The Great War Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain

A November morning

in the churned battlefields of Flanders and Northern France.

Four British platoons are making their way through the mud.

Each stops at a mass grave and digs up one body.

At midnight, a British general is blindfolded.

Three days later, on the 11th of November 1920,

the chosen coffin was carried

in full military procession through the streets of London.

In a solemn ceremony,

the body was then buried deep in the sand below Westminster Abbey.

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is a supremely democratic memorial.

Millions of bereaved people could half-believe

that the person buried here

was their own father, husband, son, brother or friend.

At the time, some people thought it was too democratic, almost a bit common.

But the so-called Great War

touched people in these islands in a way that no conflict

really since the brutal civil wars of the 17th century had done.

First, of course, the millions who actually fought.

But also the millions at home who felt the full force

of modern warfare for the first time...

Bereaved.

Bombed.

Uprooted or bankrupted.

Now, we know that the "war to end all wars" didn't.

But it tore up Europe

and it changed the great story of the British people for ever.

Sunday the 23rd of August 1914 was a nerve-racking day for Britain.

In Belgium,

British troops had just faced the Germans in battle for the first time.

But the Prime Minister was distracted, as he often was.

Henry Herbert Asquith was enjoying a weekend in the country

here at Lympne Castle on the Kent coast.

The 61-year-old premier was busy writing...

not to his generals, but to a 27-year-old woman called Venetia Stanley.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley most days,

sometimes several times a day,

and often right in the middle of crucial Cabinet meetings.

With his lengthy love letters and his leisurely country house weekends,

Asquith himself was beginning to look as dated

as the posh politics of Edwardian Britain.

After one of those weekends, a hostess asked him,

"Mr Asquith, do you take an interest in the war?"

Asquith thought she was joking...

but soon it was a question on many people's lips.

Two men in Asquith's cabinet were taking a ferocious interest in the war.

The Chancellor, David Lloyd George,

was already speaking like the war leader Asquith plainly wasn't,

while along at the Admiralty,

Winston Churchill was hyperactively trying to think of ways to win the war at sea.

But it was the Secretary of State for War,

the imperial war hero Lord Horatio Kitchener,

who really understood what Britain was in for.

It was clear to Kitchener that Britain's professional army -

a quarter of a million men compared to Germany's four and a half million -

was nothing like big enough to win the war.

And so he set about creating a citizens' army.

And he was remarkably successful.

"Your country needs you,"

and his accusing finger had a dramatic effect.

By September 1914, three-quarters of a million men had signed up.

Kitchener's army would go on to become

the biggest volunteer army raised by any country in history.

# Good-bye-ee, good-bye-ee

# Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee... #

Many men would do anything to fight.

Boys lied about their age...

men with health problems did their best to hide them.

Recruiting officers were paid a shilling for every new recruit,

so they cheerfully played along.

For tens of thousands of young men brought up on stories of British heroism,

this was the great adventure.

In the words of the future prime minister Harold Macmillan,

"Our major anxiety was, by hook or by crook, not to miss it."

Little did they know what "it" would mean.

Within three months, the war on the Western Front had frozen into deadlock.

The German advance through Belgium and France had been halted.

Both sides had dug in.

The trenches stretched nearly 500 miles

from Ostend in the north all the way to the Swiss border.

The meat-grinder war had begun.

The shock of war was also hitting hard at home.

At eight o'clock in the morning of the 16th of December 1914,

eight German warships appeared off the northeast coast of England.

They turned their guns on Scarborough, Whitby, and Hartlepool.

ARTILLERY FIRE, EXPLOSIONS

127 men, women and children were killed.

These attacks came as a terrible shock -

the first time civilians had been killed by enemy fire on British soil

since the 17th century,

utter humiliation for the Royal Navy

and, above all, further evidence of the beastliness of the enemy.

Atrocity stories were spreading around the country like wildfire -

women and children murdered in Belgium,

wounded soldiers bayoneted

and, of course, by April 1915,

the world's first use of poison gas on the Western Front.

Well, war is war,

but some of the German tactics did make it easy to hate the Hun.

Then, on the 7th of May 1915, the German navy torpedoed the Lusitania

off the coast of Ireland.

She was carrying British and American civilians from New York to Liverpool.

