forest.

Sometimes cold, more often far too hot, the

exhausted soldiers made their tour of France.

35 miles to the Somme and into Picardy, the long white roads, dead straight

between the poplar trees, dust rising off the cobbles.

I've seen infantry there with their feet bleeding.

I've seen infantry with their boots off and putties wrapped round them.

I've seen men sobbing and turning round, asking

our officers, why the hell can't we fight?

Why won't you let us fight?

Down into the Ile de France, the dark forests and the green river valleys,

with the little gay chalets where the Parisians go to fish and picnic in the summer.

This was no picnic.

It was a despondent tide of humanity, laden soldiers beside burdened refugees,

sharing the same wretchedness, treading the

same long road, which trudged wearily southward.

We came across two girls.

Only young girls they were.

They were just helping each other along.

And they could hardly drag one foot before the other.

A little bit further, I saw one poor old chap with a long white flowing beard sat

in a wheelbarrow there, and another old chap with a beard

wheeling him along, a little girl by the side, weeping.

Further as we got along, there were thousands, not hundreds, thousands,

taken to the woods at the side of the road.

We saw them, with what they had, the scanty

possessions, taking refuge in the wood for the night.

And these woods, they were just silhouetted in the...

in the background by the...

by the flames of the burning villages and

hamlets, which had been destroyed before them.

These people were just homeless and hopeless.

The hopelessness of it all began to communicate to everyone.

It reached even to the indomitable commander of the Allied armies, General Joffre.

It was a very strange thing to see a single man exercising his will over a mass

of about a million men with the fate of his country in balance, having to satisfy

the political requirements of his own government, the British government,

having to face a catastrophic...

situation, and never, never getting rattled.

Appearances and reality were beginning to drift apart.

One appearance did match the reality.

Everyone looked tired, and everyone was tired.

Order out of disorder, hope out of darkness, reverse out of triumph.

These were the realities which had to be plucked out of appearances.

South-westwards now, towards Amiens, and distant towns that

had never dreamt of war, marched von Kluck's first army.

If they were not checked, Joffre's new sixth army would be smashed before it formed.

Could they be checked?

It seemed that they just might be.

For as they marched to the south-west, a gap grew between them and their

neighbours, and the Germans, in their turn, exposed their flank.

It all depended on General Lanzac.

What followed was the Battle of Guise.

August the 29th, the French columns wove westward through

the early morning mists and across the river Wise.

Their objective?

St Quentin, on the left flank of the German first army.

At first, everything went well.

Slowly, but well.

Towards noon, the whole picture suddenly changed.

Von Bulow's second army now took the French in flank as it came southwards,

crossing the river Wise at the ancient town of Guise.

It was an ugly crisis, but Lanzac rose to the occasion.

He switched his reserve, still marching westward, into the northern fight.

Throw the Germans back across the Wise, he ordered.

The reserve commander, General Franchet Desperet, one of the most dynamic officers

in the French army, was just the man to do it.

On horseback, surrounded by his staff, Franchet Desperet led his red-trousered

infantry, with colours flying, bands playing into the attack.

It was the last of the old-time pageants of war.

And it succeeded.

They did throw the Germans back across the Boise.

The Battle of St Quentin came to nothing, but the Battle of Guise was a most

valuable success, because now the straining Schlieffenplan broke down at last.

General Von Bulow, in great alarm, called to Von Kluck for help.

And Von Kluck, halting his march to the south-west, turned inwards, towards Paris.

The streets of Paris were sad and empty, the city of pleasure silent now and scared.

The government had gone to the distant safety of

Bordeaux, and many of the citizens had also fled.

General Joseph Gallieni was in sole command.

Before he left, the minister of war had told Gallieni to defend Paris a outrance.

Do you understand, minister, the significance of the words a outrance?

asked Gallieni.

They mean destruction, ruins, dynamiting bridges in the centre of the city.

A outrance, the minister repeated.

Gallieni issued a proclamation.

Army of Paris.

Citizens of Paris.

The members of the government of the Republic have left

Paris to give a new impulse to the national defence.

I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader.

This mandate I shall carry out to the end.

The French people were learning fast what war meant.

Everyone was learning.

A special Sunday afternoon edition of the London Times, with a dispatch from a

correspondent in Amiens, confirmed what the observant

had been guessing from hints and suggestions.

It is important that the nation should know and realise certain things.

Since Monday morning last, the German advance

has been one of almost incredible rapidity.

British forces fought a terrible fight which may be called the Action of Mons.

The broken army fought its way desperately with many stands, forced backwards and

ever backwards by the sheer numbers of an enemy prepared to throw

away three or four men for the life of every British soldier.

Our losses are very great.

I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.

Some have lost nearly all their offices.

To sum up, the British Expeditionary Force has suffered terrible

losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement.

Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, at once circulated an official

correction to the Times correspondent's alarming dispatch.

There has, in effect, been a four-days battle

on the 23rd, 24th, 25th and 26th August.

During the whole of this period, the British troops, in conformity with the

general movement of the French armies, were occupied in resisting and checking

the German advance and in withdrawing to the new lines of defence.

In the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, also made a statement.

It is impossible too highly to commend the patriotic reticence of the press as a

whole, from the beginning of the war up to the present moment.

The publication in the Times would appear to be a very regrettable exception,

and I trust it will not recur.

The British public was not ready for too much truth.

Even in victorious Germany, there were signs

which contradicted the boasting of the press.

A British-born German princess wrote on September 2nd...

Today I went out to the Grunwald to see the arrival of trains full of wounded,

in the hope that I might see some English and help them.

But it turned out to be a false report, and they were only transport trains

carrying troops from the Western Front to Russia.

There was a tremendous reception, but the troops looked too weary to respond to it.

Very different from those of a short time ago.

And in St. Petersburg, also, bad news was making its first impact.

I kept passing groups of people engrossed in very lively discussions.

An especially large group was gathered before the

bulletin boards of the newspaper Novoya Vremia.

I was somewhat surprised, for I'd never seen so many people there.

Certainly, an event of exceptional importance must have occurred at the front.

People looked upset, and a voice said, What a disaster!

Even generals have been killed!

Why is the government deceiving us with news of victories?

To which another voice added, It's exactly the

same mess that happened during the war with Japan.

A chill struck at the hearts of the Allied nations.

The great weight seemed to be pressing down upon them all.

Whatever might be happening inside the German war machine, whatever mistakes the

Supreme Command might be making, the advance of the German armies seemed inexorable.

Invincible.

Yet all was not well with the mood of the German soldiers.

They were becoming weary beyond words.

And weariness breeds bitterness.

We marched on, and on, and on.

We never dared to take off our boots, because our feet were so swollen that we

didn't think it would be possible to put them on again.

And, in a small village, the mayor came and asked our company

commanders not to allow us to cut off the hands of children.

These were atrocity stories which we heard about the German army.

At first, we laughed about it, but when we heard of other propaganda,

things against the German army, we became angry.

Our men are done up.

The men stagger forward, their faces coated with dust, their uniforms in rags.

They look like living scarecrows.

They march with their eyes closed, singing in chorus,

so that they shall not fall asleep on the march.

The certainty of early victory and of a triumphal entry into Paris keeps them going.

It is the delirium of victory that sustains our men.

And in order that their bodies may be as

intoxicated as their souls, they drink to excess.

But this drunkenness helps to keep them going.

The British expeditionary force passed through the deep forest of Compiègne,

pausing to fight a rear-guard action at Villers-Cauteret.

It was shortly after we passed a place called Villers-Cauteret, which,

when the nearness of Paris began to penetrate our tiredness, and we noticed

the kilometre stones at the side of the road, gradually

we were getting nearer and nearer to Paris, 25, 24, 23.

We couldn't believe it was happening to us, but every step nearer to Paris,

as witnessed by these kilometre stones, were another blow on the head,

which increased our depression.

And we mentally felt that, should we reach zero, that is, Paris itself, that,

as far as we were concerned, we'd have lost the war.

Day by day, the essential switch of divisions

and army corps from right to left was going on.

Day by day, the picture changing, imperceptibly, but decisively.

And all the time, as the troop trains rumbled across France to the decisive

point, as the last pitiful batches of refugees made their escapes, and as the

last kilometre posts dragged slowly past the exhausted

soldiers, General Joffe was waiting his opportunity.

Hour by hour, the news came in from airmen, from cavalry, from secret agents,

from commanders.

Much of it was bad, bad enough to frighten a lesser man to death.

But one thing was certain.

The German right wing, General von Kluck's mighty first

army, was not, after all, going to encircle the allied left.

On the contrary, if it held on to its direction, it was going to march across

the defences of Paris, where Galliene was waiting like an eagle.

And as it did so, its own flank would be exposed.

The most dangerous mistake in war.

Joffe did not fail to perceive this.

I actually saw him when...

on the afternoon that he decided on the Battle of the Marn.

I've never seen, very few people can have ever seen anybody with such a burden

placed on his shoulders that nobody'd help just weighing the pros and cons of this

movement and that movement, what orders to issue.

It lasted quite a long time.

Perhaps a couple of hours.

And then he got up, his decision was taken.

And the orders went out that night.

The pendulum was coming briefly to rest.

For an indefinable moment of time, the soldiers paused in movement.

Under the gilding leaves of early autumn round their

campfires, the men of the warring nations drew a little breath.

The moment of decision was at hand.

the force in the country, The evening girls in the fight that refused to stand.

And we decided to take the ure.

Now the stroke of the warring nations The soldiers in the Head.