Original subtitles

Of all the disasters of the 20th century, the conflagration once called

the Great War looms as the one that damaged mankind irreparably.

It wasn't just the 22 million who died between 1914 and 1918 in populations

dramatically smaller than now.

It was a much greater death.

Centuries-old empires met their end.

The world lost generations of philosophers, writers, builders,

musicians, poets, scientists, healers, artists.

The flower and seed of a magnificent continent, dead in mud and misery.

The trench soldier felt by 1916-17.

that the war would be endless indeed, and that there would be no survivors

standing there, if you will, with the victor's flag at the end. His death was

inevitable.

Glory, chivalry, and idealism did not survive.

From the horrors were born all the tools, all the monsters, for later

horror. For beginning to end, it was epic.

Its peoples, its battles, its slaughter, its error.

People were full of the notion of sacrifice, and God did they sacrifice.

the millennium that had dawned in nineteen hundred shone upon a european

civilization so dazzling that it seemed within reach of every opulent promise of

mankind there had been many sharp ugly wars over the last century but now

europe's cunning diplomatic ballet had at last seemed to balance power for a

long prosperous peace

Beyond that, the blood of England's King George V mingled with that of Russia's

Tsar Nicholas II, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Austria's Emperor Franz

Joseph in intricate marriage alliances.

It was cousin Willie, Nicky, and Georgie. What was to fear?

In a Victorian afterglow, England's prosperous island was fed by a treasure

fleet of merchant ships connected to its colonies.

Its lifelines and shores were protected by the impregnable steel walls of the

Royal Navy.

One quarter of the map was England's red.

Germany was an industrial miracle, becoming Europe's wealthiest center of

industrial might.

The formidable Prussian army was brilliantly professional.

Its navy was growing fast.

Former Chancellor Bismarck had said, I am bored.

the great things are done.

France, with its rich overseas empire, had reached an intellectual and economic

prominence that made Paris the golden hub of world culture and business.

France's spirited army stood behind an iron line of forts that denied the

eastern frontier to the Germans.

A saying was, as happy as God in France.

Russia was a feudal monarchy that gleamed at the crown.

Its sumptuous court hid inner decay, but its titans of literature, music, and

dance gave it world stature.

Though Russia's armies were ill-equipped by a poor industrial base, they were

valiant and huge.

But a smoldering revolutionary named Trotsky would observe that history had

already poised its gigantic soldier's boot over the ante.

In Austria, the 66-year reign of the ancient Franz Josef was beset by

arrogance and the tensions of a polyglot empire always on the verge of breaking

into ethnic fragments.

But that was nothing new, and the court of Vienna seemed timeless in its

waltzing magnificence.

Far off in Washington's White House, Woodrow Wilson guided a youthful, happy

giant. and enjoy the high, peaceful thoughts of the college professor he had

been.

It is correct to say that Americans, by and large, both inside and

outside the government, were of the opinion that wars in Europe were really

none of our business.

In Sarajevo, Bosnia, on the morning of June 28, 1914, a hot, sunny day

of peace everywhere.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria and his beloved wife

Sophie, set forth in an open automobile for a day of military review on the

royal couple's 14th wedding anniversary.

But 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, an Austrian who belonged to the Serbian

radical group called Black Hand, was waiting in the Sarajevo mobs along the

parade route.

in two shots he fulfilled his mission killing both franz ferdinand and sophie

the archduke's last words were it is nothing but

princip's small revolver had begun the annihilation of tens of millions

The assassination ultimately of the Archduke worked against the interest of

Serbian national independence.

Why? Because it gave Austria-Hungary, the government, a pretext to militarily

occupy Serbia for a good period.

Soon an ambassador stood before Kaiser Wilhelm asking if Austria-Hungary could

count on Germany's support if she mobilized against Serbia, even if Russia

came in.

Germany said she could, without thinking she might have to.

The alliances were essentially protective.

This was an armed peace.

Germany felt that it was hemmed in by France and Russia, who of course were

allied.

So there had been a German-Austrian alliance since 1879, which had been

followed by a French-Russian alliance.

At this critical moment, Kaiser Wilhelm went to sea on his yacht for 20 days,

described as the greatest maritime disaster ever.

Behind his back, Austria scuttled the Serbs' conciliation efforts, sent them a

harsh ultimatum, and planned Serbia's subjugation and partition.

