August 27, 1933, East-Prussia.
Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, both veterans of the World War I,
pay tribute to field marshal Von Hindenburg
in the awe-inspiring setting of the monument to the battle of Tannenberg.
Hitler declares: �Tannenberg is a symbol;
it was here in 1914, that Germany's destiny was determined�.
For Hindenburg, 20 years earlier, the battle of Tannenberg
had been the defining event of his life and of the First World War.
APOCALYPSE World War I
Millions of men are caught in the machinery of the war, that will be short and glorious,
or so the generals and heads of a state promise.
Instead, the war becomes one of deadlock in fear.
2/5 FEAR
Fear on the home front.
As the Germans advance on Paris, there's a run on the banks to empty personal accounts.
Many flee, storming train stations.
But the Ferrari family remains home, in L'�tang-la-Ville, near Paris.
The first images of daily life in the wars early weeks.
The grandfather gives a military salute, he is confident in the French Army.
The children prepare for the new school year.
A directive from the French Ministry of education, dated August 7th, 1914, states:
�Lessons must cover the causes of the war�.
�The unwarranted aggression that provoked it,
and how France, eternal champion of progress in law,
was forced to again rise up with his valiant allies to repel a barbarian attack�.
Thousands of refugees from Belgium, northern France,
and the Champagne region, fled the advancing Germans.
The war forces families from their homes, from their lives.
The same panic strikes East Prussia in northern Germany, where the Russians attack.
Rumors spread: �They plunder and rape�.
In movie theaters, German propaganda features a villain, the Russian rapist,
and film after film, terrorizing audiences.�
But the Russian advances orderly.
The generals execute the strategic plan - opening a new front
which eases the pressure on the French ally.
The Russian steamroller, as it is called, made up of two Imperial armies,
totaling 400,000 men, threatens Berlin.
Russian soldiers, oppressed by czarism and religion, sing farewell to their country.
My beloved country, I shall never see you again...
But the Russian soldiers do not understand why they must march hundreds of miles
and cross the border to defend their homeland.
Peasants, for the most part, many can neither read nor write
and left no journals or letters.
In his novel, �August 1914�,
the famous Russian writer Solzhenitsyn describes the buoyant mood:
�The regiment is a sort of village, the officers� sort of squire,
and so long as meals, mass and vodka are offered, bullets hold no terror�.
On August 20th, 1914,
the Russian army advances to East Prussia, seemingly invincible.
Along with thousands of civilians, the German 8th Army retreats.
General Von Hindenburg, 67, takes over command.
To reassure the public, the general is filmed in conversation with Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Hindenburg is seconded by General Ludendorff, 47,
who has earned praise for the Belgian campaign.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff appear unconcerned; they make a formidable team.
As Hindenburg puts it: "It is a happy marriage".
Hindenburg and Ludendorff know that they are outnumbered.
They have only 200,000 men under their command, half as many as the Russians,
but they are better armed and can move their troops more efficiently
through strategic rail transport.
Morale among the troops is high, many of them come from East Prussia,
they are defending their homeland.
Ludendorff deploys the dirigibles of Count Zeppelin;
huge hydrogen-filled airships that enabled him to observe enemy movements.
The Germans are able to transmit vital information.
The two Russian armies are too far apart to come to each other's aid.
The time is right for a German attack, starting with General Samsonov's army
which is nearing Tannenberg.�
In three days the Germans take 90,000 prisoners,
30,000 Russians were killed or wounded.
General Samsonov tells his officers: �The czar trusted me,
how can I face him after such a disaster�, and he puts a bullet through his head.
The second Russian army is decimated in turn.
The defeat is a terrible blow to Russia's, French, and British allies,
who seek to cover it up.
German refugees from East Prussia returned to their villages but rarely their homes.
Their fate has shaken the nation's morale.
To boost spirits, the Germans film the surviving troops, who receive triple rations,
10,000 of their fellow comrades have fallen in battle.
Hindenburg is named field marshal, he becomes a national hero.
Ludendorff, the real architect of the victory, is overlooked.
But Hindenburg says: �If things it turned out differently,
mine would be the most hated name in all Germany�.
At Russian headquarters, Czar Nicholas II, in his special train,
sitting camouflaged in the Birch Forest, meets his uncle,
the Commander-in-Chief of his armies, Grand Duke Nicholas.
In an authoritarian giant, he plays down the disaster at Tannenberg.
For him, the real enemy is the Austro-Hungarian Empire.�
He says: �The War started in Austria�.
�The way to Berlin lies to Austria-Hungary�.
