Original subtitles

The pendulum of war had come to rest.

The armies halted.

Around the campfires, men were too weary to talk much, but they could wonder.

Which way would they march tomorrow?

For 15 days, the Allies had been in constant retreat.

For 15 days, the great weight of the German armies had

pressed steadily down towards Paris and the heart of France.

By September 5th, they were less than 20 miles from the capital.

Would Paris fall?

Hope waned, and time was running out.

Yet one man preserved his hope and made his will prevail.

At the headquarters of the Allied armies, General Joffe

perceived that a significant change had taken place.

The situation was impressive.

Our front formed the arc of a vast circle enveloping the enemy.

Thus, our 5th Army was now in a position to make a frontal attack against the enemy

columns crossing the Marne, while the British army and the mobile troops of the

Paris garrison were well placed to attack in flank the

German forces which had diverged from the direction of Paris.

This was the moment of decision, the moment that Joffe had been waiting for.

Now hundreds of thousands of tired, despondent men must be halted,

turned about, and thrown against the enemy.

From Verdun to the Marne, Joffe ordered his right wing to hold firm.

The German 2nd Army was marching southward, at some distance from the 1st.

The French 6th Army would strike in from the west.

As von Cluck turned to meet this threat, the French 5th Army

and the BEF could march upon the gap in the German line.

One thing was essential.

The BEF must march.

Once again, Joffe visited Sir John French to

explain his plan and plead for British aid.

And finally, clasping his two hands in front himself, he turned to Sir John

French and said, Monsieur le Maréchal, c'est la France qui vous supplie.

Field Marshal, it is France which is begging you.

It was so moving, that Sir John French, who was awfully British, very unemote of

himself, was so moved, that he chuckled with the French language once more.

He couldn't get anything out.

And turning to somebody, he said, Tell him that anything that men can do,

our men will do.

We will attack tomorrow.

The word began to filter down the line that

we were on the move in the reverse direction.

At first, we found it difficult to believe.

But sure enough, we soon found ourselves recrossing

the mount and we were on the advance again.

The revulsion of feeling is impossible to describe.

We have, from being tired, worn out, demoralised creatures, we became what we

intended to be trained soldiers with the enemy in view, and off we went.

The happiest day of my life, we marched towards

the rising sun, wrote a British officer.

It was September the 6th, 1914.

General Geoff issued an order of the day to his armies.

The moment has passed for looking to the rear.

All our efforts must be directed to attacking and driving back the enemy.

Groups who can advance no further must at any price hold on to the ground they have

conquered and die on the spot rather than give way.

Under the circumstances which face us, no act of weakness can be tolerated.

Slowly, the pendulum started its counter-swing.

The Germans resisted strongly.

North of Paris, General Monnery's army was

heavily counter-attacked and in danger of defeat.

General Galliani, military governor of Paris, rushed

forward reinforcements in taxi cabs, the taxis of the Marne.

The men they carried just sufficed to prevent a collapse.

But the centre was the vital area.

Here, the French 5th Army and the BEF thrust forward into the widening gap

between the armies of von Kluck and von Bülow.

Reluctantly at first, but each day, more certainly, the Germans gave way.

On September the 11th, Joffe telegraphed to the Minister of

War, The Battle of the Marne is an incontestable victory for us.

And now, as the Allies reaped the rewards of victory, new

hope surged up in men who had faced the abjectness of defeat.

Could the Germans be hustled back to the frontier, out

of the rich provinces of France which they had overrun?

Could the Allies stage a swift and shattering

pursuit, back to the Rhine in three weeks, perhaps?

Optimism spread its wings.

General Sir Henry Wilson compared notes with an officer of Joffe's staff.

Miettelow asked me when I thought we should cross into Germany.

And I replied that unless we made some serious

blunder, we ought to be at Elsenborn in four weeks.

He thought three weeks.

Vitesse, vitesse, urged General Foch.

En avance, soldats, pour la France, cried General Franchet d'Espere.

But General Haig, commanding the British First Corps, remarked, I thought our

movements very slow today in view of the fact that the enemy is on the run.

The movements were too slow.

Broken bridges, tiredness, over-caution, brave fighting by German rearguards,

all combined to slow the Allied advance.

On September the 13th, Haig's corps reached the river Aisne and pushed up

along the wooded spurs of the Chemin des Dames ridge.

The ladies rode, running along the heights beside the river from Soissons.

