The Darkest Hour Britain's Great War

In the autumn of 1916, two merciless years into the First World War,

there was one topic on everybody's lips.

It wasn't a military crisis or a political scandal.

It was a film.

A cinema documentary called The Battle Of The Somme.

The movie was the latest piece of Government propaganda

to try to rally the British people behind the war.

But this film was different from the usual patriotic newsreels.

Here, for the first time, were scenes of real fighting,

real bloodshed and real death.

Letting the British people see what was happening

to their menfolk on the Western Front was a huge gamble.

Would it swing opinion behind the war?

Or would they find the spectacle of modern combat

so horrible that they'd demand it was ended?

The film was seen by over 20 million people

in just six weeks.

The effect on audiences was electrifying.

Men cheered the start of each assault.

Women wept at the sight of the wounded.

But it was this scene in particular that had the most dramatic effect.

At the Electric Cinema in Droylsden, Lancashire,

a woman leapt to her feet, pointing at the screen and crying,

"That's Jim! That's my husband!"

She'd just been told he'd been killed in the Battle of the Somme,

leaving her a widow with nine children.

There were some who thought that seeing

British soldiers' suffering was grotesque.

But most people felt a surge of pride and sympathy.

One woman who saw the film in London had lost her brother at the Somme.

She had tried many times to imagine what his last hours

must have been like, and then she saw the film.

She said, "Now I know and I shall never forget."

The gamble of showing people what was happening on the Western Front

had paid off.

The film would make people in Britain more committed

to the war than ever.

And they would need every ounce of optimism

and resolve they could muster.

They were about to enter the darkest hour the country had ever known.

In February 1917,

after more than two years of stalemate,

the German High Command decided that

if they couldn't defeat Britain's Army,

they could crush her people.

In the words of the German Kaiser, "We will starve the British people

"who have refused peace until they kneel and plead for it."

The plan was to sink the merchant shipping which brought the food

and supplies on which the country lived.

The weapon would be the submarine - U-boats.

On a desolate mud bank in the salt marshes of Kent lies

the metal carcass of a First World War German U-boat.

British ships were blockading German ports,

but the U-boat was a new and terrifying way to wage war,

and it came close to defeating Britain.

The Germans knew that Britain imported two-thirds of her food

and they made a simple calculation.

If they sank 600,000 tonnes of merchant shipping every month,

they could starve Britain into submission in a mere five months.

So, on 1st February 1917,

the Germans sent their U-boats in for the kill,

ordering them to attack all merchant shipping supplying Britain.

The devastation in the shipping lanes was catastrophic.

In 1917, 46,000 tonnes of meat were sent to the bottom of the sea.

Between February and June, 85,000 tonnes of sugar were also sunk.

Flour and wheat were soon in short supply,

and a stunned House of Commons was told that very soon,

Britain would not be able to feed herself.

The U-boat stranglehold seemed unbreakable.

Britain faced a stark choice - to grow much more food or to starve.

But British farms were in crisis.

Many farmhands were now at the Front, and so were the horses.

So a new force was sent into the fields.

84,000 disabled soldiers, 30,000 German prisoners of war

and over a quarter of a million British women.

By the following year, over seven million extra acres had been dug up

to grow more food.

Well, it helped,

eventually yielding about a month's extra food each year.

But that was still nothing like enough to make up

for the thousands of tonnes being sent to the bottom of the sea

by German U-boats.

War was being waged on civilians,

and it was up to civilians to save themselves.

The order came to plough up Britain,

to hand over land to the people

so they could provide for themselves.

This strip of land was waste ground until 1917.

Then it was dug up to provide cabbages, potatoes

and marrows for a hungry nation.

Armies of women, children and the elderly set about transforming

the landscape of Britain's towns and cities.

The nation had a new craze which the press called "allotmentitis".

Before the war, allotments had been a hobby for eccentrics.

