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

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on a world that had endured
four years of bloodshed.

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

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civilization a week ago, the
change would induce him to

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believe that his long solitude
had unhinged his mind.

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He would see Germany,
instead of being a confident,

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arrogant empire, a timid
and apologetic republic.

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

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He would see the Austrian
Empire, a poor province

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lifted out of beggary
by the charity of her foes.

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

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would be one thing in which there was no
change.

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Europe is a seething cauldron of hate.

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

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hatred and diplomacy were hand in hand.

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

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

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A supreme moment in history has come.

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The hand of God is laid upon the nations.

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

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

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Wilson called his vision the 14 points.

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He proposed a league of
nations that would maintain

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peace and put an end
to European imperialism.

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President Woodrow
Wilson's blueprint for a new

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world order was national
self-determination.

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That is to say that peoples
should determine their own form

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of government and that the
peoples should be sovereign.

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

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powers there should emerge
new self-governing nations.

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

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Lloyd George had a very different aim.

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To protect Britain's empire and even
expand it.

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

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

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he was soaring in clouds of serene
rhetoric.

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This was President Wilson's first contact
with Europe.

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For ages the favorite hunting
ground of beasts of prey and

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poisonous reptiles creeping
and springing on their victims.

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

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To ensure that Germany would never again
invade France.

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God has his ten commandments, Clemenceau
declared.

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Wilson his 14 points.

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We shall see.

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Wilson may have thought
that the war had been fought

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for national self-determination
and democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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and Wilson, the moralizing idealist.

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

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people, all wanting to meet Woodrow
Wilson.

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

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

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Some of them came from
countries which I have, to

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

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

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

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Now was the time for them to be made good.

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

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

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what they feel is theirs by right.

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

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war against Germany and her allies by
naval blockade.

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After the armistice, hunger remained a
weapon.

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Vienna was particularly hard hit by the
allied blockade.

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Infant mortality soared.

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One out of every four babies was dying.

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For us, the war seems only to have begun.

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

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three months we shall all have died of
hunger.

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

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

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grandchild who was struggling to stay
alive.

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

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

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The wife of a doctor whom
I know recently exchanged

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her beautiful piano for
a sack of wheat flour.

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We live on hopes, expectations,
and promises.

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

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

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A world that Lenin's revolution had
changed forever.

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The victors had no answers.

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They put together a peace without
foundation.

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The British diplomat
Harold Nicholson was one

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of those called in to
advise the inner sanctum.

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

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

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old world game of dictating boundaries to
the defeated nations.

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The door opens.

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

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And the sound of water sprinkling from a
fountain.

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Clemenceau, Lloyd George,
and President Wilson have

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pulled up armchairs and
crouched low over the map.

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

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Minor to bits as if they were dividing a
cake.

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

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Hungary is partitioned, indolently,
irresponsibly partitioned.

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Then the Yugoslav frontier.

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Then tea and macaroons.

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

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

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The question of responsibility for the war
was clearly answered.

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Germany was guilty.

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

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

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She would lose all her colonies.

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

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We enter the Hall of Mirrors.

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

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The silence is terrifying.

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

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It's almost painful.

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They sign.

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

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The Kaiser was gone.

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So were Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

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What they left behind
in 1919 was a political

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war zone, where rival
groups struggled for power.

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

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turning cities into battlegrounds between
left and right.

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

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One act of revenge creates another.

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It's endless.

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

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anything that could be called
worth the sacrifice of even

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

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

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someone like Harold
Nicholson and for many others.

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

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

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

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

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Clemenceau emerges from the door.

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He is joined by Wilson and Lloyd George.

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

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The big four are lost in a sea of
gesticulation.

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Celebrations afterwards.

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

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It's very bad champagne.

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

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A German corporal wrote of his anger.

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

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

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Everything went black before my eyes.

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

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and dug my burning head into my blanket
and pillow.

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And so it had all been in vain.

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In vain, all the sacrifices and
privations.

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

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In vain, the two million who died.

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

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The graves of those
who with faith in the

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fatherland had marched
forth never to return?

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

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

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The young corporal was Adolf Hitler.

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He determined to take
revenge for the shame

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inflicted upon his
country, whatever the cost.

