Original subtitles

1916. Woodrow Wilson is re-elected president on a pledge to keep America

out of Europe's devastating war.

The U.S. is totally unprepared.

And when U.S. troops finally get into the fight, they suffer immense losses.

Everything you hold worthwhile is at stake.

This is the forgotten story of the secret deals, government mistakes, and

political intolerance of the war to end all wars.

There are only two sides, American or traitor.

This is Secrets of World War I Declassified.

France, 1917.

The world has never seen carnage like this.

A world war.

The

challenge

has gone out to America.

Britain and France desperately need help against the Germans and their allies.

They had been at war since August 1914.

What they needed most in 1917 was just simply soldiers.

They had taken such huge casualties in their units that they really seriously

were running out of people. And what they wanted were infantrymen who could

carry rifles, machine gunners.

Both the French and the British wanted assistance now.

The Great War, as it is called at the time, is unlike anything humanity has

ever seen.

Total Mechanized Warfare In

America the challenge falls on deaf ears.

The horrors of total war in a distant land are too much.

There was a lot of opposition to the war. In fact, maybe more opposition than

we might have thought at one point. Immigrant communities in the northern

cities, many people had come to America in part to escape conscription from the

European armies.

The question in 1917 becomes how Americans can be persuaded to support

the war.

Woodrow Wilson.

was essential to getting America into the Great War.

He had taken a position that America was too proud to fight, that we were going

to be neutral, that we would not get involved in this war amongst the

European powers.

America stands at a crossroads in 1917.

Wilson can either hope for peace or send American soldiers to try and rescue

Europe from the hell it has made for itself.

He tried many times to be the peace leader, to broker a peace deal, and

nobody wanted to do that because too many people had died. There was going to

be a fighting conclusion.

The worst war the world has yet seen starts with a simple murder.

August 1914.

When 20-year-old Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinates the heir to

the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo.

The powers of Europe are drawn into a war beyond any mankind has seen.

The spark that sets off this powder keg is the assassination of Archduke Franz

Ferdinand by the radical nationalists known as the Black Hand.

It's an unorganized group of young men who assassinate a key political figure.

and realize that assassination is a tool that can be used like warfare.

On the other hand, they never anticipated that their assassination

would cause worldwide tumult and chaos.

Austria, Germany and Turkey line up against Russia, France, Italy and Great

Britain.

Soon, the war becomes a stalemate in the West, with thousands of British, French,

and German soldiers dying in the mud and muck of terrifying trench warfare.

During the war, it was feared, and it was always in the back of everybody's

mind that he could end his life strangling to death at the bottom of a

trench.

The powers of Europe seek allies beyond the continent.

At the beginning of the war, President Wilson said that Americans should be

neutral in thought as well as in deed.

On the other hand, right from the beginning, England in particular was a

major trading partner of the United States, always more so than Germany.

For many Americans, World War I introduces the United States as a major

player on the world stage.

But the declassified record of America's entry and participation in the war tells

a tumultuous tale of infighting, inexperience, and agonizing American

sacrifice.

The main problem is the American troops weren't ready to enter the trenches.

It's very easy to train soldiers to fire their weapons, wear their uniforms.

It's far more difficult to train all the people, all the soldiers in a division

to do all the things that they have to.

have to do.

In terms of training the artillery, training the transportation people, the

logisticians to handle the movement of thousands of tons of supplies, that's an

enormously difficult operation.

It takes years for America to get into the war.

The British want America in on their side.

They establish a secret operation to manipulate the news of the war in

America.

It gave the British a tremendous advantage.

They were able to pretend that they didn't have a propaganda apparatus.

In fact, they had probably the biggest propaganda apparatus of any country in

the war.

August 1914.

Britain strategically cuts many of the communication links going in and out of

Germany, particularly those going to the United States.

Well, Britain, of course, cut all the cables across the North Sea leading into

Germany to cut back on German communications. This was done

immediately when the war started. But the transatlantic cables that Britain

controlled were always open during the entire war.

With that, the British have a monopoly on war news in America.

They establish a press bureau that provides news on the war to hundreds of

American newspapers.

They knew exactly what propaganda worked and what didn't work.

And the beauty of it all was that nobody knew they existed.

The propaganda machine churns out the stories, mostly false, of German

atrocities in Europe, especially in occupied Belgium.