By the end of the war, there were over 1.5 million of them

squeezed into any scrap of earth that could be dug up,

from grass verges to village greens to railway embankments.

Even the Royals were at it.

Here, in the gardens of Buckingham Palace,

the King turned his herbaceous border over to turnips

and other delights, and the same thing happened

in London's Royal Parks.

If the daintiest fingers in the land could get earthy,

well, so could anybody's.

But however many turnips left the gates of Buckingham Palace,

one desperate shortage remained.

Eight out of every ten loaves were made from imported wheat.

The poor depended on bread, few of them could afford much else.

In May 1917, the King issued a Royal Proclamation.

Being a Royal Proclamation, it takes a bit of time to get going.

"We, out of Our resolve to leave nothing undone

"have thought it fit to issue this, most earnestly exhorting

"the men and women of Our realm to practise the greatest frugality

"in the use of every species of grain."

In other words, lay off the bread, the buns and the cake.

The idea was that richer people,

who could afford other kinds of food,

should leave bread for the poor.

The Government decided it was time to step into the nation's kitchens.

The Win-The-War Cookery Book appealed to the middle classes

to leave bread and other cheap ingredients to the less well-off.

"To the women of Britain. The British struggle is not only

"on land and sea. It is in YOUR larder, YOUR kitchen

"and YOUR dining room.

"Every meal you serve is now literally a battle."

The chef Angela Hartnett has prepared

some of the recipes from the Win-The-War Cook Book.

-What's that, Angela?

-It's a fish chowder with bacon, potatoes,

a little barley flour, cos we weren't allowed to use proper wheat,

cos that's what the poor ate - they made bread, they used wheat

as their base for their food and their staple diet.

So they made sure the middle classes and the rich

-were using other ingredients.

-It IS good.

-It's not bad, is it?

-It's a little bit like 1917 MasterChef, mind you.

The cook book suggests you use oysters, lobster, turbot,

all these luxury ingredients, so the working poor were left with

the cheaper fish, but the rich had to use all this stuff.

So this is fried mush, which doesn't sound delightful.

-The old English way with menus, eh?

-Yeah, I know.

You can see why we were considered a culinary capital of the world(!)

But essentially, this is maize flour,

and it would be something that could be savoury or sweet,

but used for breakfast or as a dessert,

so I'm going to serve it to you with a little bit of golden syrup.

-That sounds like a threat.

-No!

So, what did you make of it as a cook book?

I thought it was actually very good, because one of the things

I thought was brilliant about it, which you see all the way through,

is there's very little waste. Like, they'd make a meat sauce,

or roast meat, then they'd make soup out of it, a leftover pie.

It was absolutely wasteless, which I thought was brilliant.

But no amount of patriotic cook books could hide the fact

that things were simply getting worse.

The U-boat blockade was biting.

In autumn 1917, shortages were so severe that huge queues formed

outside butchers and grocers.

In some cities, people looted the shops for food,

breaking the windows and beating up the shop owners.

Finally, the Food Controller had to think the unthinkable.

"It may well be," he told a colleague,

"that you and I are all that stands between this country

"and revolution."

People would HAVE to be told what they could and couldn't eat.

And so, in January 1918, rationing was brought in.

Now, this was one person's ration for a week - 15oz of meat,

5oz of bacon, 4oz of margarine and 8oz of sugar.

# Keep the home fires burning

# While your hearts are yearning... #

This was the first time a British Government had ever rationed food.

And it worked.

The queues outside the shops disappeared.

Rationing, allotments and a system of convoys to protect merchant ships

kept starvation at bay.

So this had become a war that was not just being fought

on the battlefields, but on every street in the land.

A new term entered the language - the Home Front.

And just as on the Western Front, there were cowards and deserters,

so the question began to be asked -

was everyone on the Home Front doing their bit?

Was the burden being shared equally?

As the hardships of 1917 bit deeper, neighbour began to spy on neighbour.

An unlikely hate figure was smoked out in that quintessentially

English town, Stratford-upon-Avon.