The Russians are able to conquer Galicia, at the time an Austrian province,
and its main city Lemberg.
The Cossack cavalry advances 120 miles.
Austria loses 400,000 men, killed, wounded, were taken prisoner.
The POWs are a cross-section of the Slavic peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
including Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Bosniaks.
A Russian propaganda film shows an Austro-Hungarian prisoner,
fraternizing with a Russian soldier, two Slavs in opposing uniforms.
They are filmed as symbols of Russia's desire to unite all Slaves in its empire.
Nicholas II smile of satisfaction, after this initial victory against the Austrians
masks the loss of 200,000 Russian soldiers in three weeks of the war.
My beloved country,
I shall never see you again...
To the west - on front 370 miles long,
seven German armies, two million men in all, invade France.
The first Army of General Von Kluck crosses the Somme River,
the last natural line of defense before the capital.
The German officers rally their troops, saying: �Victory is close;
the triumphant entry into Paris, awaits you�.
The German infantrymen have marched 250 miles
since the heavy fighting in Belgium of early August 1914.
The commander of the Brandenburg Regiment tells them:
�We must allow the enemy no rest, sweat saves blood�.
Even as they retreat, the French continue the fight;
they are at the limits of their endurance.
The heat is unbearable. It is the hottest summer of the century.
Few men have washed, were taken off their boots for a month.
Blood oozes from the backs of the horses that are seldom unsaddled.
But it is not an orderly retreat by the French and British.
The first Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment
which arrived in France on August 13, has marched 185 miles,
before assembling to hear the Commander-in- Chief of the British expeditionary force,
Field Marshal Sir John French, tell them that the situation is grave.
All of France say�s its prayers.
Every side invokes God's name.
My God protects France.
Will France's colonial troops save the country?
Ever since they landed in the south of France,
the African troops have been marching northward.
Many prefer to go barefoot, rather than wear their heavy army boots.
Before their arrival, French senator says with concern:
�Neither the climate nor the food of France is suited to them�.
The generals reassure him: �They are disciplined,
strong, and devoted to their leaders�.
One of these Senegalese infantrymen is carrying his captain's deckchair.
All around Paris the defense forces organize, using any and every means.
But on September 2, 1914,
two French aviators returned from a reconnaissance flight over enemy lines.
The German forces are changing direction.
Rather than carry on to Paris, the German armies swerve,
in an attempt to encircle the French army
thus opening themselves to an attack by the French and British along the Marne River.
The commander of the forces defending Paris, general Gallieni,
order�s�a swift transport of 6,000 men to the Marne
in Parisian taxicabs.
A huge propaganda operation which the government is filmed to boost French morale.
The Marne River taxis are hailed as the savior's of Paris,
though to the contribution to the battle is minimal.
They carry only a fraction of the million Frenchmen, preparing for battle.
The French Commander-in-Chief is General Joffre, age 62.
On September 6th, 1914,
he has his officers read the day's orders to the soldiers,
advancing to the front.
At the moment when the battle is about to begin, upon which hangs the fate of France,
the troop that cannot advance, must at any cost hold on to the Concord ground,
and be killed there, rather than retreat, no weakness can be tolerated.
The soldiers are afraid;
they know the court-martial await those who waiver.
If they retreat, they will be executed by their own,
if they advance, they will be killed by the enemy.
Among them is one of France's greatest poets Charles P�guy,
the 41-year-old lieutenant is killed by a bullet to his forehead.
A Christian socialist and patriot, he had written these verses:
�Blessed are those who died in the just-war, blessed the ripe wheat,
the wheat gathered in sheaves�.
�Blessed are those who died in great battles,
stretched down on the ground in the face of God�.
French artillery units proved to be extremely effective,
thanks to the 75 mm cannon which can fire 20 rounds of a minute.
It consumes an astronomical number of shells - some hundred thousand shells a day,
200 million shells for the entire war.
They are manufactured by women who work in miserable conditions.
On September 9th, after three days of fighting,
the French and British are victorious but only after human carnage on a terrible scale.
The French historian Marc Bloch the Sergeant at the time, writes:
�Severed leg lies on the ground almost ridiculous in its horror�.�
�The revolting stench turns the stomach�.
The fighting has left 200,000 dead and wounded on the French side and just as many Germans.
Young women from comfortable families sign up as nurses.
Known as �Angels of Mercy�, they are wrested from sheltered adolescents
and must learn to endure the terrible screams of mutilated young men
and the constant, unbearable odor of blood, ether, and gangrene.
The unimaginable number of wounded and dead does not deter military and political leaders.