They were just two hours too late.

A German army corps, released by the fall of Mauburge, marched 40 miles in 24 hours,

with a quarter of its infantry falling out on the way, and

arrived in the nick of time to block the British advance.

The Germans dug in hastily along the Chemin des Dames ridge.

The British were unable to dislodge them and dug in also.

The French did the same in their turn.

The beginnings of trench warfare were now seen.

On September the 16th, Joff told his army commanders, It seems as if the enemy is

once more going to accept battle in prepared positions north of the Aisne.

In consequence, it is no longer a question of pursuit, but of methodical attack.

Every attack was halted.

The Germans counter-attacked to throw the Allies into the Aisne.

They also failed.

Losses mounted on both sides.

At the end of the month, General Haig said, In front of this corps, and for many

miles on either side, affairs have reached a

deadlock, and no decision seems possible in this area.

Joff had already reached this conclusion.

So had the German high command.

Simultaneously, Allies and Germans moved against each other's flanks.

So the war, which had burned its way southward so swiftly, rolled back

northward like a forest fire under a changing wind.

The flames fared upon new countrysides, Picardie, Artois, Flanders.

This was the race to the sea.

All through these days of frustration on the Aisne, by railway, on horseback,

on foot, thousands by bicycle.

The soldiers of both sides were on the move.

Populations which had hoped to be spared were driven before the storm.

And in the north, the thunder of great guns was heard again.

On September the 28th, the Germans began a

violent bombardment of the outer forts of Antwerp.

The king of the Belgians, with his army and his

government, had taken refuge in this great port.

Antwerp was heavily defended by rings of powerful

forts, with some 150,000 Belgian soldiers inside them.

On October the 1st, the London Times said, We do not

think that there is any need to worry about Antwerp.

But the next day, the British government heard that

the Belgian army was proposing to abandon the city.

The news, says Sir Winston Churchill, seemed not only terrible, but incomprehensible.

Churchill himself sped across the sea.

He promised the Belgians Allied support and persuaded them to wait.

Naval armoured cars came up the coast from Ostend, and troops of the newly formed 7th

Division, using any sort of transport they could find.

Then at Antwerp itself, Royal Marines of the Naval Division landed.

They went into the line at once and were soon under bombardment.

Some shrapnel, a few high explosives, and then high in the sky, a train-like

rumble and whistle, ending with an explosion in the city of Antwerp,

smoke and flames.

An old hand said, Them's out, Sir Schell's.

The bastards must be 12 miles away.

At intervals all day, these train-like shells

came over and burst in the city of Antwerp.

Late in the afternoon, the oil tanks by the dockside were hit.

We sat, watched, waited, felt hopeless and useless.

For three days, the unequal struggle went on.

But the Allies had nothing to match the heavy German

howitzers which had already battered down Liège and Namur.

On October the 7th, the inevitable end was in sight.

The Belgian government left for Ostend, and the

field army began its withdrawal down the coast.

With them, once more, went the pitiful refugees, escaping as best they could,

by any route they could, from the German invaders,

whose cruel reputation had gone before them.

The future of Belgium was all in shadows now.

On October the 9th, the Germans entered Antwerp.

Now the flames of war licked down the coast to

join the great blaze of battle from the south.

The Belgian army fell back to Dixmude, where it

joined a magnificent detachment of French marines.

And division by division, the British expeditionary force, transported from the

Aisne, was coming into action, near the old Flemish market town of Ypres.

Their arrival filled the last remaining gap in

a line of battle from the sea to Switzerland.

It was the final act of the war of movement.

At Ypres, the last great encounter battle of the Western

Front opened with glittering promise for both sides.

General Foch was now in charge of all the Allied forces in the north.

He was quite clear about what he had to do.

The question was, would we have the time and did we possess the means of effecting

a breakthrough before the enemy could complete defensive

measures against which we would be more or less impotent?

This was the effort we were about to make.

It was an attempt to exploit the last vestige of our victory on the Marne.

The Germans now had a new commander.

Von Moltke had failed and now Erich von

Falkenhayn had replaced him as chief of staff.

He too was clear about his task.

The Allied threat to the German right wing must be eliminated.

If this at least was not done, then the drastic action against England

and her sea traffic with submarines, aeroplanes, and airships, which was being

prepared as a reply to England's war of starvation, was impossible.

It was also questionable whether the occupied territory

in northern France and western Belgium could be held.