Now Russia, responding to Serbian appeals against the Austrian threat,

mobilized.

Austria-Hungary ordered full mobilization without the emperor knowing

that Russia had mobilized on Serbia's side.

So began the cascade of mobilizations that was soon to immolate Europe.

This was a time that called for giants, and there were none.

You had a lot of men who were in control, who were afraid. They were

afraid of what would happen to them.

Not if they went to war but what would happen if they didn't go to war

Entering

the fatal August of 1914 the dominoes of dusty alliances kept toppling

Remembering nervously that Russia extended to her East Prussian borders

Germany gave Russia 12 hours to call off mobilization

Next was the preposterous German ultimatum to France, giving her 18 hours

to pledge her neutrality if Germany fought Russia, with the French

fortresses of Verdun and Toul to go to Germany as hostages.

France mobilized.

The rest was formality. By August 3rd, Germany would be at war with France and

Russia. on the side of Austria-Hungary.

And it turned out to be rather exhilarating.

War was your chance to distinguish yourself, to put some color on yourself,

to put a decoration on your chest and to know in the face of a large public that

you were being valued for being different.

War was this opportunity.

Between August 2nd and 18th, France would ship 3,781,000 soldiers in

7,000 trains, a train running every eight minutes.

Germany would speed 1,500,000 men to the west and another 500

,000 to the east against Russia.

It's a war about power, about prestige, about...

colonies, about competing markets.

It's not a war about ideology.

It's a war about

people wanting respect.

It's a war about Germany feeling it's being squeezed in and needing to

expand. It's a war about settling old scores the way France was determined

to get back Alsace and Lorraine.

It's a war about stabilizing empires as Austria

wanted to neutralize Serbia.

Russia was a very impatient nation in 1914, wanting above all, it seems,

access to the Mediterranean and to the sea trade routes that lay beyond, and

hence it wanted above all control of the straits into the Black Sea.

The supremacy of heavy artillery arrayed in hundreds and thousands and limitless

machine guns set behind miles of barbed wire had yet to be shown.

Indeed, one attack-minded French general would boast that his best weapon was the

living breast of the French soldier.

Germany's secret weapon was its war plan, worked out years earlier by one of

its vaunted tacticians, General Alfred von Schlieffen. The French, von

Schlieffen calculated, would fixate upon regaining the lost provinces of Alsace

and Lorraine and direct their attacks straight eastward towards them and

Germany. Von Schlieffen intended no more than a holding action here, with the

vast preponderance of his German armies concentrated to the north in a

steamroller right wing.

That powerful wing would break in a huge wheeling attack through neutral

Luxembourg and Belgium.

Then the attack could sweep down into France by the back door.

The French fortresses facing Germany would be outflanked.

and the French armies crushed between German legions from east and west.

Neither Britain's Prime Minister Herbert Asquith nor his foreign secretary,

Edward Grey, were much interested in Serbia or an ambiguous defense pact with

France.

To stand aside would not hurt British honor, unless Germany violated Belgium,

whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed at the formation of that state in 1831.

And there was also the thought of having the rapidly strengthening German fleet

right across the Channel in the Belgian port of Antwerp to challenge Britain's

sea supremacy.

The process was in command.

On August 1st, Germany crossed the Luxembourg border, seized the country

within 24 hours, and demanded free passage through Belgium.

Germany gave Belgium's King Albert 12 hours to agree.

He refused and appealed to King George for support.

Germany's Bettmann-Holweg voiced astonishment that London would go to war

over what he called a scrap of paper.

World opinion abandoned Germany, and on August 4th, Britain declared war.

The army Britain mobilized was blooded in colonial wars and deeply

professional.

But it was tiny in this maelstrom, just 125,000 men.

The British expeditionary force rushed to the continent for what all presumed

would be a short war.

They recognized that a modern war with modern weapons, the capabilities of

armies and navies at the time, would lead to great slaughter.

But for this very reason, the cost both in blood and treasure would be so great

that the war would have to be over very quickly.

This became known as the short war illusion.

The von Schlieffen plan was no longer in the hands of its late originator.

The general staff was now headed by General Helmut von Moltke, a gloomy

shadow of the titan father who had engineered Prussian victory in 1870.

