Remembering and Understanding Long Shadow

From the theatre of war to the theatre of memory.

Along the old frontline 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.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

But for those of us now who didn't live through the Great War,

what are we remembering?

BAGPIPES PLAY FLOWERS OF THE FOREST

A terrible sacrifice and for what?

In Britain the usual answer is, "for 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

and look afresh at the meaning of the conflict,

its impact on the survivors,

the living, not the dead.

There's a strange paradox about the Great War.

For us now it's a static, futile and inconclusive conflict.

I want to explore how this deadlocked war

unleashed huge dynamic forces

that have pummelled and shaped the whole century since 1914.

Within this bigger picture lies another fascinating puzzle -

why Britain in the '20s and '30s coped far better

than the rest of Europe with the legacies of the war,

especially the tumultuous forces of democracy and nationalism.

The first of these great legacies is perhaps the most important -

our national memory of the Great War,

the story we tell ourselves about it.

This isn't something fixed in stone, it's 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 War.

EXPLOSIONS

In 1918, the Tommies started to return from France.

Yet most British 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's said 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 War.

It was the biggest conflict in British history,

720,000 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 "honour" 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.

This cenotaph was meant to be a temporary structure,

put together from wood and plaster.

But it struck an immediate chord with the public.

The press was full of letters demanding that the cenotaph

be made permanent.

On Armistice Day, November 1920,

a stone Cenotaph was unveiled.

One and a quarter million people filed past in the first week.

The memorial stood 10ft deep in flowers.

Today, it's all very familiar

but, in 1920, what might have been going through the minds of

the bereaved as they faced the Cenotaph for the first time?

Some may well have gained comfort from the three words on the side -

The Glorious Dead.

Those who didn't probably kept their feelings to themselves.

For a nation numbed by grief and uncertainty about the war,

the appeal of the Cenotaph lies,

I think, in its 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 people to remember the war in their own way,

the state took control of the dead.

Politicians refused to bring soldiers' bodies back.

The cost would be prohibitive

and anyway, many men had literally been blown to bits.

Instead the bodies were carefully collected along the Western Front,

buried with reverence and canopied with striking architecture.

The interwoven arches Lutyens designed at Thiepval

were not to trumpet victory

but to bear 72,000 names of the Missing of the Somme.

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.

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,

should have his own named grave,

very different from the mass graves into which the soldiers

were dumped a century earlier after the battle of Waterloo.

Helping Ware to design the gravestones

was another man too old to fight.

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 Loos with half his face blown off.

His body was not found.

For those like Jack who were forever missing,

Kipling coined the phrase, "Known Unto God".

Today, the project of state-imposed remembrance, spearheaded by Lutyens,

Ware and Kipling, seems extraordinary and impressive.

But, at the time, this was enormously controversial.

Parents wanted to mourn their sons at home

in their own country churchyards.

The standardised headstone was denounced as a Prussian imposition.

One mother complained that the tombstones looked 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 Cenotaph, the cemeteries, the annual two minute silence

and the tradition of wearing poppies as a quiet demonstration of grief,

these were the ways that Britain tried to cope in the 1920s

with the trauma of the Great War.

The British had buried the dead with honour.

They had created rituals to remember but also to sanitise the war

and it seemed that life could get going again.

For a new generation who had come of age after the war,

the '20s were a time of new music and new fashions.

They had been too young to fight

and were quite happy to forget the Great War,

to consign it to history.

But the past has a way of biting back.

1928 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 grief began to enter public debate.

A succession of new books and memoirs

took the wraps off the soldiers' experience 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 of the hellish reality of the Great War.

The author was R C Sherriff who'd served as an officer

on the Western Front and then, it seemed, returned to normal life

as a shy insurance clerk living with his parents in suburban Surrey.

Yet, like many veterans,

Sheriff struggled to cope with his war experiences

and, ten years on, they came to the surface as theatre.