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

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

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never to see them again?

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Hatred grew in me.

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Hatred for those responsible for this
deed.

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

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I decided to go into politics.

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

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

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The new medium of motion pictures
reflected the public mood.

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

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J'accuse.

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The director was Abel Gance.

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

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seen many of his closest
friends die on the battlefield.

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He decided to show his
anger at their deaths, and

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began to film while the
war was still being fought.

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Remarkably, Gance had the help of the
French army.

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

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justification of war,
extremely patriotic, in fact

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chauvinistic, so that he
had tremendous war backing.

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

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thousands of French soldiers
forming the title J'accuse.

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

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And he said, I'm accusing the war.

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I'm accusing man.

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I'm accusing universal stupidity.

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

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

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

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

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villages to ask, Has our death been
worthwhile?

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

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

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have you been doing
since your husband died?

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

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You're going to meet your husband any
minute.

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

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fainted and had to be taken out of the
cinema.

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These ghosts were not actors.

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They were actual soldiers.

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Gance called his cast the dead on leave.

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By a sad irony, many
of the soldiers who

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appeared in the film
would later die in battle.

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These haunting images are the last visual
records of them.

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And his son died.

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Great perfect And they
remembered that in a fantasy We

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drank farewell to civilization
without an age of finality.

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

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who was excluded from the manine to their
talents.

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We all became confidential and almost
emotional.

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

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

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many people found positive,
productive, and worthwhile.

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

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

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other men that they had never even thought
possible before.

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

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Siegfried Sassoon, the
British poet, was one of those

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who found it impossible
to leave the war behind.

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The man who endured the war
at his worst was everlastingly

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differentiated from everyone,
except his fellow soldiers.

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Millions of soldiers joined veterans'
associations.

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

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An army of the walking
wounded returned home to

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

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An American military
film tried to show how even

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amputees might still
enjoy a game of baseball.

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00:22:21,301 --> 00:22:22,301
An army of the people.

231
00:22:29,420 --> 00:22:31,960
Does it matter losing your legs?

232
00:22:32,500 --> 00:22:34,340
For people will always be kind.

233
00:22:37,060 --> 00:22:40,651
And you need not show
that you mind when the others

234
00:22:40,652 --> 00:22:43,780
come in after hunting to
gobble their muffin and eggs.

235
00:22:48,180 --> 00:22:50,480
Does it matter, losing your sight?

236
00:22:51,460 --> 00:22:54,080
There's such splendid work for the blind.

237
00:22:56,400 --> 00:22:59,812
And the people will always
be kind as you sit on the

238
00:22:59,813 --> 00:23:02,900
terrace remembering and
turning your face to the light.

239
00:23:05,180 --> 00:23:07,920
Do they matter, those dreams from the
pits?

240
00:23:09,040 --> 00:23:12,740
You can drink and forget and be glad.

241
00:23:13,860 --> 00:23:16,280
And people won't say that you're mad.

242
00:23:16,800 --> 00:23:19,460
For they'll know that you fought for your
country.

243
00:23:20,660 --> 00:23:23,120
And no one will worry a bit.

244
00:23:24,620 --> 00:23:27,745
These were the soldiers
who continued to show

245
00:23:27,746 --> 00:23:30,240
what suffering in the
trenches had meant.

246
00:23:30,640 --> 00:23:37,380
They were a continuous reminder of what
they had gone through in the gas attack,

247
00:23:37,720 --> 00:23:44,199
in the bombardment, in
being buried for hours under the

248
00:23:44,200 --> 00:23:49,120
earth and being at the brink
of psychological collapse.

249
00:23:49,920 --> 00:23:57,940
And many of the population did not like to
have to face these war cripples.

250
00:23:58,120 --> 00:24:02,080
They did not wish to be remembered
continuously of what war was really like.

251
00:24:02,081 --> 00:24:05,860
And these bodies were really sites of
remembrance.

252
00:24:07,920 --> 00:24:11,345
Among the most tragic
victims of the war were

253
00:24:11,346 --> 00:24:15,001
what the French called
the men with broken faces.

254
00:24:19,140 --> 00:24:25,060
When medical science failed to help these
mutilated men, artisans took over.