Von Moltke had been forced to tinker fatally with the von Schlieffen plan

when a massive French offensive on his left wing in Lorraine threatened to cut

off the German armies advancing through Belgium.

So where Schlieffen had demanded a left wing with only 9% of the forces on the

right, But Moltke had to divert 42% of his armies there.

The British army had deleted the entrenching spade from its equipment.

Audacity, audacity, always audacity was the French creed. Their horses were

ready. All the powers, England, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, held

these great reserves of cavalry equipped with swords and lances, ready for the

ride through to victory.

On August 4, 1914, the cavalry spearhead of 60,000 Germans hurtled at the mouth

of the Liege gateway to Belgium.

The batteries of great forts dominated the attack corridors.

Some 25,000 Belgians manned the defensive works, and the bridges over

the Meuse River had been demolished.

The Germans found the going heavy, their attacks sinking bloodily in the Meuse.

But a German legend was being born.

An obscure colonel of fusiliers, Erich Ludendorff, became separated from his

own unit in the confusion of battle.

In the chaos, Ludendorff shone.

He got the milling German cavalry onto the right road to swing behind the Liege

defense.

When the commanding general fell, Ludendorff leaped into his place.

entered Liege and became Germany's Wagnerian hero.

Lost in the battle smoke was the real hero of the siege, the war's first

secret weapon, enormous 420-millimeter siege guns that wrecked the thick-walled

forts one by one with man-sized shells.

We might say now that the Germans had no sense of public relations.

And they proved that again and again in their invasion of Belgium

and of northern France.

There would be suspected guerrilla action and they would simply line

hundreds of men from

eight-year-olds to eighty-four-year-olds up against a wall and kill them they

burned the great library of louvain

one of the great centers of culture in the middle ages

and the legend of the raping burning

murdering hun would be a formidable weapon in the hands of allied

propagandists

The ghosts of the murdered Belgians would form themselves in armies,

haunting Germany to its death.

With the war only days old, the German momentum was building as they plunged

deeper into Belgium, heading for Namur and the Meuse.

The French chief of staff, Marshal Joseph Jacques César Joffre, massive,

pugnacious, remote from the welfare of his troops and the true situation,

followed von Schlieffen's script like one of his soldiers.

The French attacks in Lorraine, it had to be Lorraine and Alsace because part

of the rhetoric was getting the lost provinces back.

They were destroyed by the Germans.

Do you realize that the French lost 300,000 men in

the first three months?

In England, its hero war minister, Field Marshal Lord Horatio Kitchener, the

legendary Kitchener of Khartoum, saw things with brutal clarity.

Kitchener argued that the Germans were readying their knockout punch through

Belgium.

He saw the British officer corps as the preserve of gentlemen who dislike having

to take their profession seriously and stated that the war would be won by the

nation with the last million men.

Squarely in the path of the huge and unrushing German right wing, the scant

100,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force deployed where the Belgian front

hinged on the mining center of Mons.

The British commander,

Amiable, skittish Sir John French was nowhere up to the job, but was blessed

with a brilliant subordinate, Tigerish General Horace Smith Dorian.

French's position lay squarely in the path of the belligerent gambler General

Alexander von Kluck, leading the powerful First Army, northernmost force

of the German wheel.

Von Kluck rushed directly at the best-trained riflemen in the world.

So deadly was the fire of the British professionals that the Germans could not

believe they were not up against machine guns.

Their dead piled up.

Although German artillery finally drove the British back,

Mons was taken as a British victory, and the survivors were thereafter called

Mons men and wore a special medal called the Mons Star.

The French in particular were so...

inexperienced with war come 1914 and so untrained in the future

conduct of war that they sent soldiers to the front this in the fall of 1914 in

red pants lo and behold because of course the german machine gunner could

spot them in a second this practice was immediately changed

joffre remained blind to the mortal danger to his armies

His futile Plan 17, the frontal assault of the German center in Lorraine, was

stopped cold.

The French made no use of stealth, ground, or short rushes. They chanced

all on audacity and died for it.

To the north, the gallant British expeditionary force was being expended

in a series of tragic battles, sometimes to slow the Germans.

and sometimes because the exhausted men had strength to shoot but not to walk.

Von Moltke's grip was closing upon Paris.

But where were the reports of huge prisoner bags and captured guns, the

only sure sign of a foe defeated?

The one bright spot in the Allied picture was General Joseph Simon

Gallieni.