Over 1,200 people were killed, 94 of them children...

including 31 babies.

When news of the sinking of the Lusitania arrived in Liverpool,

a mob formed here at the docks and marched through the town,

gathering people as it went.

In Edwardian Britain, German migrants had been quite common -

running pastry shops and restaurants and butchers,

working as musicians or engineers.

Now Germans began to be attacked,

their homes and businesses smashed, looted and burned out.

The right-wing journalist Horatio Bottomley

called for a vendetta against every German in Britain,

whether naturalised or not, because, he said,

"You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast...

"a human abortion...a hellish freak.

"But you can exterminate it."

If there was hysteria in the country, there was crack-up at the top, too.

On the 15th May 1915,

Lord Jackie Fisher, Britain's First Sea Lord,

and one of the brilliant and charismatic men of the age,

walked out of the Admiralty buildings and vanished.

The man in charge of Britain's awesome battle fleets had disappeared.

Lord Fisher had been appointed First Sea Lord

by Winston Churchill in October 1914.

They had a passionate, often rocky relationship.

But they agreed on one thing...

they were convinced of the need to end the deadlock on the Western Front.

Churchill asked Asquith, "Are there not other alternatives

"to sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?"

He favoured an attack on Europe's southeastern coast

to knock the Ottoman Turks, who were allies of the Germans, out of the war.

Fisher thought that was insane.

He dreamed instead of a grand Royal Naval coup,

an invasion of Germany's northern coast, and then straight to Berlin.

Brilliant or bonkers?

Well, we'll never know because Fisher lost the argument.

What we do know is that Churchill's Turkish adventure was a disaster.

Hesitation and delay led to the troops landing at Gallipoli

two months after the first naval bombardment.

The Turks were waiting for them.

50,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops died in the bloodbath.

In the Admiralty, Fisher and Churchill were at each other's throats.

At a war council meeting,

Kitchener had to physically prevent Fisher from walking out.

Fisher's memos became wilder and wilder,

some people thought deranged.

He threatened to resign no fewer than eight times.

And then, on that May morning, just as it was becoming clear

how bloody the disaster of Gallipoli was,

Fisher walked out,

apparently into thin air.

Government officials were sent all over London to hunt him down.

It turned out that Fisher was, in fact,

hiding just a few hundred yards from the Admiralty

in a room here at the Charing Cross Hotel.

When Fisher was finally tracked down,

Asquith ordered him, in the name of the King, to return to his command.

By now there were rumours

that the German fleet was at last on the attack.

The Queen wrote to Fisher, begging him to stay at his post "like Nelson".

The King said his admiral should be "hanged at the yardarm for desertion".

Fisher sent an ultimatum to Asquith. He would return,

but only if Churchill was kicked out of the Cabinet.

He also demanded absolute control of all naval appointments

and sole command of the Royal Navy.

This was the kind of fantasy of a constitutional coup

that many generals and admirals might have dreamt about,

but nobody before or since

has actually dared to propose it to a British prime minister.

The letter was deranged and it finished Fisher.

But if Asquith thought the Navy were causing him problems,

the Army was about to show what a real crisis looked like.

Just six days after Fisher's breakdown,

there was uproar on the floor of the London Stock Exchange.

Hundreds of men were shouting, jeering,

and setting fire to bundles of newspapers.

The burning papers were copies of that day's Daily Mail,

whose owner, Lord Northcliffe, had used it to announce

a scandal on the Western Front.

Lord Kitchener was starving the British Army of high explosive shells,

the kind you need to blow up trenches.

The public was outraged...

not by that, but by the newspaper's attack

on the country's greatest soldier.

You can't kick Kitchener!

But Northcliffe could. And he did.

And he was essentially right.

Kitchener had provided shells

that would have been useful in the Boer War in 1900,

but against dug-in Germans in 1915 were almost useless.

And in some places they'd run out of shells altogether.

Kitchener was increasingly seen as a liability.

Margot Asquith wasn't alone in rudely describing Kitchener

as "a great poster, not a great man".

In public, at least, Asquith himself continued to defend Kitchener

but Northcliffe's attack persuaded the Tory leadership and many Liberals,

including Lloyd George, that things couldn't carry on this way.