Journey's End was set in a gloomy dug-out

with soldiers sitting around, talking, bickering

and using drink to numb their emotions and keep them going.

War imagined against a stone memorial was one thing,

the dead brought to life on stage was very different.

And Sherriff was terrified about how

his play would be received by the audience.

The performance ended in what Sherriff 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 on a tomb.

And then the cheers erupted.

IMAGINARY APPLAUSE

It was the start of a West End run that lasted 18 months.

The reviews were glowing,

praising above all the realism of the play.

But others saw a deeper meaning,

interpreting Journey's End as a stark warning for the future

about the horror of war.

The author J B 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 pay off for the Great War had to be the Great Peace.

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 was equally passionate about the dangers of the motor car.

As President of the Pedestrians' Association,

he helped bring in the driving licence

and the 30mph speed limit in towns.

But what Cecil really wanted to put the brakes on was war.

Unfortunately moderation doesn't receive the same publicity

as extreme utterances.

And for that and other reasons,

it is very, very difficult by mere speech

to counteract the harm that is done by violent utterance.

Cecil was haunted by memories of the Great War.

In 1914, he'd worked for the Red Cross in France

helping the wounded.

Like Ware, he was appalled by the destruction

but, after 1918, his eyes were not on the dead and the past

but on the living and the future.

"If there is a quarrel between two individuals,

"they do not fight it out,

"unless they are barbarians or schoolboys."

Cecil 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 aggressor.

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 murder of some Italian soldiers,

Italy's new dictator, Benito Mussolini,

occupied the island of Corfu.

The League intervened, imposed a fine on 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 War was taking hold.

For Germany, what mattered was not preventing another 1914

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 Weimar.

Weimar was a sleepy provincial town

but also the historic heart of German culture...

..home to Bach, Schiller and Goethe.

XYLOPHONE PLAYS TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN D MINOR BY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

The creation of the Republic here in Weimar was a calculated attempt

to root the new democratic Germany

in all that was best in the country's past.

But it was also a panic measure forced on Germany's politicians

by the street violence gripping Berlin.

The Weimar Republic would never escape the bitter controversy

in which it was born.

In July 1926,

an obscure right wing party held its annual rally in Weimar

and its leader delivered his keynote speech, equally deliberately,

in the National Theatre.

He was taking command of Germany's 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 Weimar Republic had then sold out by accepting

the vindictive peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

A point that he rammed home

on the very spot where the Republic had been founded.

This was very different political theatre 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 War.

"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 of a 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 Weimar 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 Weimar Republic was as bankrupt as Germany's economy.

In 1933, Hitler manoeuvred 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.

The escalating arms race was alarmingly like Europe before 1914.

But this arms race would provoke an extraordinary response

from ordinary people back in Britain.

And it all started with Essex man...

..or more precisely one Essex man,

Charles Boorman.

He was editor of the Ilford Recorder on the edge of London.

MUSIC: I've Got A Pocketful Of Dreams by Bing Crosby

Boorman wanted the League to put pressure on Hitler

and so he launched what started as a little local campaign,

a questionnaire for the people of Ilford

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 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 Institutes.

When there's a quarrel between two people,

the police are called in to settle it.

Why can't the League of Nations be strong enough

to settle disputes between two nations?

I'd fight tomorrow if I thought a war would end war

but that's what they told my father in 1914 and we're no better off now.

So let's be sensible and work together for peace by reason.

In Ilford, 26,000 people responded to Charles Boorman's appeal.

Boorman 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 honour.

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 door knockers spent hours discussing the issues with people,

often in their own homes.

One man in Sussex answered yes to all six questions,

his wife entered six no's.

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.

The hall was packed and the atmosphere triumphant.

Cecil would have been happy with five million responses

but the eventual total was 11.6 million,

more than a third of the British population over the age of 18.

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%, a 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 Peace Ballot

said they were willing to risk war in the hope of keeping the peace.

The Peace Ballot 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 Hoare told the Cabinet,

there would be "a wave of public opinion against the government."