It was a hugely successful romantic novelist, Marie Corelli.

In October 1917, Corelli's neighbours watched as a grocer's van

delivered box after box of sugar and tea here at her home, Mason Croft.

In a time of shortage, hoarding was a serious crime.

Someone tipped off the police.

Stashed away in Marie's kitchen,

a constable found 183lb of sugar and 43lb of tea.

Marie Corelli told the constable exactly what she thought of him.

"I'm a patriot, I wouldn't dream of hoarding," she said.

"It's a fine thing when a woman cannot live in her own home

"without being interfered with by a policeman.

"There'll be a revolution in England within a week."

Well, the revolution never happened,

and Marie Corelli was ordered to appear in court.

She protested her innocence.

The sugar, she said, was to make jam for the poor.

It was no use. She was found guilty of hoarding.

Her reputation was shredded.

MUSIC: "Oh, It's A Lovely War" by The Jolly Old Fellows

But some people really did seem to be having a lovely war.

It was suspected that toffs were ignoring Government advice

not to gorge themselves,

and that restaurants were flouting restrictions

on what they could serve.

One evening, a reporter from the campaigning newspaper the Herald

decided to put this to the test.

He walked into one of London's leading hotels

and ordered dinner.

It was some feast - there were hors d'oeuvres,

there was a rich soup, there was sole, there was lobster,

there was chicken, there were three rashers of bacon and three tomatoes,

fruit salad, coffee - each with lashings of cream -

and the reporter managed to eat four bread rolls, though he said

there were plenty more available had he wanted them,

if he could've eaten any more.

The next day, the Herald ran a full-page splash on the story.

It caused a sensation.

"There are whole circles of society,"

said one disgusted commentator,

"in which the spirit of sacrifice is unknown."

The Government line was, "We're all in this together."

It obviously wasn't true.

As a good campaigning journalist, the reporter noticed on his way out,

"Three old women, huddled in rags, sheltering beneath the arches

"in front of the hotel."

It's little wonder that soldiers began to resent the comfortable life

of some civilians.

They saw at first hand what was going on at home.

The Western Front was close enough for soldiers to return

to Britain on leave.

Many found these visits uncomfortable and upsetting.

These soldiers were often deeply distressed by the chasm

between home and life on the Front.

On a Monday, you might see your best friend blown to pieces.

Home on leave on Thursday, you were having tea on the lawn.

Life at home just seemed to carry on regardless.

The soldier and writer Herbert Read

was shocked by people's indifference.

"They simply have no conception whatever," he wrote,

"of what war really is like

"and they don't seem concerned about it at all."

Increasingly, many men no longer felt at home

in the homes they were fighting to save.

But civilians carried their own burdens, too.

By 1917, every family in the land knew somebody who'd been killed.

Never before had such sorrow penetrated to

the very heart of the nation.

There was really no way you couldn't be aware of the toll

that the war was taking because the deaths were published every morning

in the Times newspaper.

In this one, for example, there are two entire pages covered with

very small type, giving the names of those who've died.

143 officers

and 5,770 privates, corporals and sergeants.

Wives and mothers learned the news that would shatter their lives

by opening a plain envelope like this.

The envelope contained the form that every family learned to dread,

Army Form B 104-82.

"Dear Madam. It's my painful duty to inform you that a report

"has this day been received from the War Office

"notifying the death of..." - space for the number, space for the rank,

space for the name and space for the regiment.

"The cause of death was killed in action."

A form is a horribly impersonal way to learn of anybody's death,

but given the huge numbers of people who were being killed,

there probably was no alternative.

Soon after came a personal letter

from the dead soldier's superior officer

attempting to soften the blow.

This is a letter written to the mother of John Enticknap,

who was a village boy from Sussex.

It's written by his company commander in pencil

in the trenches.

"Dear Mrs Enticknap. It is with the sincerest feelings of regret

"that I write to tell you of the death of your son.

