How Our Perception Of WW1 Has Been Moulded Over Time | The Long Shadow (1/3) | Timeline

[Music] from the theater of war to the theatre of memory along the old front line but also in every parish back home are the now-familiar monuments to the dead of 1914 18 every year we observe solemn and moving rituals but for those of us now who didn't live through the Great War what are we remembering a terrible sacrifice and for what in Britain the usual answer is nothing we tend to think of the great war as pointless slaughter mud and blood the carnage illuminated only by poignant war poetry but I think that mentally we have become stuck in the trenches our view of 1914-18 is now a caricature in this series I want to get out of the trenches [Music] and look afresh at the impact and meaning of the conflict in Britain and across the world there's a strange paradox about the great rule for us now it's a static futile an inconclusive conflict yet I want to explore how this deadlocked war unleashed huge dynamic forces that have pummeled and shaped the whole century since 1914 one of the biggest legacies is our memory of the great war the story we tell ourselves about it this isn't something fixed in stone it shifted repeatedly over time and different countries remember the Great War in different ways above all the contrast between the memory of 1914 18 in Britain as against Germany would really matter in the years that followed this film is about how the Great War has cast shadows over the whole century since 1914 and how equally important the events of that turbulent century have cast shadows over the way we remember the great in 1918 the British Commonwealth forces started to return from France yet most people had little sense of what soldiers had been through in body and mind from the start it was hard to come to terms with the enormity of the Great War in the quiet moments of the night when the wind blew in the right direction it said that you could hear the low rumble of the guns on the Western Front here in Britain but even if people might be able to hear the war they couldn't see it and they struggled to imagine it that I think is a deep paradox about the great world it was the biggest conflict in British history seven hundred and twenty thousand dead a million and a half wounded and yet the reality of warfare remained distant and obscure so the British entombed the unknown horrors in grand monuments graced with fine words like honor and sacrifice memory was cloaked in remembrance in July 1919 veterans marched through London in a victory parade to allow them to salute the memory of their dead comrades the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to build an appropriate monument tellingly what he came up with was not a traditional victory arch but a tomb in fact an empty tomb the Cenotaph at first a temporary structure of wood and plaster and then in November 1920 made permanent in stone one and a quarter million people filed past in the first week the memorials to ten feet deep in flowers for a nation numbed by brief and uncertainty about the war the appeal of the Senate are flies I think in it's simple yet abstract character Lutyens design was in effect an empty space onto which people could project their own memories and emotions while the Cenotaph allowed the British people to remember the war in their own way the British state took control of the dead politicians refused to bring soldiers bodies back the cost would be prohibitive in any way many men had been literally blown to bits instead the bodies of British and Commonwealth soldiers were carefully collected along the western front buried with reverence and canopy with striking architecture the interwoven arches Lutyens designed the tip thong were not to trumpet victory but to bear 72,000 names of the missing of the song the new menin gate at Ypres was inscribed with a further 55,000 names and these were just two of nearly a thousand more cemeteries and memorials today still maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission the project was the brainchild of Fabian ware who at 45 in 1914 was too old to fight volunteering instead as an ambulance driver ware was appalled by the random carnage he became determined that each soldier whether a general or a private a Canadian or an Australian should have his own named brave very different from the mass graves into which the soldiers were dumped a century earlier after the Battle of Waterloo helping where to design the gravestones was another man too old to find the poet Rudyard Kipling had especially guilty memories he pressed his only son Jack to join the army Jack was last seen stumbling in agony across the battlefield of lose with half his face blown off his body was not fair for those like Jack who were forever missing tippling coined the phrase known unto God today the project has state-imposed remembrance spearheaded by Lutyens ware and Kipling seems extraordinary and impressive but at the time this was enormous ly controversial parents wanted to mourn their sons at home in their own country church arms the standardized headstone was denounced as a Prussian imposition one mother complained that the tombstones look like so many milestones but the project was pushed through by old men in London who had sent the boys to war and were now contorted by grief and probably guilt this was the survivors saying on a grand scale sorry the British had buried the dead with honour they had created rituals to remember but also to sanitize the rule and it seemed that life could get going again [Music] for a new generation who'd come of age after the blue the 20s were a time of new music and new fashions they had been too young to fight and quite happy to forget the great to consign it to history but the past has a way of fighting back [Music] 19:28 was the tenth anniversary of the end of the war the media then and now love anniversaries