General Joffre, decorating colonial troops, proclaims:
�As their cruel but glorious losses testify,
the native infantrymen have admirably carried out their duty�.
Curiously, patriotism among the troops also remains high,
despite the slaughter; they think the war will end soon.
Private Pierre Bringuier writes to his wife:
�I have not given up hope of returning this November�.
�I cannot imagine that the nations involved,
can keep up their incredible effort much longer�.
The French have taken 25,000 German prisoners
and like all the belligerents, filmed them as a tangible sign of victory.
Troops view their captives with curiosity, mixed with hatred.
Henri Desperrier, a 21-year-old soldier from the south of France says:
�It's the first time I see them up close�.
�My cartridges,�way heavy in my pockets,
I longed to plug a few Prussian bellies with them�.
Altogether the POWs are treated rather well on both sides.
The International Committee of the Red Cross creates the prisoners of war agency.
It will deliver 10 billion letters and parcels over the course of the conflict.
The French are permitted a brief period of the rest.
The Colonel, the father to his Regiment, expresses his concern for the survivors.
�How is this do soldier? � is the standard phrase.
They have saved Paris.
But a young cavalry officer Ren� Chambe writes:
�The battle of the Marne; we won the battle and lost the victory�.
The French and the British allow the Germans to flee towards the north of France,
in a series of outflanking maneuvers known as �the race to the sea�.
During those three months of battle,
other German units complete their conquest of Belgium.
The German military seeks to win over the local inhabitants.
But the plundering and requisitions to feed the soldiers,
quickly spell starvation for Belgian citizens.
Among these German soldiers is an obscure Austrian painter,
who has enlisted in the German army, Adolf Hitler, then 25 years old,
will remain marked by the hell, he experienced in Flanders.
In his book �Mein Kampf� Hitler writes:
�The pride of the fighting soon turned into a nightmare;
for four years the British refused to abandon the area around the Belgian town Ypres�.
This small strip of Belgium must remain in Allied hands.
That is the wish of the Belgian King Albert I,
to whom King George V pays a visit of support.
A Belgian military doctor, Major Max Deauville, says:
�Holding our position is God's command, even if death awaits us all�.
Ypres, the last British stronghold in the North.
Ypres, which will become the tomb of thousands of Canadians in the Battle of Passchendaele.
To fill the ranks, in the south of England, the British train ever more fighting men.
Canadians, English, and French-speaking, all volunteers,
all wearing the same uniform in all subjects of his Majesty.
With his piercing blue eyes, King George V inspects the troops.
They are the same age as his oldest son who is serving in the Royal Navy,
this worries the king and queen Mary, seen here smiling bravely for the occasion.
After disembarking in the ports of France, the Canadians marched to the front.
But are they really ready to wage war?
Claudius Corneloup, a private from Qu�bec, writes:
�Our soldiers anticipate long hardship, without questioning,
without even grasping that on each face they witness pain and anguish�.
"They will suddenly be transported into the darkness of a great calamity".
In October, the Germans, determined to hold on to the regions they have conquered,
begin to dig, for four civilians to dig for them,
a veritable network of fortifications in the oozing clay of Flanders.
The heavy soil is waterlogged because the Belgians deliberately open their dikes
to flood the region.
The Germans work hard to make these termite colonies livable.
But winter will transform them into freezing crypts.
Across from them the British dig in too.
They prepared to hold the front in Flanders which is now at a stalemate.
War of movement is replaced by a war of position.
Private Corneloup is not happy, he says:
�What's the point of having trained to sprint across fields,
when what they want are miners?�
Farther south, the French make do with more or less interconnected foxholes.
The French high command refuses to condone the troops
installing themselves in trenches organized for defense.
The soldiers know that their officers think only of attack.
The Germans must be driven out of the French provinces they occupying,
behind what is now a line of trenches 435 miles long
that stretches from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
The French observe the enemy trenches by means of devices
that sometimes prove paralysis for the brave artillery spotters.
In the winter of 1914, General Joffre launches best defensives
that stuck dead by German machine-guns.
Offensives, that are meant to take pressure off the Russian front,
but leave 100,000 men dead or wounded.
20,000 die, merely to capture the lonely peak of a forgotten mountain.
Already there are so many widows.
Inconsolable, at the loss of a 20-year-old husband,
when one his mother to a 20-month-old child.
On All Saints Day, Pope Benedict XV addresses the world.
He says: �This war is the suicide of Europe�.
�There appears no limit to the destruction and carnage,
day after day fresh blood is spilled on the Earth�.
�In the view of the senseless crime, I repeat on to you,
peace on Earth to men of goodwill�.