Germans were accused of bayoneting babies, of raping nuns, of doing all

sorts of things that later turned out to have been greatly exaggerated.

For the first three years of the war, the United States is technically

neutral. But American banks loaned Britain the money to wage war.

And American munitions companies are filling unprecedented orders from

London.

It was a boom time for U.S. industry because we were producing everything for

the Allies.

Rifles, artillery, munitions, grain, horses, petroleum.

That included poison gas.

A new weapon that the United States did not produce before the war.

U.S. manufacturers made some chlorine, which was used for cooling and cooling

systems at the time. But the government had to actually had to start producing

it themselves at an arsenal in Maryland.

The Germans fight back in America by waging a covert campaign of sabotage in

munitions factories and at ports where ships are loading American weapons bound

for Britain and France.

In 1916, a huge amount of ammunition on Black Tom Island off Cavan Point blew up

with a blast that broke practically every window in Jersey City and in

downtown New York.

It was a gigantic explosion that lasted almost all night.

1917. Despite the propaganda and all the financial and military support the

United States is giving the Allies, Britain is on the verge of bankruptcy.

1917 was the tough year.

The British authorities by the end of 1916 were deeply concerned that they

were scraping the bottom of the barrel of their financial resources.

The Allies are in danger of collapse.

They need soldiers fast.

Secretly, Woodrow Wilson is planning America's entrance into the war.

And the nation has no idea of the tragedy that is to come.

1916

Britain and France are struggling to hold the Western Front against Germany.

In America, Woodrow Wilson is a vulnerable president, having won a three

-way race with only 42% of the vote in 1912.

He is re-elected president by a razor-thin majority on an anti-war

platform.

Woodrow Wilson ran in 1916 for re-election on the slogan, he kept us

out of war.

which wasn't the slogan he had favored. He really wanted to run on his domestic

record. The eight-hour day, child labor laws, a restriction of big business, the

so-called trusts.

In his first term and during the campaign, Wilson condemns all the

warring nations, and he calls on them to negotiate a peace without victory.

The stories from the battlefield horrify the average American.

This is trench warfare.

The two lines are dug in, facing each other. An assault is the only way to

break the lines.

But the machine guns are waiting.

The most fearsome weapon of all is gas.

Gas was first used on the Western Front in the spring of 1915.

The gas was chlorine, kind of a primitive form.

of gas, it was an asphyxiant, but of course the troops who were opposing

them, French colonials and Canadians, were not prepared for it. They had to

improvise and they just barely held on and if the Germans had had sufficient

troops to follow up, there might have been a major breakthrough.

This triggered a gas war.

Over nine million soldiers will die before the conflict is finished.

Many Americans are dismayed at the mechanized carnage.

But many feel they must take sides.

Wilson's view of the war during his first term was it was a nightmare on

both sides.

He saw nothing to differentiate the morality of the British and the morality

of the Germans.

But secretly, he is pro-British.

His mother was English.

He had visited England.

He harbors deep suspicions of the German government.

He wanted Britain to win, but he also wanted the U.S. to stay out of it, which

was not seen as a contradiction at the time. That was the most popular view

among the different views of war in the United States at the time.

The Democratic Party, Wilson's party, is filled with anti-war sentiment.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan constantly warns Wilson that Wall

Street will drag America into war.

At its convention in Baltimore, the party adopts the slogan, He Kept Us Out

of War, for Wilson's re-election campaign.

The Republicans are the party of war raging over German submarine attacks on

US ships in the Atlantic, headed for England.

Attacks like that on the Lusitania in 1915, in which 128 Americans die.

The Republican Party tended to be more belligerent.

Some of its leading figures, for example, former President Theodore

Roosevelt, detested Wilson.

January 1917.

President Woodrow Wilson is still talking as if the U.S. will stay out of

the war.

But Americans are in harm's way on the high seas.

President Wilson makes his Peace Without Victory speech on January 22nd, 1917.

It's his last attempt to avoid a war, but then events take a bad turn for his

vision. The first thing that happens is the Germans instantly resume using the

submarine warfare, and they start shooting at ships, including ships that

include American passengers.

portrays incidents like these in his 1917 film, The Little American, fanning

the flames of war.