as a source of cheap and easy stories but these often generate deeper discussion about the meaning of the past 1928 was just such a trigger private brief began to enter public debate a succession of new books and memoirs took the wraps off the soldiers experiences in the trenches and gave voice to their enduring pain but more than anything it was a play that brought home to the British people something at the hellish reality of the Great Wall the author was RC sheriff who'd served as an officer on the Western Front and then it seemed returned to normal life as a shy insurance Clark living with his parents in suburban Surrey yet like many veterans sheriffs struggled to cope with his war experiences and ten years on they came to the surface as the theater journey's end was set in a gloomy dugout with soldiers sitting around talking bickering and using drink to numb their emotions and keep them going whar imagined against a stone memorial was one thing the dead brought to life on stage was very different and sheriff was terrified about how his play would be received by the audience the performance ended in what sheriff called an eerie and unreal silence the cast took their bow while a thousand faces just stared back no clapping no reaction nothing the curtain descended again as if honored to and then the cheers erupted it was the start of a West End run that lasted 18 the reviews were glowing praising above all the realism of the play but others saw a deeper me interpreting journey's end as a stark warning for the future about the horror of war the author JB Priestley wrote of the play it is the strongest plea for peace I know today that reaction to journey's end as a plea for peace may seem to us rather pathetic even tragic because we know with hindsight that in 1939 the world was plunged into another Great War for us the 1920s and 1930s are the interwar years but we have to remember that for the people who lived through them they were the post-war years when the future still seemed open and even hopeful the great hope was never again that 1914-18 would be in the cliche of the time the war to end all war Britain's payoff for the Great War had to be the great peace [Music] in the 1920s this yearning for peace was focused on a new international body the League of Nations based in neutral Geneva one of its key architects and champions in Britain was another guilt-ridden man who'd been too old to fight Robert Cecil was the son of Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury he grew up here at Hatfield house part of a family that had served the British state since the days of the first Queen Elizabeth Cecil was a man of the establishment but he was also an instinctive reformer with a deep Christian conscience who loved to campaign for unlikely causes he championed votes for women but he was equally passionate about the dangers of the motorcar as president of the pedestrians Association he helped to bring in the driving licence and the 30 mile an hour speed limit in towns but what Cecil really wanted to put the brakes on [Music] sessile was haunted by memories of the Great War in 1914 he'd worked for the Red Cross in France helping the wounded like where he was appalled by the destruction but after 1918 his eyes were not on the dead and the past but on the living of the future if there is a quarrel between two individuals they do not fight it out unless they are barbarians or schoolboys sessile was an idealist with a highly moral view of international affairs for him the League of Nations was the essential machinery as he put it to prevent States from going to war in other words stopping another 1914 and that meant no more secret deals between an international mafia of aristocratic diplomats instead democratic decisions open to public gaze and if rogue states didn't settle disputes through talking then sanctions or even force could be used against an aggressive and the league soon made a difference in 1914 the Great War had exploded out of a little Balkan crisis in 1923 there was another dangerous flare-up in the Balkans between Italy and Greece in retaliation for the murderous some Italian soldiers Italy's new dictator Benito Mussolini occupied the island of Corfu the league intervened imposed a final Greece and persuaded Mussolini to withdraw his troops for the British Corfu was a positive sign that the league could stop 1914 happening again but in Germany a very different way of remembering and understanding the Great Wall with taking hold for Germany what mattered was not preventing another 1940 but another 1918 the year of humiliating defeat that autumn German soldiers were still fighting in France when the government fell apart and the capital Berlin became a political battleground between right and left so much so that the constitution for the new German Republic was hammered out 200 miles away in vimal vimal was a sleepy provincial town but also the historic heart of German culture home to bar Schiller and Goethe the creation of the Republic here in Vemma was a calculated attempt to rout the new democratic Germany in all that was best in the country's past but it was also a panic mission forced on Germany's politicians by the street violence gripping Berlin the Vimal Republic would never escape the bitter controversy in which it was all in July 1926 an obscure right-wing party held its annual rally environment but its leader delivered his keynote speech equally deliberately in the national theater he was taking command of German his past for a very different purpose the party leader had fought on the Western Front and his version of Germany's war echoed that of many fellow veterans the German army had not been defeated in 1918 it was still fighting heroically on foreign soil only to be stabbed in the back by the Reds and pacifists at home the Vimal republic had been so loud by accepting the vindictive peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles a point that he rammed her on the very spot where the Republic had been founded this was very different political theater from journey's end Hitler's speech celebrated Germany's centuries-long struggle to become a great power then he turned in fury to the great wall the whole world was against us on the battlefields of France Belgium Russia the Ukraine in the south and on the high seas and now now we are a ridiculously small splinter country like Poland Serbia Croatia No Hitler lusted to make Germany a world empire once more it was a far cry from never again more like bring it on nazi members held rallies in vimar and other German cities many of them war veterans turned paramilitaries this was a total contrast with the veterans of the British Legion armed only with poppies in 1926 Hitler was a fringe politician but his spin on the memory of the war struck a chord with many ordinary Germans in the devastating economic depression of the early 30s Hitler was able to convince millions of his countrymen that the Vimal Republic was his bankrupt as Germany's economy in 1933 Hitler maneuvered his way to become Chancellor of Germany then stalked out of the League of Nations and started to rearm Britain in turn also began rearmament [Music] the escalating arms race was alarmingly like Europe before 1940 but this arms race would provoke an extraordinary response from ordinary people back in Britain [Music] [Music] Charles Borman was editor of the Ilford recorder on the edge of London [Music] Worman wanted the lead to put pressure on Hitler and so he launched what started as a little local campaign a questionnaire for the people of ill-fate which was taken door-to-door by volunteers from the League of Nations Union today the League of Nations Union is largely forgotten but in the 1930s it was a hugely powerful pressure group inspired by the belief that peace would be the most sincere way to remember the dead of the great war it had an extraordinary reach into the British population by 1931 the lnu had over 400,000 members in 3,000 branches across the country with links to rotary groups trade unions Boy Scout troops and women's Institute's in Ilford 26,000 people responded to Charles wormans appeal Foreman arranged a special meeting here in Ilford Town Hall in February 1934 to present the results to the press and the public Robert Cecil was invited as guest of honor deeply impressed he decided to try out the idea nationwide and so the lnu launched what became popularly known as the peace ballot half a million lnu supporters volunteered to knock on doors and deliver and collect the forms the questions weren't easy for example number four about whether the manufacture of arms for private profit should be banned by international agreement some doorknockers spent hours discussing the issues with people often in their own homes one man in Sussex answered yes to all six questions his wife into six knows completed questionnaires flooded in from cities towns and villages and the results were announced at a rally in London's Albert Hall in June 1935 [Music] the whole is and the atmosphere triumphant sessile would have been happy with five million responses but the eventual total was eleven point six million more than a third of the British population over the age of eighteen a truly extraordinary figure the peace ballot showed a clear nationwide pattern over nine out of ten respondents supported Britain's continued membership of the League of Nations and backed international agreements to reduce armaments even more remarkable given our stereotype now of the appeasing 1930s 60% clear majority were willing to support military sanctions against aggressor states military sanctions meant running the risk of starting another war a sobering gamble for a generation living in the shadow of 1914-18 but what's striking even moving is that nearly two-thirds of those who signed the feast ballot said they were willing to risk war in the hope of keeping the peace the peace palette was uniquely British and in a way that would also have been inconceivable in Berlin or Moscow it penetrated deep into London's corridors of power the pressing problem for the British Foreign Office in 1935 was once again Mussolini fascist Italy had invaded the East African state of Abyssinia and this provoked an outcry in Britain here was a crunch test for the League of Nations and its supporters in public the government took a firm pro-league line supporting limited economic sanctions against Italy otherwise foreign secretary Sir Samuel hor told the Cabinet there would be a wave of public opinion against the government but behind closed doors at the Foreign Office the talk was very different Samuel Hall was a canny politician irreverently known as slippery Sam in reality he was pretty skeptical about the league and fought Cecil and the Ln you were utopian the war now looming unlike 1914-18 would be truly global with Japan an ally of Germany and Italy so [ __ ] reverted to old-style power politics bypassing the league he and his French counterpart Pierre Laval trying to buy off Mussolini when the British and French deal-making was exposed public uproar forced [ __ ] to resign the new man at the Foreign Office came from the war generation and had made his political reputation as a champion of the league Anthony Eden was dashing and handsome and had won the Military Cross in 1918 he also had a bizarre shared memory of the war with the most notorious veteran on the German side [Music] even held talks with Hitler in Berlin in 1936 chatting later at dinner they discovered they'd been only 500 yards apart in the trenches in March 1918 setting politics and nationalism aside they mattered like old veterans exchanging war stories and drawing maps of the front on the back of menu cards after the dinner the French ambassador took Eden aside I understand you were