"I am well aware that anything that I can say will do little to assuage

"the pain that you must feel at your loss,

"but I'm sure it will be some slight comfort for you to know

"that your son died gamely."

And he finishes, "He stood out among his comrades

"as a man who was without fear. I cannot say more."

The war was subjecting the British people to pressure

they had never known before.

They were increasingly governed by fear.

Fear of loss, fear of hunger.

Some even feared a collapse of moral values.

For there was a new and hidden danger on the streets

and in the parks of Britain.

DOG BARKS

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle,

wrote to the Times to warn of vile women

who preyed on soldiers home on leave, luring them to their rooms,

plying them with drink, and leaving them with a dose of disease.

By 1917, it was believed there were 60,000 prostitutes in London alone.

They found willing clients in young soldiers desperate

to lose their virginity before it was too late.

The consequences were predictable.

It was estimated that at least 55,000 British soldiers

were hospitalised with venereal disease.

The Government decided that something had to be done.

Worry about the damage being done to the war effort

chimed with a general moral concern about what the war was doing

to behaviour. But with so many policemen away at the Front,

who was to keep vice off the streets?

The answer was women.

The Government had already employed hosts of women to do vital war work.

Now they invited them to join the police to safeguard

the nation's morals, and keep young soldiers away from temptation.

By 1917, there were over 2,000 women's patrols

up and down the country.

The streets of Grantham in Lincolnshire were the regular beat

of Edith Smith...

..the first woman to be sworn in

as a member of the English police force.

There was an enormous Army base just outside Grantham,

which inevitably attracted loads of easy women.

But Edith Smith was a formidable figure who worked seven days a week

for two years, and her notebook is full of comments like

"foolish girls warned"

or "prostitutes driven out of Grantham".

She even compiled a blacklist of girls who were not to be allowed

into the cinema or theatre, because they were going to be more

interested in their own performance than in anything happening on stage.

But women like Edith Smith were also given powers to police

behind closed doors.

She wrote that a regular part of the job was,

"Husbands placing their wives under observation during their absence."

Another policewoman recorded visiting the house of a woman

of suspected bad character - seven children, and a husband away

at the Front - and finding there another soldier.

The woman, she reported, was very obviously alarmed

and promised to send the man away after supper.

But the police officer reported that

when she returned at 11pm, she found the man still in the house,

so she drove him out, cautioning him not to return.

The State was now effectively policing people's bedrooms.

It was merely one aspect of official intrusion into

almost every aspect of people's lives.

In this new kind of war, the Government was having to find

new ways to manage and control the civilian population.

The British public had so far been overwhelmingly behind the war,

but as things grew more desperate, there was a fear this resolve

might crumble under the influence of the so-called enemy within -

pacifists, socialists, trade unionists.

Could they set Britain, like Russia that same year,

on the road to revolution?

By 1917, the Government held over 30,000 secret files

on those they suspected.

Official anxiety burst into the open

when the nation found itself gripped by a sensational court case.

It was a headline-writer's dream, involving spies, poison

and conspiracy to murder.

Alice Wheeldon, a working-class mother from Derby,

was accused, along with her family, of plotting to assassinate

the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

It started here, on Derby's Pear Tree Road,

where Alice Wheeldon ran a second-hand clothes shop,

nowadays a travel agent.

Alice Wheeldon and her family were a real cocktail of subversion.

Her son Willie was a conscientious objector on the run.

Her daughters Hettie and Winnie were both suffragettes.

And all were passionate pacifists, socialists and atheists.

The police had been tipped off that Alice used her shop as a safe house

for conscientious objectors on the run.

One night, a young man turned up here

and introduced himself as an anarchist.

His name, he said, was Alex Gordon.

But Alex Gordon wasn't who he said he was.

In fact, he was a secret agent for British Intelligence.

A month later, Gordon went to his spymasters

with an extraordinary story about the Wheeldons.