255
00:24:27,680 --> 00:24:31,560
The skills of the sculptor were called
upon in special clinics.

256
00:24:32,820 --> 00:24:36,660
Using pre-war photos
of the patients, sculptors

257
00:24:36,661 --> 00:24:39,861
fashioned thin masks to
cover the worst wounds.

258
00:24:40,980 --> 00:24:45,340
The men who helped these men cope with
their injuries was the British orderly,

259
00:24:45,500 --> 00:24:46,500
Ward Muir.

260
00:24:48,960 --> 00:24:53,360
It is difficult to convey a fair
impression of the extraordinary sort of

261
00:24:53,361 --> 00:24:57,256
precision with which these
membrane-like but strong metal

262
00:24:57,257 --> 00:25:01,480
masks adhere to the face and
cover the grisly gap beneath them.

263
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:11,000
Figure what this means to the patient.

264
00:25:13,120 --> 00:25:18,960
Instead of being a gargoyle ashamed to
show himself on the streets, he is almost

265
00:25:18,961 --> 00:25:24,040
a normal human being and can go anywhere
unafraid.

266
00:25:27,360 --> 00:25:29,500
Self-respect returns to him.

267
00:25:30,020 --> 00:25:32,020
His depression departs.

268
00:25:35,420 --> 00:25:40,780
Concealing war wounds was one way of
coping with a war that refused to go away.

269
00:25:41,940 --> 00:25:44,480
Drawing attention to them was another.

270
00:25:49,900 --> 00:25:54,900
The German artist, Otto Dix, knew what
disfigurement could do to a man.

271
00:25:55,500 --> 00:26:00,260
He had been a soldier during the war and
was now suffering from nightmares.

272
00:26:03,780 --> 00:26:05,420
I am obsessed with the devil.

273
00:26:05,980 --> 00:26:08,220
That is how I know what is up in the
world.

274
00:26:13,320 --> 00:26:17,620
He painted, he said, to rid himself of the
demons of war.

275
00:26:20,100 --> 00:26:24,580
After the war, he is actually painting the
effects of the war on human bodies.

276
00:26:25,080 --> 00:26:28,282
Really, the psychological
effect as well, and

277
00:26:28,283 --> 00:26:30,960
the mental devastation
on the human being.

278
00:26:31,060 --> 00:26:36,360
But he images it in the flesh, in this
really crude, deliberately grotesque manner.

279
00:26:36,361 --> 00:26:38,160
Because he really wants to shock people.

280
00:26:41,780 --> 00:26:45,360
The effects of war are when you see
somebody with half their face scoured

281
00:26:45,361 --> 00:26:47,601
away, walking down the street,
and you try and look away.

282
00:26:51,590 --> 00:26:53,992
The people were already
beginning to forget what

283
00:26:53,993 --> 00:26:56,451
unspeakable suffering
the war had brought with it.

284
00:26:57,330 --> 00:27:01,010
It is not the task of artists to correct
and convert.

285
00:27:02,350 --> 00:27:04,150
They are much too small for that.

286
00:27:05,070 --> 00:27:07,050
But they must give their testimony.

287
00:27:12,900 --> 00:27:15,800
The effects painted what he saw around
him.

288
00:27:16,420 --> 00:27:20,460
Former soldiers reduced to selling matches
on the street.

289
00:27:23,400 --> 00:27:27,040
Disfigured amputees with horrid head and
facial wounds.

290
00:27:33,280 --> 00:27:37,720
And women forced to become prostitutes to
avoid starving.

291
00:27:39,940 --> 00:27:45,060
Once the war is over, the prostitute and
the war cripple are the two most trenchant

292
00:27:45,061 --> 00:27:47,842
ways in which you could
actually image on a human

293
00:27:47,843 --> 00:27:50,121
body the horrors and
the degradation of the war.

294
00:27:50,220 --> 00:27:55,680
So, he implies that the brutalising done
to you, whether as a soldier or as a

295
00:27:55,681 --> 00:27:59,200
prostitute in that war, was savage and
real.