Galliani was old, he was retired, but he was the best of the French generals, and

he was pulled out of retirement to set up defenses around Paris.

The French government was prepared to evacuate Paris.

Women were weeping in the streets.

so unstoppable seemed the german wheel on paris that general french proposed a

retirement of the british expeditionary force to england only a furious rebuttal

by kitchener held in england sir arthur conan doyle spoke of the most terrible

august in the history of the world one thought that god's curse hung heavy when

cluck meeting galling resistance and beginning to feel his overextension

began the undoing of his rampaging right wing by invoking a crucial change in the

plan that had served him so well.

Instead of swinging southwestward around Paris, he began turning inward to the

south to pin the French armies between two German forces.

This presented the flank of his army, already weakened by two corps sent to

East Prussia on the Russian front, to a flanking counterattack from forces in

Paris. This seemed not to concern his impetuous nature.

The new aerial reconnaissance capability proved its mettle by spotting the

godsent inward wheel along the marne.

Von Kluck with the bit in his teeth drove his stretched, exhausted forces

forward.

When men march day in, day out, day in, day out, there comes a point where they

get a little tired.

And furthermore, they did not anticipate what hauling guns over these

distances was going to do to their horses.

Paris began to panic.

Crowds demanded that it be declared an open city.

Dropped German leaflets declared there is nothing you can do but surrender.

Refugees rushed toward the railway stations.

Ministers wept.

Gallieni responded, I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the

invader. This mandate I shall carry out to the end.

Joffre finally began to see the possibilities of the Germans' flank

being in the air.

He sent Gallieni to see if Sir John French's British expeditionary force was

ready to join an attack.

Sir John became lost in the Gallic language and finally blurted, tell him

that all that men can do our fellows will do the battle of the marne was a

series of fused deadly clashes that began on september 5th and bled on

through seven dreadful days

the

germans had not looked to their flags and gaps in their line appeared

everywhere They botched their communications. They attacked without

reconnaissance or artillery preparation and advanced in the open against mass

fire.

All the mistakes their despised foes had made in the early going.

The big wheel was bound to run out of gas.

They had gone too far too quickly.

Some days they would average 26 miles marching and they

didn't have the logistical ability to keep up with this march.

At one critical juncture, as the French line began to bend, General Gallieni

collected 1,200 French taxicabs to rush decisive reinforcements to the front.

It was history's first important use of gasoline-powered mobility in war.

By bit, the German wedge fell back to the river end.

Paris was saved.

Nobody could know it, but the wild mobility that had characterized the

war's first weeks in the West was over for good.

Obviously, we will never know what would have happened if the Germans had taken

Paris in 1914.

But the evidence that we do have on this general issue

is... that there is nothing to suggest that the French were going to throw

in the towel.

Meanwhile, in the East, the death machine had not been idle.

The German rebuff on the Marne was more than recouped at the gates of Prussia.

While the Battle of the Marne had raged on the Western Front throughout August,

the huge Russian army had tried for decisive victory in the East.

The Germans had relatively few troops in the East because

their intention was to deal with France as quickly as

they could, and they were convinced they could.

take France out of the war in a matter of a month or six weeks.

The Russians then started their offensive in what was then called East

Prussia. The defenders of the wide German front covering over 200 miles of

East Prussian border numbered barely 135,000 men under General Max von

Prittwitz.

The Russian armies bearing down on them numbered 650,000 men, an advantage of

four to one.

They moved in two armies commanded by Generals Alexander Samsonov and Pavel

Renenkov.

The Russians were good soldiers. The trouble was they just didn't have the

right arms.

Sometimes they didn't even have rifles.

They didn't have enough...

Between the opposing armies lay a hump-filled countryside broken miserably

with forests, lakes, and marshes.

The Russians could deploy only slowly over narrow fronts, enabling the Germans

to shift forces over their efficient railway systems.

Seeing that the Russian armies would be split upon entering East Prussia and

arrive on the battlefield at different times, The German high command made

plans to defeat each in separate turn.

Von Moltke misinterpreted an adjustment in the line by von Prittwitz as defeat

and retreat and made a far-reaching decision.

He changed commanders.

On August 28th, he cabled General Erich Ludendorff, the hero of Liege.

You may yet be able to save the situation in the east.

On Ludendorff's train to Prussia, there was a fortuitous meeting.