Alice and her daughters were promptly arrested

and brought here to the Guildhall in Derby.

The Wheeldons were held in these cells,

charged with conspiring to murder

the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

Alex Gordon had told his handlers they were plotting to creep up

on him and fire a poison dart from a blowpipe while he was playing golf.

The full force of the British Establishment

came down on the Wheeldons.

They were brought to the most famous court in Britain.

The Attorney General himself led the prosecution.

It was David against Goliath.

The Attorney General began by describing what he called

the "diseased moral condition" of the defendants.

When Alice refused to swear on the Bible,

the jury and the packed public gallery drew their own conclusions.

She then freely admitted to helping young men evade conscription,

and as to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George,

she wouldn't mind if he was dead.

It wasn't a good start.

But the prosecution had

an astonishing admission of their own.

They weren't going to call their chief witness.

The secret agent on whose word the whole case rested

wasn't going to give evidence.

What sort of a witness would he have made?

Well, the jury might have learned that he'd got previous convictions

for theft and blackmail, that he'd twice been declared

criminally insane, and had done time in Broadmoor.

They might also have learned he was an agent provocateur,

offering bombs and poison all over the place.

The Government did the sensible thing - they gave him

a one-way ticket on a ship to South Africa.

In spite of this gaping hole in the evidence,

the Government pressed ahead with the prosecution.

It took less than a week for the jury to find Alice guilty.

She was sentenced to ten years' hard labour.

One of her daughters got five years.

Alice Wheeldon's great-granddaughter believes it was a show trial.

I think no-one who knows what happened,

and how the Government arranged the information for what happened,

could ever believe that that was a fair trial that happened here.

-You think she was framed?

-I do. Not for who they were,

but for what they stood for,

because they stood for things that the Government wanted to demonise

and suppress, and to hold up as a warning to other people,

because, in fact, there were many people all over England

who were concerned about the war and raising questions.

What happened to your great-grandmother after conviction?

Well, after conviction, she was sent to prison,

and she became very ill in prison, and in fact

there's documents to show that there was debate about the fear

from the Home Office perspective that she would die in prison

and she would become a martyr, and they didn't want that.

And that was why they released her.

But she was ill when she came out of prison

and she died not all that long after. She died in 1919.

We'll never know for sure whether Alice Wheeldon was innocent,

but it's clear that the British Government knew all too well

that she'd been framed by an unreliable secret agent.

In truth, it wasn't the enemy within

the British public needed to fear.

At 11.30am on Wednesday 13th June 1917,

people in the financial district of London heard a distant roar.

In the sky, they saw more than 20 planes heading towards them.

Many thought they were British... and rushed out to wave at them.

And then the bombs began to fall.

On the streets, there was terror,

there was shock and there was disbelief.

An Army sergeant at home on leave recalled that,

"No thought of the planes being German had entered our heads.

"It wasn't possible for them to raid London in daylight."

Zeppelins, the great German airships,

had attacked London before, but always at night.

An attack by planes on the capital during daylight

was something completely new.

72 bombs were dropped on London that day, killing 162 civilians.

It was the most destructive air raid of the war.

But this new, brutal way of waging war

was about to deliver one more shock.

A stray 100 lb bomb fell here,

the site of Upper North Street School in east London.

The bomb smashed through the roof of the school.

On the top floor, the girls were having a singing lesson.

One of them, a 13-year-old, was killed outright.

It then plunged through the middle floor, where the boys were

having a maths lesson. There it killed a 12-year-old.

And finally, it struck the bottom floor,

where there were 54 5-year-olds gathered.

It blew 16 of them to pieces.

The events of that day were recorded in the school's logbook.

-This is the headteacher's log, is it?

-Yes.

So from August 1913

to April 1928.

And what does it say about the terrible day when the bombs fell?

"13th of the 6th, 1917. 11.40am. Air raid.

"Bomb fell through roof of north-east corner of E room

"and went through floor.