296
00:28:00,120 --> 00:28:04,740
The streets of post-war Berlin became
drawn into the chaos of defeat,

297
00:28:05,060 --> 00:28:07,100
revolution and counter-revolution.

298
00:28:07,101 --> 00:28:11,080
The German artist, George Gross,
described the anarchy.

299
00:28:14,040 --> 00:28:16,373
Inhabitants, half-crazed
with fear, could not

300
00:28:16,374 --> 00:28:19,041
stand the confinement
of their own four walls.

301
00:28:19,480 --> 00:28:23,280
So, they went up on the roof to shoot
pigeons and people.

302
00:28:29,160 --> 00:28:33,160
The whole city was dark, cold and full of
rumours.

303
00:28:35,340 --> 00:28:39,040
The streets became ravines of manslaughter
and cocaine traffic.

304
00:28:42,810 --> 00:28:44,570
All moral codes were abandoned.

305
00:28:45,130 --> 00:28:50,110
A wave of vice, pornography and
prostitution enveloped the whole country.

306
00:28:55,490 --> 00:29:01,050
George Gross was one of a growing number
of painters in Berlin, drawn to art as a

307
00:29:01,051 --> 00:29:03,990
way of expressing his disgust with what he
saw around him.

308
00:29:06,390 --> 00:29:09,230
My art was to be gun and soared.

309
00:29:09,650 --> 00:29:14,931
I considered all art senseless, unless it
served as a weapon in the political arena.

310
00:29:20,480 --> 00:29:24,100
Grotz embraced a new artistic movement
called Dada.

311
00:29:24,760 --> 00:29:30,560
Begun in Zurich during the war,
Dada exhibitions outraged post-war Berlin.

312
00:29:34,920 --> 00:29:41,940
Dada artists like Grotz declared,
The kunst ist tot, art is dead.

313
00:29:45,400 --> 00:29:49,013
Values like reason,
beauty and obedience, all

314
00:29:49,014 --> 00:29:53,201
prized before the war,
had lost their meaning.

315
00:29:54,680 --> 00:29:56,580
We derided everything.

316
00:29:57,440 --> 00:29:58,440
Respected nothing.

317
00:29:59,200 --> 00:30:00,640
Spat upon everything.

318
00:30:01,400 --> 00:30:02,700
That was Dada.

319
00:30:06,680 --> 00:30:10,260
It was not mysticism, not communism,
not anarchy.

320
00:30:14,920 --> 00:30:16,760
We were complete nihilists.

321
00:30:17,040 --> 00:30:19,620
Our symbol was non-existence.

322
00:30:19,840 --> 00:30:20,840
A vacuum.

323
00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:22,160
A hole.

324
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:40,120
As time passed, the battlefields of the
Great War became hallowed ground.

325
00:30:41,000 --> 00:30:44,520
Thousands tried to retrace the footsteps
of their loved ones.

326
00:30:45,020 --> 00:30:50,220
Those who made this pilgrimage soon after
the war found the landscape still an open

327
00:30:50,221 --> 00:30:53,640
wound, the trenches still littered with
human remains.

328
00:30:57,790 --> 00:31:01,817
Two years after the war
ended, the British journalist

329
00:31:01,818 --> 00:31:05,190
Stephen Graham took a walk
across those desolate fields.

330
00:31:06,660 --> 00:31:08,790
The stagnancy has not dried up.

331
00:31:09,510 --> 00:31:13,510
But festers still in the black rot below
the rushes.

332
00:31:16,530 --> 00:31:18,270
Double shell holes.

333
00:31:19,050 --> 00:31:20,250
Charred ground.

334
00:31:20,790 --> 00:31:21,790
Great pits.

335
00:31:22,370 --> 00:31:23,630
What is it now?

336
00:31:26,070 --> 00:31:28,230
The abode of rats.

337
00:31:29,010 --> 00:31:30,730
Lizards weasels.

338
00:31:32,050 --> 00:31:33,670
Unexploded stick bombs.

339
00:31:34,890 --> 00:31:36,590
Rusty grog bottles.

340
00:31:39,250 --> 00:31:41,570
Helmets lie there still in plenty.

341
00:31:42,690 --> 00:31:44,430
There are broken rifles.