opposite Hitler and you missed Eden always opposed doing deals with Mussolini and continued to take a pro lead line but now the public mood was shifting towards appeasement of Italy and Germany because after 1936 people could begin to discern the face of a future war the civil war in Spain showed the frightening power of aerial bomb endured not in the trenches by soldiers like the last war but in towns and cities by women and children tough sanctions against an aggressor might provoke Apocalypse Now the 1930s came to their notorious climax in a desperate one-man crusade to prevent a second Great War by the time Neville Chamberlain took over as Prime Minister in 1937 the hopes for peace were narrowing Chamberlain was another old man with a burden of guilt about the Great War hanging upon his shoulders like Robert Cecil he'd been too old to fight and was gutted by the death inaction of his younger cousin and closest friend Norman now like millions of British people he was horrified by the terrible war that was looming and like Sam Hall he was ready to cut a deal to try to stop it in September 1938 Chamberlain took to the air to avert the threat from the air making a face-to-face deal with Hitler at Munich Chamberlain's gamble delayed a new great war but only for a year we had any country to establish the situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel itself safe and become intolerable the declaration of war in 1939 dashed the hopes of the eleven point six million people who'd signed the peace ballot back here in Ilford the man who'd pioneered the ballot Charles Borman resigned as editor of the ilford recorder on the day that war broke out and signed up that a six man was going to war again seemed like an utterly damning comment on the meaning of 1914-18 [Music] [Music] for Britain the new war was in every way totally different from the last this time Britain was heavily bombed and in danger of invasion and the conflict was truly global with Commonwealth forces engaged from North Africa to Singapore this was also a war with heroes like the fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain or the Australians who defended Tobruk and heroic leaders looking back 1914-18 seen by contrast messy and inconclusive [Music] this story of 1939 245 was celebrated in dozens of post-war British movies pitting square-jawed good is played by stars such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd against the evil Nazis [Music] and evil was no mere cliche the Nazis had hit depths of depravity previously unimaginable civilized Europe a few miles from the Great shrine of German culture Lima was booked and found [Music] inside its grounds this stump is all that's left of a fabled oak tree under which the poet Goethe read some of the classics of German literature how far in Germany form the camps showed to the world the utter barbarity of Nazi rule this second war unlike 1914-18 seemed unquestionably a good war truly a noble sacrifice to defeat an appalling evil so 1914-18 shrank in significance and this was reflected in a change of name it may seem like a word game that renaming the Great War as the First World War changed its meaning officially highlighting the sense that 1914-18 had been a failed attempt to end war an ineffectual sacrifice that required a second round in fact Winston Churchill and others now talked about a thirty years war from 1914 to 1945 into which the Great War was subsumed Armistice Day so sacred in the 30s was now abandoned in favour of Remembrance Sunday for the dead of both world wars you might have expected that with time the first world war would slide into ever fainter memory but in the 1960s dramatic world events and a new generation once again combined to reinvent the war in public memory the Great War had shaped the 1920s and 30s but the 1960s shaped our view of the great war it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the world seemed on the brink of a third world war brought home to people the horrors of the nuclear age the first world war paused in 1914 my similar miscalculations by leaders that cost 10 million dead another war it seemed in the sixties would be the war to end war and probably the world as well 1964 was 50 years since the outbreak of the Great War it was a chance for a new generation to discover 1914-18 afresh but they came at it through the tinted lens of world war ii and amid nightmare fantasies about world war 3 this was a less deferential generation ready to question even mock the attitudes of their predecessors and also a more egalitarian society interested in the experience of ordinary soldiers rather than the posturings of upper class generals [Music] one of the most profound shifts in thinking about the war in the 1960s occurred in Germany [Applause] after 1945 most German still believe that the Hitler era was just a terrible blip in the proud sweep of Prussian and German history they continued to look back on 1914-18 as a good war fought in self-defense but in 1961 an obscure leftist professor Fritz Fischer gain access to Imperial German archives that were now in communist East Germany Fischer published a book arguing that in 1914 Germany had caused the war by launching an all-out grab for world power Germany was not the victim it was the aggressor just as in 1939 I tried to show that 1914 Germany kept sames she was pursuing since last century a position of Germany in Europe and world on equal footing this oppressive Empire what's important to understand about Fischer is that he was attacking head-on a comfortable West German story that the crimes of the Nazi era were the work of just a few evil men instead he argued that Hitler was the culmination of an aggressive militarism engrained in German history right back to the days of Bismarck and Frederick the Great Fischer's dramatic claims captured the imagination of a rebellious younger generation and sparked years