Aboard was General Paul von Hindenburg, called out of retirement.

The commanders connected instantly in spirit.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff would become virtually one as military dictators of

Germany.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff proceeded with the plan for which von Prittwitz had

been fired. It worked perfectly.

helped by the Russian propensity to send radio messages in the clear so that the

Germans knew their plans.

On August 26, the huge, pivotal Battle of Tannenberg began to unfold.

Samsonov drove his split-off army into a trap baited by a purposely thin German

center.

As Samsonov wired vainly for Rennenkamp's army to be rushed to his

rescue, The Germans methodically crushed his flanks and pinched off his center.

When they closed behind him by capturing the rail and road center at Neidenburg,

the disaster was complete.

There were 92,000 Russian prisoners.

Samsonov bade farewell to his staff and walked into the woods.

A single pistol shot was heard.

Nobody bothered to go into the woods to search for his body.

in the terrible crisis of the war as the most likely people to bring Germany

victory.

Austria had pounced upon the Serbs to take the long-desired territory.

On August 16, a ferociously fighting Serbian army under a defensive genius

named Radomir Putnik smashed the Austrian attack at the Battle of the

Jadar River.

Then they were beaten by the Russians in 1914.

They continually had to call on the Germans to save them.

And this happened again and again. It's one of the motifs of that war.

And when the Germans saved them, where did the Germans have to get the troops?

From the Western Front.

A German officer sighed gloomily, we are fettered to a corpse.

And there was no comfort in the West either.

No one realized the great implications of this many soldiers on a battlefield.

Now, in 1914, the machine gun and rapid fire artillery gave

an individual the capability to cover about three times the ground that he had

before in the war of 1870, and yet there were ten times the troops.

As the fronts hardened, each side saw its only hope for advantage at the

flanks, and there began a leapfrogging series of movements, the so-called race

to the sea, to either get around the enemy or to defend against his end runs.

There was no place where you could maneuver.

And that became the great dilemma of the war in France and Belgium.

How do you get through?

By the end of September 1914,

two months after the Great War began, the Western Front became a brutal

honeycomb of astonishing complexity.

The man-height trenches grew underground dugouts for men and horses, galleries to

accommodate stores and headquarters, pillboxes, ammunition dumps, traverses,

and communication tunnels.

And the trenches appeared in successive lines, shrouding themselves in thousands

of miles of barbed wire.

Trench warfare was hell on earth.

Mud, disease, typhus.

Rats inside the trenches gas shells day after day of

cold and filth

With

the front stabilized it was possible to begin the massing of artillery wheel to

wheel in great packs for uses in defense and attack

Artillery men soon became artists, masters of the creeping barrage and the

pre-registered firestorm.

The great killer of the First World War was artillery.

Artillery accounted for 70% of the casualties in the

First World War.

The Western Front, by the beginning of 1915, had become a line of entrenchments

reaching from Switzerland to the Channel, over 400 miles.

It was said that a man could walk from Switzerland to the Channel and never

emerge above ground.

It was more than most men could bear.

With firepower in sheer numbers ending all Western Front mobility in the early

war, Antwerp was evacuated.

The remains of the Belgian and British forces fell back to dig in on a fragment

of Belgian soil in Flanders that would become infamous for four years.

as the war's most lethal ground.

Von Moltke's failures had brought command of the German army to General

Erich von Falkenhayn. He was enigmatic, dashing, and stopped cold by an old

reliable weapon, mud.

If they had overpowered the Belgians, they...

could have gained the last real prizes of 1914, which were the channel ports.

The Belgians under King Albert opted to flood that flat

landscape, and that flooded landscape absolutely stopped the Germans.

Defending the ports with the French, the British Expeditionary Force made a

magnificent stand at Ypres.

called wipers forever by the british the british defensive salient was shaped

chillingly like a skull within it one million would die or be maimed

slaughtered at triple the rate of any other sector kitchener cried out this

isn't war the battle died down and the armies dug deeper

we know

that soldiers began to recognize that the conditions of war this war of

attrition this bleeding of the enemy to death was forever changing their lives

when they recognized themselves that probably their most important weapon for

protection was the spade not the gun not the bayonet the germans did

something very smart early on in the war and that was that they gained

practically

All the high ground on the Western Front.

The nation suddenly understood that this was another sort of war.