342
00:31:45,390 --> 00:31:46,790
There are graves.

343
00:31:47,830 --> 00:31:51,170
Death and the ruins completely outweigh
the living.

344
00:31:53,110 --> 00:31:56,570
There is a pull from the other world.

345
00:31:59,270 --> 00:32:01,390
Lying in an old trench.

346
00:32:01,910 --> 00:32:02,390
Behold.

347
00:32:02,870 --> 00:32:03,870
A skull.

348
00:32:08,420 --> 00:32:10,380
It is clean and polished.

349
00:32:10,980 --> 00:32:12,440
A soldier's head.

350
00:32:13,320 --> 00:32:17,340
There is a frayed hole in an otherwise
perfect cranium.

351
00:32:20,900 --> 00:32:25,540
The simplest way to pick it up would be to
put a finger in the eye hole and lift it.

352
00:32:29,380 --> 00:32:30,940
Friend or foe.

353
00:32:34,340 --> 00:32:39,420
The more you look at the skull,
the more angry does it seem.

354
00:32:41,500 --> 00:32:44,800
It has an intense eternal grievance.

355
00:32:46,310 --> 00:32:47,800
This one does not grin.

356
00:32:48,100 --> 00:32:50,140
For the mouth has been destroyed.

357
00:32:51,100 --> 00:32:53,920
It is just blind and senseless.

358
00:32:54,440 --> 00:32:56,660
Forever and ever.

359
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:12,729
By 1922, the battlefields
were cleared and national

360
00:33:12,730 --> 00:33:16,940
cemeteries for the dead of
the Great War had been created.

361
00:33:21,960 --> 00:33:27,180
But the pull from another world still held
millions of survivors in its grip.

362
00:33:29,840 --> 00:33:34,500
One was Keita Kollwitz, one of the gifted
artists of her time.

363
00:33:35,580 --> 00:33:40,180
In the early days of the war, she'd
watched her 19-year-old son, Peter,

364
00:33:40,380 --> 00:33:41,380
march off to battle.

365
00:33:41,860 --> 00:33:44,280
He was killed on his second day at the
front.

366
00:33:57,180 --> 00:33:58,960
I knew it all even then.

367
00:34:05,290 --> 00:34:08,810
I sat on the bed and wept, wept,
wept.

368
00:34:16,200 --> 00:34:20,440
Where do all these women find the courage
to send their dear ones to the front to

369
00:34:20,441 --> 00:34:26,100
face the guns, when they have watched over
them all their lives with loving care?

370
00:34:42,560 --> 00:34:46,840
Kollwitz's art had always portrayed the
hardships of her and the anguished.

371
00:34:50,060 --> 00:34:52,780
With the death of her son, she joined
them.

372
00:35:08,500 --> 00:35:12,380
She tried to express her grief in a
monument to her dead son.

373
00:35:18,790 --> 00:35:25,450
But her guilt made the work so painful
that she put it aside for years at a time.

374
00:35:30,820 --> 00:35:33,240
Is it a break of faith with you,
Peter?

375
00:35:34,160 --> 00:35:36,600
If I can only see madness in the war.

376
00:35:38,140 --> 00:35:41,720
But I shall do this work for you and for
the others.

377
00:35:43,020 --> 00:35:47,400
Dear Peter, I ask you then to be around
me.

378
00:35:47,980 --> 00:35:48,980
Help me.

379
00:35:49,380 --> 00:35:51,020
Show yourself to me.

380
00:36:01,880 --> 00:36:06,055
The real impetus comes
when she visits the graveyard in

381
00:36:06,056 --> 00:36:09,560
Belgium, where her son's
remains were placed in 1926.

382
00:36:10,040 --> 00:36:14,660
And she goes away and she decides the only
thing she can do for this sea of crosses

383
00:36:15,140 --> 00:36:19,500
is two figures of her husband and herself.

384
00:36:22,680 --> 00:36:25,740
And she chooses this mourning,
grieving father.

385
00:36:28,060 --> 00:36:29,660
And the grieving mother.

386
00:36:32,620 --> 00:36:36,940
Who she places in the centre of this
graveyard, so that they encompass,

387
00:36:37,200 --> 00:36:40,840
they grieve for every young man who lay in
that field.