The mood began to turn against both the warlord Kitchener

and his prime minister.

Asquith survived for now

by inviting the Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law,

to join him in a new coalition government of national unity.

Kitchener also managed to hang on, unhappily...

until his ship hit a mine on a mission to Russia.

On the night of the 31st of May 1915, a new terror appeared over London.

German Zeppelin airships.

Then they began to unload their cargo.

The first bomb ever dropped on London

landed here, at 16 Alkham Road in Stoke Newington.

It bounced off a neighbour's chimney, lodged in the rafters,

and set fire to the upstairs bedroom.

The family escaped.

Many others didn't.

Henry and Caroline Good of 187 Balls Pond Road in Dalston

were discovered by a policeman still kneeling at their bedside,

their bodies charred, their clothes burned away.

Mr Good's arm was still around his wife.

They had died while praying.

Visits from Zeppelins would now be a regular occurrence.

They became known as "the baby-killers".

Far fewer people were killed in the First World War by air raids

than would be in the Second World War,

but in some ways it was even more terrifying.

People who'd only just got used to the idea of human flight

were confronted by 500ft balloons, lobbing death.

And air raid precautions were laughably inadequate.

You didn't have much time to scarper.

But the invention of the incendiary bullet gave a way to fight back.

In September 1916, millions watched as Lieutenant Leefe Robinson

attacked a German airship over north London with the new weapon.

The inferno could be seen for more than 35 miles in all directions.

The airship crashed to the ground

behind this pub, the Plough Inn, in the village of Cuffley.

And the next day, more than 10,000 sightseers

swarmed over the wreckage.

The Plough had soon sold out anything that could be eaten or drunk

and they had to bolt their doors against the crowds.

One rather ghoulish highlight

was the charred remains of the German airmen.

A girl watched a pair of policemen playing ball with their helmets

over the charred corpses.

But out-producing the enemy was just as important as out-fighting them.

Winning an industrial war meant winning industrially.

And so the human dynamo, Lloyd George,

now asked for the toughest job in politics,

sorting out old-fashioned British industry to make more weapons.

He built 50 new munitions factories.

The largest was here at Gretna in Scotland.

These ruined power stations are all that remain now.

But in its day, this was the largest factory in the world.

It employed 30,000 people and stretched out over an area of nine miles.

And into his new factories, Lloyd George poured a new workforce.

With so many men away fighting, he turned to women.

And they flocked into the new jobs -

bus conductors, farm workers, shipyard workers.

And 700,000 of them became munitionettes,

working in the new munitions factories, which were very dangerous.

Explosions, TNT poisoning killed more than 100 women.

Many more found their teeth fell out or they turned yellow.

They were called "canaries".

But there were less toxic changes for the new workers, too.

Women started to cut their hair shorter, they wore simpler clothing,

they learned to smoke cigarettes, they learned about condoms.

Among the many casualties of the Great War was the Edwardian woman.

As Munitions Minister, Lloyd George was a phenomenal success.

Within a year, the manufacture of heavy guns was up by over 1,000%.

Lloyd George was also sketching out a blueprint

for a more modern, fairer Britain.

He extended welfare help for munitions workers and their families,

providing new houses and flats, and feeding them in canteens.

Lloyd George chewed over the strange thought

that the manufacturing of weapons of destruction was humanising industry.

And if you're looking for the real origins of the welfare state,

they can be seen most clearly

in what Lloyd George was up to in places like Gretna in 1916.

A whole new town was created here to service the factory...

With shops, a cinema, and a social hall.

To encourage production, Lloyd George introduced

British Summer Time in May 1916.

We've had it ever since.

Lloyd George was very worried about the amount munition workers were drinking,

and so the state started to take over some pubs, including this one.

He banned all-day drinking...

that's where pub opening hours come from.

He banned the buying of rounds,

and, yes, he watered the workers' beer. And it wasn't just the workers.

Lloyd George wanted leading figures in the country to give up alcohol

for the duration of the war to set an example.

And when he heard that the Cabinet had agreed to do so,

the King reluctantly gave up drink himself.

As for the Cabinet, they weaselled out.

Politicians, eh?

And what these politicians needed were victories...

which weren't coming.

By February 1916, Asquith was forced to introduce conscription.

So what was it like?