Will the Pope's words be heard?
There are moments of spontaneous fraternization on the front
as these rare images show.
All these men risk being shot for treason.
No one knows what became of them and their celebrations were quickly stifled.
The generals remain deaf and blind.
The military, already very powerful at the beginning of the war,
is starting to dominate politics and politicians.
Despite the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, the conflict spreads.
In Africa, the French, British, and Belgians attacked the German colonies of Togo,
Cameroon, Tanganyika, Rwanda, and Namibia.
Their goals - enlarge the colonial empires
and obtain the raw materials, needed for the war industry.
Rare images of peoples that are largely been left to themselves
and are now conscripted, sometimes under the lash,
as here, in the German colony of Zanzibar.
Many Africans are lured by the soldiers� proud uniform and good pay.
These troops will fight with loyalty and encourage in the unspeakable conditions
that all combatants face.
Hundred thousand Africans and 30,000 Europeans will lose their lives in Africa;
victims of ferocious fighting and diseases, such as dysentery,
typhoid, and especially malaria.
In Asia, to honor its treaty of alliance with Great Britain,
Japan has fought the war against Germany from the beginning.
The Japanese take the opportunity to help themselves to the German enclave in China,
the port of Qingdao, with a German brewery that produces a beer,
known to this day.
Japan, on the rise economically and militarily, demonstrates superiority
by shelling for seven straight days the German defenses, which collapse.
Qingdao and its beer are now in their hands,
the Japanese turn their attention to the rest of China.
While in Europe the fighting box down, the conflict spreads to the Middle East.
On November 23, 1914, in the Jerusalem, then part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire,
allied with the Germans, the Muslims call for a Holy War to rally Muslim combatants,
against the French, British, and Russians.
The Ottoman Empire occupies a strategic position,
its capital Constantinople, now Istanbul in Turkey;
it is the home of the Hagia Sophia Basilica which has been turned into a mosque.
Constantinople commands the passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
The Ottoman Empire reaches as far as the Persian Gulf
and threatens the Suez Canal, a vital artery for the British,
and a major shipping root for supplies to the Western front.
The Ottoman sovereign is Sultan Mehmed V, 72,
here seen receiving the German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Wilhelm II is worried about diplomatic maneuvering by the British
who tried to buy Turkey's allegiance but the Germans outbid them.
The Sultan is the ruler in name only,
the real power lies with a nationalist organization �the young Turks�.
Its leader Enver Pasha, 33, is the country�s strongman.
Educated in Germany, Enver Pasha leads an army of one million men,
trained and supervised by Germans. The Germans are counting on Enver Pasha's armies
to provide relief in the fight against Russia.
Enver Pasha decides to attack Russia, Turkey�s hereditary enemy, in the Caucasus,
the border region inhabited by Muslims.
The Ottomans hope these Muslims will rise up against the czar if the holy war is declared.
The Turks, fearsome warriors, have already fought the Russians,
who hold the passages, and have deployed their troops in the mountains
to draw the enemy toward the summits.
During the previous war against the Turks, a Russian general said:
�The Caucasus is a fortress and only a madman would attempt to scale it�.
Is Enver Pasha mad?
On December 22, 1914, in the middle of winter,
he launches an attack in the mountains, near Sarikamish.
The attack fails; defeated 70,000 soldiers of the Turkish 3.Army
die of the cold or are finished off as they retreat.
Not a single Muslim, either in Russia or among its allies, rose up for the holy war.
The party in power, �the young Turks�, and Enver Pasha need a scapegoat.
They settle on Turkey's Armenian community who are Christians.
The Turkish interior minister issues an order for genocide.
The government has decided to destroy all the Armenians, living in Turkey.
No regard must be paid to either age or sex, no allowances will be made.
The Turks hang the intellectuals and community leaders and appropriate their positions.
Their wives and daughters are raped, then murdered.
The Armenians, who survived the first massacres, are herded by the Turks to camps,
in the Syrian Desert, hundreds of miles away.
Exhausted, beaten, denied food and water, they die along the way.
Over one million Armenians were killed.
For the Turks, the war goes on.
On March 15th, 1915, the joint British and French fleet
tries to force the Dardanelles straight,
to take Constantinople, and prevent Bulgaria from entering the war,
alongside the German and Ottoman empires.
The Turks have powerful cannons and underwater minefields.
They sink three battleships and damage seven others.
Out of a fleet of 18, 10 British and French warships are out of action.
After the defeat, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty
and mastermind of the mission is forced to step down,
but those responsible for the disaster are the admirals and generals.