388
00:36:48,680 --> 00:36:54,560
And when she goes to install it in 1932,
she describes in a letter home how she

389
00:36:54,561 --> 00:36:59,120
goes to look at it, then she goes to her
son's grave, and then she walks back to

390
00:36:59,121 --> 00:37:04,680
her own image, and she weeps, and she
strokes the cheeks of the figure she's

391
00:37:04,681 --> 00:37:08,220
carved to look like herself, with her own
tears.

392
00:37:08,460 --> 00:37:11,298
And it seems to me
that that reconciliation,

393
00:37:11,299 --> 00:37:14,040
that redemption, is
what that statue's about.

394
00:37:18,520 --> 00:37:20,740
My husband stood close behind me.

395
00:37:21,480 --> 00:37:22,960
I heard him whisper.

396
00:37:23,820 --> 00:37:24,820
Yes.

397
00:37:25,940 --> 00:37:28,160
How close we were to one another then.

398
00:37:46,680 --> 00:37:50,920
Keita Kollwitz drew solace from being able
to visit her son's grave.

399
00:37:55,630 --> 00:37:57,410
But millions were less fortunate.

400
00:37:58,110 --> 00:38:00,656
Those who could not
afford to make the journey,

401
00:38:00,657 --> 00:38:03,571
and those whose sons
had vanished without trace.

402
00:38:12,170 --> 00:38:14,865
In Britain, the
government's solution was

403
00:38:14,866 --> 00:38:17,450
to unveil a memorial
in the heart of London.

404
00:38:17,770 --> 00:38:19,170
An empty tomb.

405
00:38:19,990 --> 00:38:21,010
The Cenotaph.

406
00:38:22,030 --> 00:38:25,490
It commemorated the nearly one million
dead of the British Empire.

407
00:38:36,420 --> 00:38:39,160
But for some, this was not enough.

408
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:43,119
They needed assurance
that their loved ones had not

409
00:38:43,120 --> 00:38:46,420
gone forever, that their
spirits lived on after death.

410
00:38:47,340 --> 00:38:51,200
One of those seeking solace was Arthur
Conan Doyle.

411
00:38:52,160 --> 00:38:58,520
In the presence of an agonized world,
hearing every day of the deaths of the

412
00:38:58,521 --> 00:39:05,040
flower of our race, and the first promise
of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around

413
00:39:05,041 --> 00:39:10,240
one the wives and mothers who had no clear
conception where their loved ones had

414
00:39:10,241 --> 00:39:15,980
gone, I seemed suddenly to see that it was
really something tremendous.

415
00:39:16,700 --> 00:39:20,580
A breaking down of the walls between two
worlds.

416
00:39:21,240 --> 00:39:25,120
A direct, undeniable message from beyond.

417
00:39:25,980 --> 00:39:33,181
A call of hope and of guidance to the human
race at the time of its deepest affliction.

418
00:39:38,010 --> 00:39:40,919
Arthur Conan Doyle,
the creator of Sherlock

419
00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:44,211
Holmes, was one of the
leaders of spiritualism.

420
00:39:44,430 --> 00:39:49,170
He had lost several loved ones in the war,
including his son Kingsley.

421
00:39:54,260 --> 00:39:58,196
Like millions of others, Conan
Doyle found comfort in the

422
00:39:58,197 --> 00:40:01,320
belief that it was possible to
communicate with the dead.

423
00:40:04,680 --> 00:40:09,300
Conan Doyle believed that this blurred
image, floating above his head,

424
00:40:09,880 --> 00:40:11,160
was that of his dead son.

425
00:40:12,200 --> 00:40:16,360
Thousands of others who saw similar
visions were equally convinced.

426
00:40:16,860 --> 00:40:19,571
In the wave of mourning
that followed the war,

427
00:40:19,572 --> 00:40:22,740
millions were caught up
in the spiritualist resurgence.

428
00:40:24,920 --> 00:40:31,480
Spiritualism gave people a chance to have
a ritual interment of members of their

429
00:40:31,481 --> 00:40:36,840
family whose graves were not known,
or who had literally been blown to pieces.