What happened here was beyond anybody's imagination

and yet, despite the massive scale,

it was, in one way, strangely familiar, even local.

Each thousand-strong battalion of officers and men,

defending their own tiny part of the front line,

became a kind of community.

With its class divisions, it was a small piece of Britain transplanted.

It wasn't a real Britain.

There were no women, no trade unions, no strikes

and very few political arguments

because all politicians were pretty much universally despised,

along with the staff officers,

who were allegedly living it up in chateaux, away from danger.

# Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile... #

There were some comforts. British troops had rum and cigarettes.

They ate better than the Germans and had shorter spells at the front line.

Soldiers could send letters and even their dirty linen home.

And back came home-baked cakes, family photos and newly knitted socks.

But none of that took away from the utter horror of what happened here.

At times the rain seemed to go on for ever,

turning the trenches into filthy little rivers, infested with rats and lice.

The noise was monstrous.

ARTILLERY FIRE, EXPLOSIONS

Sometimes you could hear the artillery barrage in London.

And when the order finally came to go over the top,

you had to march steadily into scythe-like machine-gun fire.

WHISTLE BLOWS

One war correspondent described the horrors of the Front.

"Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp,

"was pasted into the mud-banks...

"If they dug to get deeper cover, their shovels went into the softness

"of dead bodies who had been their comrades.

"Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads

"came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position."

So how did these men possibly cope?

Religion, yes. But humour was also absolutely essential.

Some of it was pretty dark, like the habit of shaking hands

with the hands of corpses protruding from the mud.

At other times, it was lighter.

When Captain Fred Roberts discovered

a smashed old printing press in the town of Ypres,

he decided to mend it, and produce his own newspaper for the troops.

It was called The Wipers Times -

Wipers being how British troops mispronounced Ypres.

This was a newspaper from the Front for the Front.

# Oh, oh, oh, it's a lovely war! #

So how did the men see themselves in the pages of their own local paper?

Well, it's all terribly British and understated.

One ad asks, "Are You Going Over the Top?

"If so, be sure to first inspect

"our new line of velveteen corduroy plush breeches."

The Wipers Times is a really important document

because it reminds us that in the middle of horror,

people were enjoying the same stupid jokes and gossip

they always had done.

Here's the authentic voice of 1916.

"Three Tommies sat in the trench one day,

"Discussing the war in the normal way,

"They talked of the mud, and they talked of the Hun

"Of what was to do, and what had been done,

"They talked about rum...

"But the point which they argued from post back to pillar

"Was whether Notts County could beat Aston Villa."

# Oh, oh, oh, it's a lovely war. #

But not all the United Kingdom was so united.

In the early hours of Good Friday 1916,

a man scrambled off a German U-boat into a small rubber dinghy

and landed here at Banna Strand

on the west coast of Ireland.

He sucked in the fresh Irish air and gloried in the birdsong.

But not for long.

Two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary arrived.

They'd had a tip-off about a German-sponsored revolt

against British rule in Ireland.

Quite right.

In one of the man's pockets they found the ticket stub

for a railway journey from Berlin to one of the U-boat bases.

The weary traveller was promptly arrested,

charged with sabotage and treason, and taken to the Tower of London.

The man was Sir Roger Casement,

once a loyal servant of the British Empire.

An Irishman, he'd become a determined critic of imperialism

and joined forces with the Irish Republican movement.

When war broke out, Casement decided

that his enemy's enemy would be his friend.

So he made his way to Berlin and spoke to the Kaiser's High Command

about using the German army and navy to help a full-scale Irish rebellion

against the British Empire.

In Dublin, the Republicans were also secretly asking for help

from the Germans.

And they resolved to proclaim a republic at Easter 1916.

When Casement eventually heard about the plan,

he went to the Germans to find out how they were going to help.

From his point of view, the answer was bad news.

20,000 old rifles,

just enough ammunition for two or three days of heavy fighting

and, above all, no German soldiers at all.

This gave Casement a terrible dilemma.

Either he'd come back and join a rebellion he knew was going to be a disaster,

or he'd seem a coward.

He decided to return to Ireland,

but to plead with the rebel leaders to delay their uprising,

and that was what he was doing here when he was arrested.