of furious debate among politicians and the media the irony is that just when Germans were being forced to think about 1914 as an immoral war caused by their own country's aggression most British people came to see it as a war that had no clear cause no moral justification and achieved think at all in Britain it would be a piece of theater about the war that set the tone for this new era much as journey's end had done 30 years early oh [Music] what a lovely war started life here in East London as a production of Joan Littlewoods theatre workshop before going on to have global impact as a feature film like the first night of journey's end the audience in the theatre was overwhelmed many were in tears oh what a lovely war was the story of ordinary men squandered in hopeless offensives by aristocratic boneheaded generals convinced that victory was just around the corner it was savaging the apparent futility of the great war but also satirizing the class war within it at the moment my men are advancing across no-man's land in full the men are forbidden on pain of court-martial to take cover in any shell hole or Duquette the loss of say another three hundred thousand men may lead to really great results oh what a lovely war drew on a mishmash of often partial sources quoted out of context to skewer the generals the soldiers were now not real people as in journey's end they were simply victims [Music] this idea of the Great War as futile slaughter was reinforced by a uniquely British obsession one that seared the memory of the war into the imagination of an even younger generation in the 1960s Britain rediscovered the poetry of the Great Hall as publishers produced several new 50th anniversary anthologies the soldier poets of the Great War have become our most trusted guides to the meaning of the conflict these anthologies shaped how the war has been taught in schools and understood in public memory but in reality they are carefully edited selections that preach a particular message about the war great poetry bad history because the anthologies took a few soldier poets as the authentic voices of the war and portrayed them moving along a kind of poetic learning curve from the innocent patriotism of Rupert Brooke to the Bleak pity of Wilfred Owen as the horrors of war are revealed at the psalm and Passchendaele [Music] owen was killed in the last week of the war while peace terms were being discussed so his death seems to sum up neatly the futility of the conflict but the real story is more intriguing here in 1918 in the beautiful physic garden in Chelsea Owen wrestle with whether to return to frontline duty for several hours on a hot summer afternoon his friend Siegfried Sassoon tried to dissuade him but Owen did go back today Wilfred Owen is regarded as the archetypal war poet meaning a soldier poet who was anti-war but Owens poetry like his decision to go back to fight on the Western Front reveal something more complex Owens poems convey the ecstasy of fighting as well as the horrors of dying Owen was not a pacifist in fact he won the Military Cross for mowing down Germans with the machine gun but his younger brother Harold self-appointed custodian at Wilfred's memory tried to conceal this in the 1960s because being a killer did not fit the image of a poet renowned for evoking the pity of war Wilfred Owen's poem exposure is now usually quoted to illustrate the misery of soldiers here on the front line but in it Owen also conjures up a peaceful England worth fighting for and dying for since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn nor ever son smile true on child or field or fruit therefore not loathe we lie out here exposure suggests that even in the last months of the war Owen still believed the struggle had meaning but the Owen of 1918 was repackaged for the anti-war 1960s helping set firm public memory of a war suffered by poetic soldiers and waged by stupid generals [Music] they shall grow not old as we that are left grow old age shall not weary them nor the years condemn and for going down of the Sun and in the morning we will remember them the solemn call to remember carries a huge burden of sadness and duty but unlike the immovable pillars and headstones of the Western Front public memory as we've seen has been molded even caricatured by what happened after the Great War we have remembered the soldiers and tried to imagine the warfare they endured but that's got in the way of understanding the great Wars full character and impact of course we can't ignore the mind and the suffering but I believe that a hundred years on from 1914 it's time to let go of the dead we can't just feel the Great War as a piece of poetry or a stark morality play we need to understand it as history history that cast long shadows over the years that followed

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 691,858

Rating: 4.7524109 out of 5

Keywords: Full length Documentaries, real, Documentaries, Documentary Movies - Topic, documentary history, TV Shows - Topic, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, stories, History, Documentary, david reynolds, history documentary, world war one, amnisty, wwi, Full Documentary, after world war one, ww1, rememberance, 2017 documentary

Id: iPYxS5h4x34

Length: 49min 15sec (2955 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Neko-Neko-]

Please note this is three parts. Presented by David Reynolds.

Really enjoyed this series. Covers wide range of subjects but links them together in very well formed web. From how the memories of WWI & II were shaped and presented as time wore on. How Nationalism created the wars and how the EU keeps nationalism at bay. Touches on the Irish troubles, Arab spring, early beginnings of European democracy and follows through right upto modern times with independce vote of Scotland and just stops short of brexit.

Dare i say feels a little bit Alan Curtis.