We're all out for peace.

We're all out for carrying out our obligations under the League.

But behind closed doors at the Foreign Office,

the talk was very different.

Samuel Hoare was a canny politician,

irreverently known as Slippery Sam.

In reality he was pretty sceptical about the League

and thought Cecil and the LNU were utopian.

The war now looming, unlike 1914-18, would be truly global,

with Japan an ally of Germany and Italy.

So Hoare reverted to old-style power politics.

Bypassing the League,

he and his French counterpart Pierre Laval tried to buy off Mussolini.

When the British and French deal making was exposed,

public uproar forced Hoare to resign.

The Cabinet sacrificed him to preserve its public image

as devoted supporters of the League.

Unlike Hoare,

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.

Eden 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 nattered 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-League line.

But now public support for a strongly moral foreign policy

was starting to ebb. 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 bombing.

The popular science fiction writer H G Wells imagined the war to come,

endured not in the trenches by soldiers like the last one,

but in towns and cities by women and children.

TANNOY: An air raid is approaching Everytown.

An air raid is approaching Everytown.

Gas masks are being distributed.

See that they fit tightly behind the ears.

Get to cover. Get undercover at once.

The enemy are not in any great force

and our anti-aircraft gunners will speedily dispose of them.

The cost of war seemed much higher than in 1914.

Tough sanctions against an aggressor might provoke apocalypse now.

The British peace movement, the largest in Europe in the mid-1930s

began to splinter in two.

On one hand were supporters of the League

willing to risk war to ensure peace with justice.

On the other were those who believed modern war was so terrible

that they wanted peace at any price.

This shifting public mood was the background

to the government's policy of appeasing Germany.

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 in action 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 Hoare, 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.

CHAMBERLAIN: This country is at war with Germany.

We have done all that any country could do to establish peace.

The situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted

and no people or county could feel itself safe has become intolerable.

And now that we have resolved to finish it,

I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage...

The declaration of war in 1939

dashed the hopes of the 11.6 million people

who'd signed the Peace Ballot.

Back here in Ilford, the man who'd pioneered the ballot,

Charles Boorman, resigned as editor of the Ilford Recorder

on the day that war broke out and signed up.

That Essex man was going to war again

seemed like an utterly damning comment on the meaning of 1914-18.

AIR RAID SIREN SOUNDS

EXPLOSIONS

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.

This was a war with heroes,

like the fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain

and it had a heroic leader

who wrote a clear and dramatic narrative of our finest hour in 1940

that has become inseparable from Britain's identity.

Looking back, 1914-18 seemed by contrast messy and inconclusive.

This story of 1939-45

was celebrated in dozens of post-war British movies,

pitting square-jawed goodies played by stars such as Jack Hawkins

and Richard Todd against the evil Nazis.

And evil was no mere cliche.

The Nazis had hit depths of depravity

previously unimagined in civilised Europe.

A few miles from the great shrine of German culture, Weimar,

was Buchenwald.

Inside its grounds,

this stump is all that's left of a fabled oak tree

under which the poet Goethe

wrote some of the classics of German literature.

How far had Germany fallen.

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 in the national story

and this was reflected in a change of name.

For the British, it had always been known as the Great War.

But in 1948, the British Government decided to drop the term "Great"

and use the titles First World War and Second World War.

You may think that all this was simply word games.

But re-naming the Great War 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.

JOHN F KENNEDY: Good evening, my fellow citizens.

This Government, as promised,

has maintained the closest surveillance

of the Soviet military build up on the island of Cuba.

The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide

a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

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,

caused in 1914 by similar miscalculations by leaders,

had cost ten million dead.

Another war, it seemed in the '60s,

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 three.

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.

Until the 1960s, the public had seen very little

of the reality of the Great War.

The most candid wartime footage was a silent propaganda film

of the Battle of the Somme,

shown in cinemas in August 1916.