That same month, in the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, the German

government offers an alliance to Mexico, dangling the possibility of regaining

Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and other parts of the Southwest as bait.

The British intercept the telegram, decode it, and give it to Wilson.

He is especially incensed because he allowed the German embassy to use

communication lines from Washington to send coded messages to Berlin.

They've gone to Wilson and said, we can't communicate normally because the

British have cut our communications.

Can we please use your State Department channels? And Wilson says, yeah, sure.

And what are they doing? They're sending messages offering an alliance to Mexico

to attack us through the same channel.

April 2nd, 1917.

Just five months after his re-election, Wilson asks Congress for a declaration

of war.

Despite opposition from his own party, Wilson carries the day and Congress

declares war on Germany.

America is now at war.

But both the nation and its president are naive about what is to come.

Woodrow Wilson wasn't aware of how badly the Allies were doing.

They had been fairly successful at hiding it.

Britain successfully hid its financial problems for the most part until after

the American Declaration of War.

Neither the President nor the public have any idea how desperate Britain and

France are.

How many American troops will be needed in Europe?

how unprepared the military is, and how the war in Europe will challenge the

American Republic at home.

April 1917.

Building on Britain's secret propaganda effort, America declares war on Germany.

Woodrow Wilson is now a war president, but neither he nor his administration

has a war plan.

In fact, they have no idea what is to come.

That same April, almost 40,000 British soldiers lose their lives in the Battle

of Arras in northeastern France.

They call it Bloody April.

And that's just a fraction of the dead from Verdun and the Somme and countless

other battles in the war's first three years.

Military innovations, from the machine gun to the tank to the aerial bomb,

result in a level of carnage the world has never seen.

The day that Congress declares war on Germany, April 6, 1917,

some in the military ask the Senate for $3 billion to build training camps and

purchase new weapons for an expanded army.

The leader of the U.S. Senate said, my God, you're not going to send soldiers

over there, are you?

Now, if that doesn't prove that we didn't know what we were doing, I don't

know what does.

We did not have a modern army.

We had to build that from scratch, and it all started on the day America

declared war, April 6, 1917.

For nearly three years, millions have been fighting and dying in the trenches

of Europe.

And yet, when the US enters the war, it has virtually no one to send to help.

The American military and political leaders really believed that they would

not have to send a single soldier to France.

The U.S. Army in April 1917 was about 128,000 officers and men and about

another 101, maybe 102,000 National Guardsmen.

It was a frontier constabulary force, really had no units larger than

regiments.

America wasn't prepared for what it got into in April of 1917.

A young major, Douglas MacArthur, writes a memo challenging the belief that the

US will need only half a million troops.

He argues his case with the Secretary of War.

Even President Wilson does not know how badly American troops are needed in

Europe.

When Wilson was looking at the Allies in February and March of 1917, it

still looked, if not that they were winning, it did not look as if they were

losing yet.

A French offensive that spring crumbles into disaster, bringing with it

desertions and mutiny involving tens of thousands of troops.

In the Alps, Italian troops are deserting as well, giving assault plans

to their Austrian adversaries.

On the Eastern Front, catastrophe in the Russian army is not far off.

The Russian Revolution occurred in March of 1917, but their military collapse

came months after that.

At first, Wilson and others believe a volunteer army will do.

But America greets the declaration of war with resistance.

First enlistments total just 73,000.

Woodrow Wilson was initially opposed to conscription.

It had only really been used once before in the Civil War, which had not gone

well, causing riots and such in New York City.

He thinks it goes against American tradition.

He thinks that it will make America like European countries where people are

forced to fight and that that didn't represent what this country was about.

May 1917.

Wilson quickly changes his mind.

When it becomes clear without a draft, America cannot raise the army necessary

to make a difference in the fighting.

The draft is instituted, but not without a huge fight in Congress and in the

country.

We have very high rates of desertion, exemptions, people trying to avoid the

draft.

Wilson soon becomes aware just how desperate things are for his new allies.

The French sent General Joffre, who had been the commander of their armies at

the time of the beginning of the war.

Joffre said, well, you know, this is all very good. You'll contribute money.

You'll contribute materiel. But what we want is men. We need men. We must have

men. Because the French were suffering disastrous casualties.

They needed American soldiers.

But Americans believe.

Wilson leads them to believe that the war is as good as won.