A munitions machine of unheard-of size had sprung up everywhere.

The French 75mm guns alone were spewing 30,000 rounds a day.

England was soon turning out 1,200,000 shells a month.

The army's butchery would need every one of them.

As 1915 began, the German planners broke into rival camps called Easterners and

Westerners, each seeing his own front as the decisive one to break the stalemate.

The Hindenburg Ludendorff team managed to take Warsaw from the Russians,

although the enemy retreat into the Russian vastnesses made it meaningless.

The Austrians again knocked heads against the Serbs and came out with 100

,000 dead and nothing gained.

The Germans hoped for more from Turkey.

The Germans were successful.

in drawing the Ottoman Empire into the war on their side.

That meant that they had to fight Russia in the Caucasus.

It meant that when British forces landed in what is today Iraq, they had to fight

them there.

Turkey, although the Ottoman Empire had lost most of its European territories,

still had the area around what was then Constantinople, is now Istanbul, and the

Dardanelles. In other words, the straits connecting the Aegean Sea with the Black

Sea.

And this was an area of enormous importance because it was the most

plausible route by which the Western powers could supply Russia with military

supplies

Although Turkish attempts to break into Russia through the Caucasus in December

were bloodily repulsed, the nervous Russians appealed to Britain for a

British diversion to ease the threat from the south.

The British and the French were determined to force the Dardanelles.

They planned a combined land and naval campaign, the largest amphibious

operation probably ever tried up to that point.

Winston Churchill, as Lord of the Admiralty, was one of the principal

architects.

An attempt by British and French fleets to force the Dardanelles by naval

gunpower alone foundered in a series of spectacular sinkings of three attacking

battleships by Turkish mines and shore battles.

The seizure of the Dardanelles would have to be given over to an army landed

by sea.

The attack point chosen was the Gallipoli Peninsula, guarding the

European side of the straits.

Imposing cliffs looked down on the sea with points rising to 1,200 feet.

Access from narrow rocky beaches was limited to a series of gullies running

up through low, dense scrub.

the capable general sir ian hamilton was sent by kitchener to command two

divisions of australians and new zealanders under general sir william

birdwood the anzacs and a french brigade numbered seventy thousand and were

destined for valorous calamity trying for the impossible goals they would go

over the mountains toward

Constantinople, as it was called then, and others would go up into the Balkans.

The idea would be to hit Germany from another side.

Of course, it didn't work because, thanks to the Turkish machine guns,

Gallipoli simply turned into the Western Front gone vertical.

The defenders fought superbly under the capable German General Limon von

Sanders, who soon commanded 84,000 Turks.

The Gallipoli landings were made from small boats and awkward landing ships,

bunching the troops for the murderous fire that met them.

The forces were scattered around four small and unconnected beaches around the

toe of the peninsula.

Confused and floundering everywhere, the attackers missed key tactical and

strategic opportunities to go forward where the Turks were weak and walked

instead into a series of hornets' nests.

Quickly, the attacking forces found themselves pinned by Turkish forces on

cramped strips of unsheltered beach beneath virtually unassailable heights

from which defenders poured down non-stop death.

As Turkish reinforcements arrived to freeze the lines, all Birdwood could

think to tell his dying soldiers was to dig, dig, dig.

The Anzacs did, picking up the permanent name of Diggers.

Nowhere was courage expended more recklessly or hopelessly than at

Gallipoli, in attacks on the heights.

In three days, a third of the assault force had fallen.

The Royal Navy came in close to help with big gunfire, but the German

submarines were waiting.

Three British battleships went to the bottom.

Careers began to dissolve.

British Prime Minister Asquith removed Winston Churchill as First Lord of the

Admiralty.

By July, Gallipoli battle casualties had passed the 50,000 mark.

Names like Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove became symbols of useless courage and

prodigious waste.

Another 40,000 diggers fell in August for what a soldier called five acres of

bad grazing ground.

What you had as a result was a terrible, bloody fight that runs through most

of 1915, in which approximately a million men from both sides

fight over this small peninsula, and a quarter of them are buried there still

today.

Shortly after a December blizzard froze and drowned 280 men in trenches, the

gallant diggers of Gallipoli were pulled out, and hell thereafter would hold no

new terrors for them, such as the one they were due to endure on other

miserable fronts of this great war.

now consuming mankind without end.