"Rose Martin of 10 Annabelle Street killed.

"Anne Pritchard - foot blown off, seriously ill in hospital.

"Mrs Allen, teacher in E room, probably blown across room.

"I saw her crouching in corner with A Pritchard in front later.

"There was no panic, but children sobbed and wailed,

"clinging and standing close to their teachers.

"No school held 13/6/17 pm."

So they stopped...

-There was no school for the rest of the day, is that right?

-Hmm.

-And how soon after that does it reopen?

-The next morning.

What did you think when you found this?

Well, I must admit, I did cry. I thought it was very poignant.

And, you know, you hear about how stoic the British were,

and I think this really shows that, you know,

there was that real, "We'll just carry on and we'll get through this."

A week after the raid, the funeral for the 18 dead children took place.

It was one of most emotional moments in the history of the East End.

The Bishop of London told the mourners that it was inconceivable

that after 2,000 years of Christianity,

war could now be made on women and children.

But in this, the first modern war, technology was changing everything.

Each side was trying to starve the other into surrender,

U-boats were sinking passenger ships,

and aircraft bombing civilians.

The rules and conventions of war were casualties, too.

But in November 1917 came a glimmer of hope.

Another terrifying new weapon had entered the war.

But this time...

..it was British.

The tank was a brand-new British invention

developed with the enthusiastic support of Winston Churchill.

He wanted a land ship which could smash through barbed wire

and cross trenches.

No-one had ever seen anything like it.

The tank clanked its way straight out of the pages of science fiction.

A giant, hideous mechanical toad.

Many of the Germans were so terrified, they threw their hands

in the air and begged for mercy.

In November 1917, British tanks won a stunning victory.

Nearly 400 of them snatched seven miles of ground at Cambrai

in Northern France.

The German line had never been so successfully penetrated.

Across Britain, church bells rang out in celebration.

Might this at last be the weapon to break the stalemate

and beat the Germans?

The British people went tank crazy.

The Government saw an opportunity.

They decided to deploy tanks at home to raise morale...and funds.

Tank number 130 rumbled into Trafalgar Square

not to fight the Germans, obviously,

but to help raise money to fight the Germans

through the sale of war bonds.

The Trafalgar Square Tank Bank was aimed at the ordinary man

or woman in the street, the sort of person who didn't have

a stockbroker but who wanted to do their bit.

Thousands queued to see the tank

and to buy bonds from two women sitting inside.

The stunt was so successful that tanks were sent around the country.

Towns and cities competed with one another

to see who could raise more money.

The winner was Glasgow, with £16 million.

There, a tank called Julian showed off its tricks

on a specially prepared obstacle course.

And everywhere the tanks went,

ordinary people turned up to buy the bonds.

In Birmingham, a cowherd arrived with £75-worth of sovereigns

he'd previously had buried for 30 years in his cottage garden.

In Preston, a woman arrived with about half a crown.

It wasn't enough to buy a war bond,

but she insisted on donating it anyway.

And an old man came and gave £100...

He said he'd happily give more if he had it,

in memory of his four sons who'd already given their lives.

The success of the Tank Bank

came to symbolise British values of self-sacrifice and pluck.

One Tank Bank customer

declared the tank to be like the British character -

rather slow to move, somewhat heavy, but sure.

In total, the Tank Banks sold over £300 million-worth of war bonds,

that's about £11 billion-worth at today's values.

In the darkest hour, they had persuaded the British people

to rally behind the war effort and reach deep into their

increasingly empty pockets.

It was an astonishing achievement.

But as the third year of the war drew on,

the situation on the Western Front had become bleaker than ever.

Britain's Allies were tottering.

There was mutiny in the French army.

Fellow ally Russia, torn by revolution,

was about to pull out of the war.

And the killing didn't stop.

More than half a million British dead since the start of the war.

Even war heroes were now wondering what they'd risked their lives for.

In 1917, one of them, the poet Siegfried Sassoon,

went public with his doubts about the war.