In truth, the Allies are holding on by their fingernails.

The British wanted 500,000 Americans drafted immediately and shipped to

England. You don't have to train them. They said, we'll train them and we'll

put them in the British Army, commanded by British officers, and make them into

cannon fodder like they'd made all their own men.

Wilson also does not know the extent of the secret dealings among the Allies for

carving up Europe, the Middle East, and Africa after the war.

Woodrow Wilson didn't know the specifics of the secret treaties, but he certainly

suspected there were some agreements.

He knew that Britain and France and their allies were fighting not

necessarily or not at all for...

particularly pure reasons.

There were commercial reasons, there were strategic reasons, there were

reasons of territory, reasons of revenge.

The president rejects Britain's request to train and command American troops.

Instead, he appoints General John Pershing to lead the American

Expeditionary Force.

General Pershing was a career army officer who served out on the frontier

initially.

was at one time the captain of a company of Indian scouts in the Sioux Territory.

He was at Wounded Knee.

He was later on a horse next to Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill in Cuba.

Pershing arrives in France without an army.

British and French leaders are furious.

Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of War gave Pershing specific instructions to

set up an independent American army, which Wilson needed in order to have a

strong voice in the peace negotiations that he knew would eventually arise.

Wilson is already thinking about his role on the world stage after the war.

Without a dependent American army, the United States would not have an

important voice.

So we had to have that army.

Pershing tells the British and French it will take another year for his army to

get into the fight.

He meets Britain's King George V.

There are rumors of 50,000 American warplanes on their way to Europe.

In reality, America has only 55 training planes.

Pershing tells the king no planes will be sent for some time to come.

The Allies are shocked.

They tell Pershing, we don't know how much longer we can hold out.

Summer, 1917.

While America attempts to build a fighting armament, and its allies hang

on by a thread,

Opponents of the war rage against President Woodrow Wilson.

The anti-war movement was pretty strong when America entered World War I. There

were many people who didn't support this war.

They were progressive politicians and progressive activists who had supported

all kinds of government reform earlier in the 20th century who thought this was

a bad war.

It was a war that would lead to needless death. It was a war that was being

fought in the name of business rather than really democracy.

And they opposed it. So you had progressives like Robert La Follette in

the Senate, or you had progressive activists like Jane Addams, who didn't

support what this was about. You also had socialists such as Eugene Debs, a

labor leader, who didn't think this would be in the interest of working men.

So there were many different kinds of opponents. There were also many...

irish americans there were many german americans who had ambivalent feelings

about this war there are many groups opposing the war fighting

conscription marching in the streets

Hyphenated Americanism was a common idea during this period, and it meant that

either if you were naturalized or you weren't, and you had been an immigrant,

that you weren't fully American.

That you were either an Irish American, you were an Italian American, and that

meant to some you weren't fully loyal to the country. You weren't American. And

throughout World War I, you have all kinds of incidents against German

Americans, Irish Americans, because they are hyphenated Americans.

Sometimes it is violent.

Another very powerful force in the anti-war movement were the ethnics of

the United States, particularly the German Americans, who were the largest

ethnic group in the United States, there were 8.5 million of them, and also the

most prosperous, and the Irish Americans, who were absolutely livid at

the thought of going into a war to support England.

They still remembered their...

hundreds of years of oppression under English rule in Ireland, and so they

were totally opposed to this.

They represented a very formidable element in the anti-war picture,

particularly because they controlled hundreds of thousands, even millions of

votes.

And Wilson did not endear himself to either one of them when he accused

American ethnics of pouring poison into the veins of American life.

To make matters worse on the battlefield things are not going well for US allies

Supporters of the war in America are becoming increasingly nervous about the

state of affairs The actual course of the war The fall of

1917 to the spring of 1918 was the period of maximum danger for the Allies

because even once the United States was involved in the war, we had hardly any

army to speak of to begin with.

Casualties are so severe and trench warfare is so punishing that morale

among the Italians, French, and British is crumbling.

the allies had suffered a number of horrendous defeats in both italy and in

flanders and in france there were major mutinies in the french army the british

suffered enormous losses at the third battle of ypres or

in the fall of 1917 and also of course you have to remember that the russian

revolution occurred and russia by the spring of 1918 and pulled out of the war

the german troops that were fighting the russians on the eastern front were now

free to be brought over to the western front and as many as two million more

german troops were available for combat in france and the germans launched a

series of major offensives that came very close to puncturing the allied

lines drove the british way back

Because of this grim news, Americans of all stripes are nervous about sending

troops. Recent historical research reveals even widespread resistance to

the war in the rural South and among religious groups.