In Dublin, the rebels decided to go ahead with the revolt,

and on Easter Monday, they rose in rebellion.

They occupied key buildings,

including the General Post Office,

and proclaimed Irish independence.

But, after the arrival of 20,000 British reinforcements,

the rebellion collapsed in five days.

It had been a small-scale revolt.

Just 1,600 rebels compared to the 150,000 Irishmen

who'd volunteered to fight for Britain in the war.

The Irish, even in the Catholic south,

still generally backed the British Empire.

This general goodwill was about to be squandered

by an act of brutal British stupidity.

The police and the army rounded up 3,500 of the Irish nationalists,

whether or not they'd been involved in the uprising.

97 of them were sentenced to death.

16 actually killed.

13 men died here

in one of the courtyards of Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol.

A 14th, James Connolly, one of the leaders, was so badly injured

that he had to be tied to a chair so that he could be killed there.

These killings changed everything.

In the words of one bishop,

the blood seemed to be seeping out from under the prison door.

They made martyrs of the rebels

and Irish opinion began to swing away from the Empire

and towards the Republican cause.

In London,

there was an influential campaign for clemency for Roger Casement.

It was even supported by the King.

But then in a search of his rooms,

the police discovered Casement's private diaries.

They became known as the Black Diaries.

Casement was a homosexual

and his Black Diaries listed and described his exploits

with scores of young men.

As soon as the diaries were in the hands of the British secret service,

there was no chance of a reprieve and Casement was duly hanged.

His Irish cause, however,

would smoulder and fizz all the way to civil war.

On the Western Front, the war was descending into a nightmarish paralysis.

It reached its bloodiest with the Somme offensive of July 1916.

The idea was to destroy the German trenches

with an intensive seven-day bombardment.

British troops were told

they'd be able to stroll through the shattered German lines

and bring the war to an end.

Many of the British troops were absolutely convinced of victory.

Captain Billie Neville of the 8th East Surreys painted a football

with the words "Great European Cup-Tie Final.

"East Surreys versus Bavarians. Kick off at zero."

Another football was painted with the words "no referee".

And when the attack started, both were kicked over the top.

Captain Neville offered a prize for the first British soldier

to dribble one of the footballs to the German front line.

WHISTLE BLOWS

When he led his men over the top, Captain Neville was killed instantly.

So too were 21,000 other British soldiers,

most of them within the first hour.

German troops had survived the bombardment

in concrete bunkers ten metres underground.

British infantry had walked into an inferno of machine-gun fire.

The generals have been blamed...

callous, stupid, skulking behind the lines.

Not quite fair.

78 British generals were killed in the war.

And this was a totally new type of dug-in, industrialised slaughter.

In 1916, nobody knew how to win this kind of war.

But we're still left with the frightened young officers

blowing their whistles and leading their men to death.

Take Captain DL Martin of the 9th Devons.

He'd been a maths teacher before the war,

and he used trigonometry and scale models

to prove conclusively that an agreed line of attack

must end with him and his men being cut down

by a particular German machine-gun post.

He showed his superior officers, and was told, "Sorry, you must attack."

Captain Martin and 160 of the Devons were killed instantly.

They're buried together in a mass grave,

above which is written, "The Devonshires held this trench.

"They hold it still."

These disasters had a direct political effect.

Asquith had lost his own son in the fiasco of the Somme.

Now it would cost him his political career.

Lloyd George scented blood.

Was Lloyd George plotting?

Lloyd George was always plotting.

But the first person to stick in the knife was the press baron.

Northcliffe asked the editor of the Daily Mail

to find the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it "wait and see",

and then the best possible picture of Lloyd George and call it "do it now!"

And in case anyone failed to get the message,

he then wrote a headline which read simply "Asquith... A Limpet".

Politicians these days who complain about being roughed up by the press

should stay in a little more and read some history.

Lloyd George now joined hands with Andrew Bonar Law

and forced Asquith to resign.

The King invited Lloyd George to form a new coalition government.

The Liberal Party was split down the middle

and would never really recover.

The Tories were now the majority in Lloyd George's coalition.

With no election, this was a wartime parliamentary coup.

The socialist Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary

that it was "brilliant improvisation,

"reactionary in composition and undemocratic in form."

Lloyd George remade British government.