In the trenches, his men had known Lieutenant Sassoon as Mad Jack

for his astonishing fearlessness,

and he'd won a Military Cross for bravery.

But now he was denouncing the whole thing.

"The war upon which I embarked as one of defence and liberation,"

he wrote, "has become a war of aggression and conquest.

"I am protesting against the political errors for which the lives

"of fighting men are being sacrificed,

"and against the callous complacency with which those at home

"regard agonies they do not share."

From a decorated war hero, this was incendiary stuff.

Sassoon risked court martial, imprisonment, even execution.

But the generals were cleverer than that.

They pronounced him mad and sent him here to a military hospital

called Craiglockhart.

Sassoon was surrounded by men suffering from

the newly diagnosed condition of shell shock.

This war wasn't only killing and maiming soldiers,

it was unhinging their minds.

At first, doctors thought it was a physical condition,

concussion caused by exploding shells.

Treatment was often brutal.

Some doctors used solitary confinement

and electric-shock treatment to try to snap their patients out of it.

But then they began to understand something of the stress of life

in the trenches - the lack of sleep, the shattering noise,

the sight of so much death and mutilation.

As one lieutenant put it, "Quite apart from the number of people

"blown to bits, the explosions were so terrible

"that anyone within 100 yards was liable to lose their reason."

At Craiglockhart, doctors were pioneering a radical new approach

to shell shock.

Dr William Rivers believed that patients were repressing

the terrifying experiences they'd had,

and that in order to get better, they needed to talk about them.

In 1917, Rivers' work was ground-breaking.

His methods, his practices

lie at the heart of trauma treatment even today.

He was ahead of his time.

He was using practices that none of his contemporaries were using.

What was it he understood that others hadn't understood?

I think he understood how trauma memories work.

He... He understood that by repressing traumatic memory,

all you do is you make it intrude even more.

It doesn't work, suppressing it.

And he advocated the opposite of that.

He encouraged his patients to talk about their traumatic memories,

and by doing so helped them to connect with the emotion

of the memory and to process that.

Would you have liked to have Rivers on your team?

Very much so. In a flash. I would've employed him...

..today, if he applied. Hmm.

But Craiglockhart's most famous patient,

the anti-war Lieutenant Sassoon, wasn't suffering from shell shock.

And he realised that unless he gave up his protest

and returned to the Front, he'd be stuck here forever.

After three months, Sassoon was restless.

He hadn't changed his anti-war views,

but he chose solidarity with his soldiers over private principles.

As he wrote when he returned to the Western Front,

"I'm only here to look after some men."

Sassoon's protesting voice had been silenced.

But in the autumn of 1917, events on the Western Front would prove

so terrible that a growing number of British people,

soldier and civilian alike,

would begin to voice doubts about the dreadful human cost of the war.

One of them was a 32-year-old Army chaplain,

the Rev Julian Bickersteth.

In August 1917, Bickersteth had been posted to Poperinge in Flanders.

His job - to minister to the British troops as they launched

a new offensive to break the German lines.

This battle would be so bloody, its name has come to sum up,

more than any other, the horror of the First World War.

Passchendaele.

Julian Bickersteth was so passionately pro-war

that he had travelled all the way from Australia

to serve at the Front.

For him, loving God and hating the enemy

were one and the same thing.

"We shall win this war," he said,

"because God cannot allow such German scum to exist."

That belief in a righteous crusade was about to be utterly destroyed.

Bickersteth kept a diary recording his growing concerns about the war.

It tells how, in August,

he arrived here at an odd little place called Talbot House.

MUSIC: "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm?" by Harry Fay

# Reuben, Reuben, I've been thinking

# Said his wifey dear... #

This was a refuge, designed as a wholesome home-away-from-home

for exhausted soldiers taking a few days out of the trenches,

an alternative to beer and brothels.

Here, they could relax, write letters, read books and drink tea.

But Bickersteth was here for another reason.