430
00:40:37,720 --> 00:40:41,200
Maybe half of the men who were killed in
the First World War had no known graves.

431
00:40:41,740 --> 00:40:45,800
The families had no place to go through
the rituals of separation.

432
00:40:46,120 --> 00:40:48,000
A séance was one of them.

433
00:40:55,550 --> 00:41:00,310
Six of us, all personal friends,
sat in a semicircle.

434
00:41:03,010 --> 00:41:05,190
My wife being on my left.

435
00:41:13,230 --> 00:41:17,510
Presently, a voice came quite close to my
face.

436
00:41:18,470 --> 00:41:21,670
Both my wife and I cried out that it was
our boy.

437
00:41:23,650 --> 00:41:25,430
He began to talk.

438
00:41:27,350 --> 00:41:30,070
He tried to console me for his death.

439
00:41:31,950 --> 00:41:34,470
I asked, Are you happy?

440
00:41:37,350 --> 00:41:40,970
He answered, I am happy now.

441
00:41:45,020 --> 00:41:52,580
He put his strong, heavy hand on my head
and pressed as solidly as possible.

442
00:41:57,390 --> 00:42:03,110
And I can assure you that he left me a
good deal happier than he found me.

443
00:42:07,320 --> 00:42:11,160
Arthur Conan Doyle never escaped the
shadow of loss.

444
00:42:12,060 --> 00:42:15,332
He spent the rest of
his life searching for an

445
00:42:15,333 --> 00:42:18,300
explanation, for a way
of justifying his grief.

446
00:42:19,120 --> 00:42:20,900
There were millions like him.

447
00:42:23,580 --> 00:42:30,000
To understand this century, we must return
to the Great War and remember the millions

448
00:42:30,001 --> 00:42:32,320
who shaped the world in which we live
today.

449
00:42:34,380 --> 00:42:42,101
Siegfried Sassoon died in 1967, still a
soldier in his mind and in his memories.

450
00:42:42,320 --> 00:42:47,000
He was unable to forget, but feared the
rest of us would.

451
00:42:52,290 --> 00:42:53,770
Have you forgotten yet?

452
00:42:56,170 --> 00:43:00,084
For the world's events have
rumbled on since those gag days,

453
00:43:00,085 --> 00:43:02,950
like traffic checked while
at the crossing of city ways.

454
00:43:06,840 --> 00:43:09,360
But the past is just the same.

455
00:43:10,060 --> 00:43:12,300
And war's a bloody game.

456
00:43:13,080 --> 00:43:14,820
Have you forgotten yet?

457
00:43:16,380 --> 00:43:21,500
Look down and swear by the slain of the
war that you'll never forget.

458
00:43:27,790 --> 00:43:31,870
Do you remember the dark months you held
the sector at Nametz?

459
00:43:33,730 --> 00:43:38,690
The nights you watched and wired and dug
and piled sandbags on parapets?

460
00:43:42,250 --> 00:43:44,010
Do you remember the rats?

461
00:43:46,130 --> 00:43:50,150
And the stench of corpses rotting in front
of the frontline trench?

462
00:43:54,900 --> 00:44:00,740
And dawn coming, dirty white, and chill
with the hopeless rain?

463
00:44:06,960 --> 00:44:11,200
Do you ever stop and ask, is it all going
to happen again?

464
00:44:17,960 --> 00:44:21,240
Do you remember that hour of din before
the attack?

465
00:44:26,860 --> 00:44:28,180
And the anger?

466
00:44:29,360 --> 00:44:33,233
The blind compassion that
seized and shook you as you

467
00:44:33,234 --> 00:44:36,600
peered at the doomed and
haggard faces of your men?

468
00:44:44,190 --> 00:44:47,990
Do you remember the stretcher cases
lurching back?

469
00:44:49,650 --> 00:44:52,990
With dying eyes and lolling heads?

470
00:44:54,370 --> 00:45:02,190
Those ashen-gray masks of the lads who
once were keen and kind and gay?

471
00:45:06,880 --> 00:45:08,940
Have you forgotten yet?

472
00:45:13,280 --> 00:45:21,760
Look up and swear by the green of the
spring that you'll never forget.