A war cabinet of just five men oversaw the fighting,

while outside this place

British government power spread to undreamt of degrees.

The Edwardian Age didn't really end in 1914.

It ended with what was, in effect,

the first parliamentary dictatorship since the days of Oliver Cromwell,

the dictatorship of David Lloyd George.

The first year of Lloyd George's parliamentary dictatorship

would be a black one.

The Battle of Passchendaele on the Western Front

was another bloodbath that achieved little.

France was crippled, its army mutinous.

Russia, one of the key Allies, fell to the Germans

and then to revolution.

The United States was doggedly refusing to join the war.

And most alarming of all, Britain was running out of food.

The food crisis of 1917 was caused by a step change in German strategy.

We tend to think of the U-boat menace as a Second World War affair

but actually the submarines were more dangerous first time round.

The Germans knew that Britain imported two thirds of her food

and thought that a slaughter of merchant shipping

might bring this country to surrender.

But there was a problem.

To make that effective, they would have to try to sink

ALL ships coming into British ports, including American ships,

which meant risking America coming into the war.

Starving and desperate herself,

Germany took the risk...

..and lost her gamble within weeks,

for America at last declared war.

Now it was a race to the finish.

Could the U-boats defeat Britain

before American intervention changed everything?

It was a close-run thing.

Before long, Britain was running out of fuel and food.

Prices shot up and long queues formed outside shops.

This nation of gardeners pulled together.

They turned parks and squares into allotments.

And the Government set up national canteens serving cheap meals.

And none of it was enough.

The U-boats continued to slaughter the merchant ships.

What could be done?

The answer was staring the Admiralty in the face.

Organise the merchant ships in convoys.

The Admiralty was sure this wouldn't work.

A convoy is a lot bigger than a single ship.

Once the U-boats found them there'd be a turkey shoot.

Obvious.

But sometimes the obvious is wrong.

Set against the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean,

a convoy is not much bigger, proportionally, than a single ship,

almost as hard for the U-boats to find

and you can protect a convoy with warships.

The Admiralty was pressed into trying this by, among others,

Lloyd George himself,

and very reluctantly they agreed to give it a go.

As soon as they tried the convoy system,

the rate of sinkings dramatically decreased,

the food started to come through.

This single lateral jump of logic

may have saved Britain from losing the war.

The beach at Formby, where the Mersey meets the Irish Sea,

was a quiet place even in wartime.

In July 1917,

a tall, striking-looking officer was walking here alone.

He stopped by the water,

shook his fist at the sky.

And then he began to tug at a small ribbon on his tunic,

which showed that he'd won the Military Cross.

And he tore it off, and let it drop weakly into the water,

and watched it float away and sink.

The man was Siegfried Sassoon,

one of the greatest war poets ever, and a hero of the trenches.

And he was in the middle of the worst crisis of his young life.

Sassoon was in turmoil about the war.

He'd been quick to enlist,

and was a brave and charismatic front-line leader.

But he'd come to believe the war was being fought for the wrong reasons.

At home on leave, he wrote a public statement

explaining why he felt he could no longer serve.

A war "of defence and liberation", he said,

had become one "of aggression and conquest".

"I am protesting against the political errors and insincerities

"for which the fighting men are being sacrificed," he said,

"and against the callous complacency

"with which the majority of those at home

"regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share,

"and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."

Sassoon's statement was all the more explosive

because he was a genuine war hero.

Now he was determined to be a martyr.

He knew he was risking court martial, imprisonment

and even execution.

Instead, the Army tried to discredit Sassoon

by packing him off to Craiglockhart in Edinburgh,

a hospital for officers

suffering from the newly diagnosed condition of shell shock.

Sassoon called this place "Dottyville".

He was surrounded by

the psychically shattered and shaking victims of the war.

But he himself didn't really fit in.

He was mentally and physically sound

and he spent his time playing golf, talking to other writers,

and producing some of the great war poetry

which has made his name live ever since.

"I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

"And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

"Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

"And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

"Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

"And going to the office in the train."

Sassoon was speaking out for a small minority.

There were 16,000 conscientious objectors who refused to fight.

Some people sympathised. Most did not.

Pacifist meetings were broken up by angry mobs.

"Conchies", as they were known, were attacked and imprisoned.