On the top floor of Talbot House, there was a small chapel

decorated with ornaments saved from the ruins of other churches

in the area.

One afternoon, in this room,

Julian Bickersteth witnessed 120 men being confirmed.

"Many of them had come straight from the battle," he said,

"and they were returning there that evening."

They knew that this might be their last chance to make peace

with their God.

Bickersteth followed his men to the battlefield,

a mere 12 miles from the comforts of Talbot House.

The battle was marked by a horror all its own - mud.

Mud that swamped you, mud that sucked at you,

mud that could even drown you.

30 days of incessant rain and shellfire had turned

the whole battlefield into a foul-smelling quagmire,

stripped of any living thing but men trying to kill each other.

Bickersteth couldn't believe his eyes.

"This is the most appalling country that it has ever been

"my misfortune to see.

"Swamp, shell holes, stench, water,

"mud, broken-down tree stumps, destroyed dugouts and gun pits,

"unburied bodies of horses and men all over the place."

If you fell off a duckboard into a shell hole, God help you.

A major in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment came across a soldier

stuck up to his knees.

His men tried to pull him out, but they couldn't do so.

Two days later, the major returned.

He said, "The wretched fellow was still there,

"but now only his head was visible and he was raving mad."

It's not known how many soldiers drowned here.

Belgian farmers still dig up the bones of the dead to this day.

One morning, Bickersteth found himself tending to the wounded

at a dressing station behind the front line.

He wrote that, "At least six men died in my arms.

"The courage of these grievously wounded men moves me to tears."

Julian Bickersteth's disillusionment was growing.

The British press loyally banged on about great victories,

but he said, "It's maddening to those of us who know the truth."

The carnage continued until November,

when British and Commonwealth troops finally captured the small

and now devastated village of Passchendaele,

the village that gave its name to the blood-letting.

The British began their advance in July 1917 on the horizon over there.

It took them four long months to advance five miles to Passchendaele,

which is where the church is on the horizon over there.

It came at enormous cost.

The total number of British and Commonwealth casualties

was 300,000 - 80,000 of them dead.

For Julian Bickersteth, this was not what war should be.

His nephew, Bishop John Bickersteth,

has collected and published his diaries.

Tell me about how he describes his feelings at Passchendaele.

At Passchendaele, he says this...

He says this.

"When will this senseless murder end?

"The country is being hoodwinked.

"Facts are distorted, totally misrepresented by the press.

"My nostrils are filled with the smell of blood.

"My eyes are glutted with the sight of bleeding bodies

"and shattered limbs,

"my heart wrung with the agony of wounded and dying men."

He was, if you like, he was disillusioned about the war.

I think that most of them were.

But this was a man who was, by no stretch of the imagination,

-a conscientious objector.

-Absolutely not, no.

-He'd won the Military Cross.

-He won a Military Cross.

He was mentioned... Oh, no stretch of the imagination

was he anywhere near being a conscientious objector, no.

What do you think caused Julian to change his attitude?

I think he was sick of war, yes, I...

And he realised how stupid it was to go on with it.

That was really the fact of the matter. He realised it was silly

to go on with it, but how was anyone going to stop it?

12,000 of the Passchendaele dead

lie here on the site of the battle itself.

This is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world.

The terrible sacrifice made by those buried here prompted further doubts

about the point of it all.

In November 1917, a former Minister for War broke ranks,

calling on Britain to make peace.

But the country had gone too far to turn back.

And an awful realisation was dawning...

..that many more might have to die.

Long ago, way back in 1914, in that great recruiting poster,

Lord Kitchener had said that the war would be won by

the last million men.

Was it really possible that it could go on until one side,

exhausted, broken, bled white,

had nothing more to give?

And if so, when would that day come?

Next time - Sherlock Holmes comes to the aid of a beleaguered nation.

At the 11th hour, victory at last on the Western Front.

And after the celebrations, Britain counts the cost of war.