The prize, concluded Falkenhayn, was worth the stake.

For both sides, the stake at Ypres consisted of everything they had.

The sustained intensity of this battle was something new.

Crisis after crisis flared along the line.

In the north, the Belgians were hard-pressed, defending the last few

square miles of their native soil from the invader.

They took a terrible decision to open the sluice gates of the river Isère and let in

the sea over land which had been reclaimed by the labour of centuries.

A French officer watched the result.

Little by little, the soil became spongy and the ditches began to fill.

On the 29th, we could see the water rise but it was only on the 31st that we had

the impression of an entirely different landscape.

Over this new landscape, veiled by a steady mist, settled a death-like silence.

The Germans too were willing to mortgage their future.

They flung into the battle divisions of young student

volunteers, wildly enthusiastic but only half-trained.

They were moaned down by the fire of the British regulars.

The Germans called their fate the slaughter of the innocents.

Veteran units also suffered heavy losses.

We ran approximately 100 yards when we came under a machine gun fire which was so

terrific that the losses were so staggering that

we got orders to lie down and to seek shelter.

Nobody dared to lift the set because the very moment

the machine gunners saw any movement, they let fly.

and then the British artillery opened up and the corpses and the heads and the arms

and the legs flew about and we were cut to pieces.

The British expeditionary force pounded by the German guns

was also cut to pieces and these men were irreplaceable.

They were Britain's only trained troops.

By the time the battle was over the old British army was gone past recall.

Its losses in this battle totaled nearly 60,000.

Already before it ended the consequences were seen.

The territorials made their appearance.

The London Scottish were the first territorial infantry to enter the fight.

They lost 60% of their numbers in their first battle.

Beside them on October the 29th arrived the first units of the Indian Corps.

The citizen army and the empire were already having to replace the regulars.

Regulars, territorials, Indians, French, Belgians.

The French outnumbered all the rest.

Together they beat off all the German attacks.

Their own attacks failed also.

Captain Rudolf Binding of the German Dragoons wrote in a letter, The war has

got stuck into a gigantic siege on both sides.

The whole front is one endless fortified trench.

Neither side has the force to make a decisive push.

On November the 2nd he was even gloomier.

Everyone is getting ready for a winter campaign.

As far as I can judge there is no possibility of an early finish.

The thought grew upon him with all its cheerless implications.

November the 8th... We are still stuck here for perfectly good reasons.

One might as well say for perfectly bad reasons.

By the middle of November his mind was made up.

This business may last for a long time.

The impossible was now a fact.

A battle line which stretched across a continent.

There were no flanks to turn only the curves and convolutions of the rough

trenches in which the million strong armies crouched and waited.

Nothing like it had ever been seen before.

All the plans had gone awry.

All the careful preparation of Germany all the brave improvisation of the Allies all

the heroism of the soldiers had produced stalemate.

Stalemate was universal.

In Serbia where the war began the same incredible spectacle was seen.

On August the 12th the Austrians entered Serbia on what they took to be a short

punitive campaign which would swiftly bring down this upstart Slav kingdom to the dust.

To the world's astonishment the Austrian invasion was at once repelled.

The Serbs fought with passionate fury against their overwhelming neighbours.

But all the weight of numbers was on Austria's side.

And after an interval the Austrians returned in strength and with more caution.

this time it seemed that they must win.

On December the 2nd they entered Belgrade for the second time.

Easy enough Belgrade was right on the border.

But once again the Serbs made a remarkable rally.

By the 15th the Austrians were out of Belgrade

again and Serbia was cleared of the invaders.

The campaign had been brutal and bloody.

the Austrians lost 227,000 men more than half the numbers of their invading forces.

This was a war of Austria's making but Austria was out of luck.

The great bulk of the Austrian armies marched to meet the Russians marched with

enthusiasm believing in the strength of their German allies.

Less than 50% of these men were Austrians and Hungarians.

The rest mostly Slavs had little desire to fight for the Habsburg Empire.

many of these soldiers knew no more German than the 80 basic army words of command.

Yet the German victory of Tannenberg in August lent the Austrians hope.

Their commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Conrad von Hertzendorf, had visions of a

Tannenberg of his own against the Russian southern group of armies.

On September the 6th, the main bodies of the Russians

and Austrians met around the town of Lemberg.

There was bitter fighting.

On September the 11th, the day on which Joffe renounced his victory on the Marne,

Conrad had accepted defeat.