For Sassoon, things weren't quite as clear-cut

as they were for the conscientious objectors.

He was torn between his intellectual contempt

for the war and its leaders,

and his own feelings of comradeship and exhilaration in the trenches.

However vile and murderous the fighting was,

it gave him more of a sense of being alive

than anything here at home among the sheep-like civilians.

And in the end, he decided his place was with the fighting men.

He returned to the Army, and eventually to the Western Front,

where he survived.

But for the rest of his life

he never lost that seething anger with the politicians.

In the spring of 1918, a new German offensive,

using troops returning from the Russian Front,

almost broke the British and the French armies.

The new stormtroopers very nearly won the war.

The British Commander Sir Douglas Haig ordered,

"With our backs to the wall, each one of us must fight to the end."

Back at home, Britain was descending into panic

about German spies and saboteurs.

In June 1918, a scandalous trial at the Old Bailey

threatened to ignite this combustible atmosphere.

The man behind the scandal

was an eccentric right-wing MP and self-publicist

called Noel Pemberton Billing.

Pemberton Billing was obsessed by what he called "the Hidden Hand".

He thought the Germans had infiltrated the British Establishment.

There was a German Black Book

containing the names of 47,000 sexually depraved British men and women

who'd been blackmailed into helping Germany win the war.

It was, he said, "a most Catholic list."

It contained the names of privy councillors,

cabinet ministers and their wives,

diplomats, newspaper proprietors,

and even members of His Majesty's household.

In short, the Germans had the British Establishment over a barrel.

Billing's theory might have been ignored

were it not for a private performance of Salome, a banned play by Oscar Wilde.

Its star was a risque Canadian dancer called Maud Allan.

Billing saw an opportunity to promote his obsession and pounced.

He implied that Maud Allan was a lesbian,

and that her audience were among the 47,000 traitors

named in the Black Book.

Maud Allan took the bait and sued for libel at the Old Bailey.

The British people were transfixed.

There were huge daily queues for the public gallery,

the atmosphere in court was described as "pantomime, circus, farce".

The gallery cheered like "spectators at a football match".

Billing's witnesses claimed that Asquith was in the Black Book,

alongside his wife, Margot.

And in an extraordinary twist,

Billing even claimed that the man presiding over the trial,

Britain's most famous judge, Justice Darling,

known as Little Darling,

was involved as well.

This was the conspiracy theory to end them all.

And the British public seemed to be falling for

Billing's extraordinary claims about pro-German homosexuals in high places.

Anxiety rippled through the corridors of power.

There were even fears of a revolution, a peoples' revolt.

After a five-day slither of titter fodder and garbage

had gurgled out of the Old Bailey,

the jury took just two hours

to acquit Billing of libelling Maud Allan.

The public gallery erupted in joy.

As their hero emerged from the Old Bailey,

he was mobbed by more than a thousand supporters.

But what of the German Black Book itself that had started it all?

Well, there's no evidence that it ever existed.

It was almost certainly the fevered figment of one man's imagination,

seized upon by a people driven half-mad

by four years of loss and fear and hating.

But by the end of the trial, the fortunes of war

were dramatically reversing.

In July, the German advance was stopped.

And by September, a ferocious counter attack

by British, Canadian and Australian troops

was smashing through German lines.

These mostly forgotten battles

formed one of the greatest military victories ever won by British forces.

Finally, at 11 o'clock on the 11th November 1918,

the Germans formally surrendered and signed the Armistice.

The guns fell silent.

To start with, the reaction was celebratory, wild, even drunken.

Lloyd George was hailed by the jubilant crowds

as "the man who won the war".

But the crowds quickly sobered up

and the mood darkened.

The war had changed Britain

in ways that would have been unimaginable four years earlier.

More than 720,000 people never returned from the battlefields.

And those at home lived surrounded by the gaps and the ghosts -

those people who should have been in the street

or in the factory or down the pub, but just weren't there.

The civilians had pulled together

and worked for the war effort as never before.

They'd seen the birth of "big government".

Perhaps no shock has ever hit these islands with quite the force

of what they called - with, let's hope, an edge of bitter humour -

the Great War.

In the next programme,

cocktails and communists,

nightclubs, gold...

and sleaze.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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