When we went into World War I, this was not a popular war, and this is something

that Wilson had to deal with.

One of Wilson's first moves is to create a propaganda machine,

the Committee for Public Information, headed by a Colorado newspaper man named

George Creel.

The committee floods America's newspapers with pro-government articles

about the war, eventually setting up a newspaper of its own with Wilson's

approval.

He hated all reporters. He thought they were ignoramuses. So he thought this was

what we really should have, a government-run newspaper.

The committee also creates the four-minute men, who propagandize for

the war in short speeches in movie houses between reels.

And in that four-minute period, men were trained to then get up and to give a

short, pithy, precise...

pitch for the war, for recruitment, for war bonds, for whatever the cause might

be.

Hollywood stars join the war bond campaign.

Wilson's government also begins a crackdown on anyone speaking out against

the war effort.

He approves the creation of the American Protective League, volunteers working

with the Attorney General to enforce the war effort.

They would conduct slacker raids.

to try to find out who was avoiding draft duty.

They would try to intimidate people who weren't buying liberty bonds, which the

government was selling to raise money for the war.

They would go into public schools and try to overhear if people were talking

badly against the war, and they would report it to the government.

June 1917.

A quarter of a million private agents of the American Protective League are

battling against dissent across the nation.

Americans are spying.

on Americans.

That same month, President Wilson signs the Espionage Act.

And the law empowers the federal government to go after people who were

opposing the war, either people who were speaking out against the war or people

who were sending material through the mail.

The government is especially uneasy about dissent among black Americans.

American blacks are still deprived of the vote in the South.

When America went to war in the name of democracy, and when African Americans

were part of the wartime effort, many African Americans said, why is there

democracy abroad?

Why are we fighting for that in Europe, but not here in the United States?

Frequently, the crackdown in the black community brings violence.

The worst comes in Houston in August 1917, when black soldiers in training

see a white Houston police officer abuse a black woman.

They grabbed the cop and shook him until his teeth rattled, apparently, and maybe

slugged him a couple of times.

And the next thing you know, there were other cops beating the hell out of these

black soldiers. They went back to their camp outside Houston. They told what had

happened, and quite a few of them reached for their rifles.

41 black troops are eventually imprisoned in the attacks, and 13 are

hanged.

Other targets of repression include the radical labor movement led by the

Wobblers, or the Industrial Workers of the World.

and German-Americans who are victims of the growing war rage in America.

There's one case in St. Louis where a German-American is wrapped in an

American flag by a mob, carried through the streets, and lynched.

The battle is raging in America, but in Europe, American soldiers are still

nowhere to be seen.

The trenches and battlefields are soaked with the blood of millions dead.

The two million Americans who will eventually make it to Europe will face a

kind of combat they could never imagine.

Autumn 1917.

American troops in small numbers begin to arrive in Europe, but by far not

enough to make a difference in the war.

General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, spends

much of the next year trying to get his soldiers trained and fighting with his

British and French counterparts over strategy.

Pershing is a hard-nosed, stubborn leader who concludes the French and the

British have made the wrong moves on the battlefield.

So when the Americans first started coming, There was a huge debate amongst

the Americans on one side and the French and the British on the other, with the

Americans saying, especially General John J. Pershing, that the United States

forces would in fact train, prepare themselves, and once they were fully

organized and fully prepared, they would enter battle.

They wanted to ship us out and break us up and put us into...

the French and English units, and John Pershing, Black Jack, wouldn't stand for

it. He said, nope, Americans are going to fight as Americans so we don't lose

our identity.

The U.S. is slow to build training camps, and when training begins in

earnest, sickness ravages the recruits.

Most of the deaths in the U.S. in training were from disease.

Of the 120 some odd thousand casualties, death casualties, suffered by the AEF,

60,000 were mainly from the effects of influenza.

It was a really serious problem. Of course, in the days before antibiotics,

there was no cure.