His casualties were enormous and included over a hundred thousand prisoners.

The Austrians began a withdrawal which carried them back back over two hundred miles.

A lasting blow had been struck at Austrian morale.

German staff officers cruelly summed it up in the saying we are fettered to a corpse.

The Germans had reason for bitterness.

This Austrian disaster had gravely affected their own plans

and prospects which had been so bright after Tannenberg.

Now, as the Russians advanced to the Carpathian mountains, the Germans had to

turn from their own offensives to meet the threat.

Their attack on Warsaw came to nothing.

In East Prussia, the Russians were even able to mount a new invasion.

At the root of all problems in this vast fighting area was communication.

General Ludendorff wrote, We had great trouble in getting the railway lines,

which we had ourselves previously completely destroyed, into working order again.

We worked now with might and main to restore them.

But considerable time elapsed before the railway communications were really in order.

The Russian winter arrived, halting all the armies in their tracks.

Germans, Austrians, Austrians, Russians.

They burrowed holes for shelter, struggled to keep warm and waited for better times.

Ludendorff said, The 1914 campaign had not brought a decision

and I could not see how one was to be reached in 1915.

In the East as in the West, it was stalemate.

This too was going to be a long business.

As the weeks slid into months and the months drew towards the ending of the

year, shocked nations recognized that this war would not be over by Christmas.

In France, tight censorship concealed the full

truth of what had happened since the 3rd of August.

But in hundreds of thousands of homes, nothing could

conceal the loss of a husband, a brother, or a son.

995,000 Frenchmen were killed, wounded, or missing in 1914.

Russia's losses had been even greater than the French.

And with them, disturbing signs of internal rottenness had appeared.

The Russian soldiers had displayed unbelievable devotion, patience, and tenacity.

Too often, their courage was brought to nothing by blunders, corruption,

and heartbreaking shortages.

Yet, at the end of the year, the Tsar's illusions lingered on.

My dear army, I've already given such proofs

of valour that victory can't fail us now.

We must dictate the peace, and I am determined to

continue the war until the central powers are destroyed.

no congress or mediation from me.

Britain and Germany settled to their business with implacable wrath.

The novelist H.G.

Wells voiced their ardour.

Nobody wants to be a non-competent in a war of this sort.

The desire to serve, to join in the fight, possessed the British people in odd ways.

A Times reporter wrote in his diary.

People seem to be enveloped in a mysterious darkness,

haunted by goblins in the form of desperate German spies.

The wildest stories are being circulated of outrages committed by Germans in our midst.

Fear of spies and fear of invasion produced hysteria, which turned venomously

against Germans and Austrians living in Britain,

or against their suspected sympathizers.

The first casualty was Lord Haldane, the man who had

created the Expeditionary Force and the Territorial Army.

Haldane was accused in the newspapers of being secretly pro-German.

It was even said that this lifelong bachelor had a German wife.

He recalled, I was threatened with assault in the street,

and I was on occasions in some danger of being shot at.

This violence turned in other directions also.

In the east end of London, German shops were attacked and looted.

Driven by popular pressure, the government unwillingly rounded up aliens in Britain.

The historian F.S.

Oliver recorded, One of my friends has given away her

Dachshunds, lest they should lead her to be suspected of spying.

In October, the agitation reached its climax with a campaign against the first

sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who, with Winston Churchill, had been

responsible for the concentration of the Grand Fleet before war even broke out.

The journal John Bull wrote, Blood is said to be thicker than water, and we doubt

whether all the water in the North Sea could obliterate the blood ties between

the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a question

of a life-and-death struggle between Germany and ourselves.

On October 30th, Prince Louis resigned.

But all these preoccupations were very remote

from the urgent needs of the Expeditionary Force.

On August 7th, the Prime Minister requested Parliament

to sanction an increase of the army by 500,000 men.

The response was immediate and impressive.

War had been declared, and the following Sunday I went with a friend of mine into

Shepherd's Bush Empire to see the picture show there, and at the end of the show

they showed the fleet sailing the high seas and played

Britain's Never Shall Be Slaves and Hearts of Oak.

And you know one feels that little shiver run up

their back and you know you've got to do something.

I was just turned 17 at the time, and on the Monday I went up to Whitehall.

New Old Scotland Yard and had enlisted.

By September the 5th, the Prime Minister announced that

between 250,000 and 300,000 men had joined Kitchener's army.