In their continued content in underestimation of the Turks, one month later,
the venture landing on the coast of Turkey at Gallipoli to seize the enemy�s batteries.
On April 25, 1915, the ANZAC�s, the Australian and New Zealand forces,
together with British and French contingents, are dropped on the narrow beaches.
From high on the steep slopes, the Turks fire on them with impunity.
The Turks are well armed, well-equipped, and well commanded by officers
such as Mustafa Kemal, the future leader, and modernizer of Turkey.
Pin down, the Allied troops endure after months of agony.
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the British war correspondent for the �London Daily Telegraph�
writes: �It is the most ghastly military fiasco in our history�.
"The generals had no maps, and a vague idea of the nature of the ground in their front
and no adequate steps were taken to keep the troops' supply".
"The Australian volunteers have nothing to drink under the beating Sun".
Three months later, using his own camera, Ashmead-Bartlett films these same men,
now starving and feverish.
They know that 150,000 men have been killed or wounded here in vain.
Bulgaria has swung over to the German side;
the Dardanelles remain in Turkish hands.
�The Daily Telegraph� correspondent directly addresses Herbert Asquith,
the British Prime Minister, and causing scandal.
�Mr. Prime Minister, I am not sure you are aware of the true state of affairs out here
or to what extent the generals keep you informed�.
�Here, in Gallipoli, we are dissipating a large portion of the Empire's fortune
and have not yet gained a single acre of ground of any strategic value�.
�This futile expedition may ruin our prospects
of wearing down Germany's colossal military power�.
Germany's power, embodied by the victor of East Prussia,
Marshall Von Hindenburg, nonetheless has its limits.
The toll of German dead and wounded is turning public opinion against the war.
In April, in The Hague, in the Netherlands, which remains neutral,
the women's Congress for peace demands an immediate end to hostilities.
But just the opposite happens, the conflict expands again.
Italy enters the war on May 23, 1915.
A neutral power in the early months of the war, it was, nonetheless, allied with Germany.
Britain and France promised to return to Italy the cities of Trento and Trieste
which are still in Austrian territory. Italy changes sides.
A patriotic anti-Austrian fervor sweeps Italy,
fed by the grandiloquent verses of the nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio.
�You are the raging sparks of the sacred blaze,
may old voices be a single flaming cry �Italia�, �Italia�.�
These young Italians have no idea of the hardships ahead
as they march into the Alpine war.
In France, the front is deadlocked in the trenches,
though punctuated by attacks as deadly as they are futile.
Private Charles Gaillard writes: �Here morale is very poor; we are fed up with fighting,
but not advancing and the peasants envy the cows,
which are bedded more comfortably than they are�.
The enemy is on the other side of the Sea of the barbed wire which stretches to infinity.
Given the impasse, the Germans decide to strike a major blow in the East
and the part of Poland, still under Russian rule.
Certain of his success, the new German commander-in-chief, General von Falkenhayn,
authorizes 33-year-old American journalist Wilbur Durborough and his crew
to follow the German Army for six months.
They travel in an American luxury convertible, Stutz,
led by a German military guide.
Durborough is clearly proud of his scoop.
In the United States which is still officially neutral,
hostility toward Germany surges, after German submarine torpedoes and sinks
the British liner SS Lusitania on May 7, 1915,
killing 1,500 including 120 Americans.
The Germans claimed the attack is justified,
because the Lusitania was transporting ammunition,
proof of this emerges only years later.
But the darkening mood at home does not stop Durborough from enjoying his travels
with these German officers.
He presents an affectionate portrait of the Kaiser's troops, relaxing before the attack.
After the German victory in Poland, Durborough films thousands of Russian prisoners.
And in this shot of a captured Russian field kitchen,
he shows Germans who seem to like Russian food.
Durborough films himself on the platform of the Warsaw train station,
alongside German soldiers, celebrating the city's capture.
Then, accompanied by police contingent, armed with whips,
he films the Jews in the Jewish quarter.
And the German armies� victory march to Warsaw on August 4, 1915.
Other war cameramen also capture images of Germany's might as zeppelins bomb London.
The British realize that the heart of their empire is now vulnerable.
A new kind of warfare is born, industrial warfare,
a war of destruction, of annihilation.
The aim now is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
Assembly lines turnout flood of even deadlier inventions -
grenades of all kinds,
bombshells of every caliber,
a variety of poison gases,
a proud achievement of scientific research.
How will mankind endure this voyage to the heart of darkness
to the farthest reaches of Hell?
TIMING & TRANSCRIPTION danel32 /eng. to.est@gmail.com/