A global influenza pandemic hits the soldiers in U.S. training camps.

There is no place more perfect for spreading a communicable disease than a

cramped military camp.

30,000 American troops in training in America died from the influenza.

In Europe, the Allies are suffering horrible losses at the Second Battle of

Ypres and at Passchendaele.

January 1918.

America has just four divisions in the war, barely more than 100,000 troops.

Their morale is low.

So far, they make little difference in the fighting.

The slow arrival of American troops in France is one of the forgotten scandals

of the war.

So the French really almost went berserk. There was a serious attempt in

France at this time because they decided the Americans were a bunch of fakes and

they never were going to send any men. Within the French government, there was

a serious attempt to negotiate a peace with the Germans.

The real secret of the war lies inside Germany.

The German economy is collapsing.

Under pressure from the British naval blockade, food is becoming scarce.

Malnutrition and hunger are rampant.

Discontent skyrockets.

There was no coal to heat their houses.

They were living on turnips.

There was no meat to be found.

Airplanes were having trouble flying because rubber for tires, even petroleum

to keep them in the air was in very, very short supply.

Short on supplies and morale, the Germans nonetheless are pushing forward

on the battlefield.

But in the spring and summer of 1918, America's troops begin to make a

difference.

At this point, in late May 1918, Germany is indisputably

winning World War I.

But something changes.

General Pershing, who had just started to move his first division out into the

Somme sector, also sends two divisions, almost 60,000 men.

They plug the gap.

And from that point in history, there are no more German breakthroughs in

World War I.

American troops use gas as a weapon, like all armies in World War I.

American casualties from enemy gas attacks are especially high.

By the time American troops were fighting fully in the summer of 1918,

gas had been used for almost three years on the Western Front. It was one of the

things that the headstrong Americans wouldn't learn about or learned about

only through bitter experience. So actually a high proportion of American

casualties were gas casualties.

It's just that the gas was particularly effective against green and untried

troops, as the Americans were.

Mustard gas would burn you wherever you were moist. I mean, on your lips, your

nose, your eyes, your arms, and your groin.

In fact, when I was in the hospital, I saw guys laying there, spread eagle on

the bed, their groin and their arms and their eyes and their nose and their

mouth was just red, puffed up, swollen and red.

than mustard gas.

Over 70,000 US troops are overcome by gas weapons and

1,500 of those die.

General Pershing, in a rarely heard recording, implores the American public

to back the troops.

July,

1918. America finally manages to put two million men into combat.

They will fight for just 200 days, and they will turn the tide.

The actual fighting, the heavy bombardment and all, that the Germans

made on July 14th, that was the start, French Bastille Day, that was the

start of the Germans' last dive.

And from there on, we knocked the tire out of them and kept them going until

the war was over.

September 1918.

In the Ayn Marn Offensive, more than 90,000 American soldiers are killed or

wounded. The final push comes in the Argonne Forest.

The battle lasts for weeks.

Americans bleed, starve, and die.

It's very difficult for the Americans, but it occurs at a time when the Allies

have the initiative. The German army is beginning to disintegrate.

And in many ways, it really is the drive of the Americans toward the north that

forced the Germans to realize that they are facing a terrible disaster and

really have to do something to end this war.

Morning, November 11, 1918.

Sergeant Ralph Vorderhase leads a squad of American soldiers of the 89th

Division on the east bank of the Meuse River in northern France.

In dense fog, two German soldiers manning a machine gun startle the

Americans. The Germans do not shoot.

Vorderhase asks them why.

The war is ending at 11 this morning, they tell him. No need to sacrifice our

lives or yours needlessly.

Germany and her allies have collapsed and an armistice has been declared.

Suddenly, something was wrong.

And I stopped dead in my tracks.

And I couldn't figure out what it was for maybe five or six seconds.

It was that dramatic.

The firing had stopped.

America's six months of fighting in World War I are at an end.

More than 50,000 American soldiers are killed in action.

Almost 200,000 wounded.

Another 60,000 are dead from disease.

And the world that the war, in Wilson's words, would make safe for democracy?

The Great War turns the world on its head.

It destroys the German monarchy, the Russian monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, the Ottoman Empire.

The British Empire is mortally wounded.

More than 9 million soldiers are dead.

And the world?

We'll soon be at war again.