Two days later, the figure was corrected.

It was 439,000.

The patriotic fires burned high.

A letter to the Times cried out... Reform Club, Pell-Mell.

Sir, yesterday afternoon, while Lord Kitchener was telling of the bravery of

our wounded and dead, while he was asking for men to take their places, every lawn

tennis court in the space near me was crowded

by strapping young Englishmen and girls.

Is there no way way of shaming these laggards?

The English girl who will not know the man, lover, brother, friend, that cannot

show an overwhelming reason for not taking up arms, that

girl will do her duty and will give good help to her country.

54 million posters were issued, 8 million personal letters were sent,

12,000 meetings were held, 20,000 speeches

were delivered by servicemen or ex-servicemen.

By the end of 1914, 1,186,337 men had enlisted.

And this was not all.

Canada's position had been made clear long before the war.

In 1910, her prime minister said, When Britain is at war, Canada is at war.

There is no distinction.

Canadian government offered a contingent of 25,000,

but over 40,000 men came forward in less than a month.

Their chronicler, Lord Beaverbrook, wrote,

No mere jackbooted militarism inspired them.

They sought neither the glory of conquest nor the

rape of freedom nor the loot of sacked cities.

They came forward free men and unconstrained with a simple resolve to lay

down their lives if need be in defence of the empire.

Their empire too.

As with Canada, so with Australia.

On August the 3rd, the Australian treasurer said, if

Britain goes to her Armageddon, we will go with her.

Our fate and hers, for good or ill, are as woven threads.

Australia offered her navy and a contingent of 20,000.

New Zealand also offered her navy and 8,000 men,

a higher proportion than any other dominion.

South Africa joined in.

Men came from all the colonies.

The martial races of India gathered at the summons of the drum.

The empire was at war.

This was something that Germany had not catered for.

The Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, visiting Germany

in October, spoke for her outraged feelings.

The two western powers of the Entente bear the responsibility

for having caused the dance of death to involve the whole globe.

Canadians come in their ships from America, Turcos and Seneca-lise Negroes

from Africa, and poor Hindus and Gurkhas, bronzed

by the sun of India, lie freezing in the trenches.

And lastly, Australia and New Zealand are sending their contingents.

And what is the purpose of such a worldwide levy of warriors?

Why?

Germanic culture is to be uprooted from the earth.

Victorious, yet thwarted of total victory,

Germany set her teeth and hardened her will.

At the end of October, the president of the National Bank in Berlin told the

correspondent of the New York Sun, It is a fight between England and Germany.

to the bitter end, to the last German, if need be.

England has wanted it, so let it be.

We want no quarter from England.

We shall give none.

Now it is death, destruction, and annihilation for one or other of the two nations.

Tell your American people that.

And say the words do not come from a fanatic, but from a

quiet businessman who knows the feelings of his people.

Tell America not to be misled by peace talk.

There is not going to be any peace.

This will be a long war.

In an ugly mood, the nation settled down to fight it out.

In the crude trenches, men dug for shelter as deep as they dared.

They learned to suffer the companionship of mud.

the manhood of Europe discovered a new way of life, with death never far away.

They were surprised to find that Christmas had overtaken them.

British soldiers listened with wonder as the carol

Heilige Nacht arose from the German trenches.

Here and there they saw Christmas trees go up.

The next day it was just the sort of day for

peace to be declared, said one British officer.

Suddenly, without a word, British and German soldiers got

out of their trenches and began to walk towards each other.

The whole of no man's land, as far as we could see, was grey and khaki.

There they were smoking and talking, shaking hands, exchanging names and

addresses after the war to write to one another.

The British soldiers showed the Germans the handsome brass gift boxes which they'd

received from Princess Mary, each containing tobacco and cigarettes.

The Germans had pipes embossed with the head of the

crown prince, little willy of the English cartoons.

When the Germans started to bury some of their

frozen dead, the British had another shock.

The inscriptions on the crosses.

They would put the Germans for Vaterland und Freiheit.

For fatherland and freedom.

And I said to a German, excuse me, but how can you be fighting for freedom?

You started the war and we are fighting for freedom.

And he said, excuse me, English comrade, camarade, but we are fighting for freedom,

for our country.

And I say you also put here rest in God, an unbecanter, held.

Here rest in God, an unknown hero, in God.

Oh yes, God is on our side, but I said he's on our side.

Well, English comrade, do not let us quarrel on Christmas day.