For audiences at the time,

the most graphic image was of soldiers going over the top,

particularly the wounded man slipping back into the trench.

Yet this was almost certainly faked afterwards behind the lines.

But now, in 1964, the British rediscovered the Great War

by seeing it at home on the small screen.

A TV blockbuster, The Great War,

marking the 50th anniversary of the war's outbreak,

brought a dead conflict to life.

Millions of viewers saw for the first time what, to us now,

has become cliched footage of the brutal experience

of the Western Front.

This, along with stark testimony from some of the veterans,

made a huge impact.

We were living like wild animals and in fact we became wild animals.

The Great War series brought the obscenity of the trenches

right into people's living rooms.

This was shocking reality television,

hugely influential at the time.

But again it would be a piece of theatre about the war

that set the tone for this new era,

much as Journey's End had done 30 years earlier.

MUSIC: Oh! It's A Lovely War by Courtland and Jeffries

Oh, What A Lovely War! started life here in East London

as a production of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop.

Like the first night of Journey's End,

the audience was overwhelmed,

many were in tears.

Oh, What a Lovely War! was a 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 pack.

"The men are forbidden on pain of court martial to take cover

"in any shell hole or dugout.

"The loss of say another 300,000 men

"may lead to really great results."

The soldiers were now not real people, as in Journey's End,

they were simply victims.

# Goodbye, goodbye

# Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye... '#

The show was such a hit that it soon moved to the West End

and then achieved global impact as a feature film

directed by Richard Attenborough

with John Mills cast as a glacially insensitive Field-Marshal Haig.

God is with us. Just one more battle.

Sir, tell us what to do and by God, we'll do it!

We're going to walk through the enemy lines.

But Oh, What a Lovely War! drew on a mishmash of often partial sources,

quoted out of context to skewer the generals.

Books like The Donkeys,

Alan Clark's indictment of the Battle of Loos in 1915.

"To my generation," he wrote, "the First World War is as remote

"as the Crimean, its causes and its personnel obscure and disreputable."

I realised what hideous crimes

had been committed by us on our own people,

which is quite different from committing it on others,

on your enemy, not really bothered about that especially.

The Donkeys, Clark's catchy title,

was supposedly a quotation from the German general Max Hoffmann

describing British troops as, "Lions led by donkeys."

Clark later admitted he'd made it up.

Alan Clark was just a brash young writer on the make

but his use of the phrase lions led by donkeys has hung round

the necks of British commanders of the Great War ever since.

It's a cheap sneer tossed off across a generational divide.

Yet what's fascinating is how a fabricated tag line

and a vaudeville satire reflecting '60s attitudes to class and country

still frame our view of the Great War.

The Great War had been pulled out of the shadow of World War II

but only to be condemned as the total opposite of that second war.

And the generals who ordered the Tommies to walk into

the jaws of death were damned as criminals,

NOT the Germans firing at them.

While British memory of the Great War was shifting,

German memory was also changing,

but in an opposite direction.

After 1945,

Germans had to acknowledge the appalling crimes of the Nazis.

But most Germans still believed that the Hitler era was just

a terrible blip in the proud sweep of Prussian and German history.

They continued to think of 1914-18 as a good war,

fought in self-defence.

But in 1961, an obscure leftist professor, Fritz Fischer,

gained 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 the aims

she was pursuing since the last century.

A position of Germany in Europe and the world

on equal footing with the British Empire.

What's important to understand about Fischer is that

he was attacking head-on the 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 ingrained 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 clause,

no moral justification

and achieved nothing at all.

This conviction about the Great War's futility 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 War

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 angry satire of Siegfried Sassoon

and ultimately the bleak pity of Wilfred Owen

as the horrors of war are revealed at the Somme and Passchendaele.

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 wrestled with whether to return to front line 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 Owen's poetry,

like his decision to go back to fight on the Western Front,

reveals something more complex.

Owen's 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 a machine gun.

But his younger brother Harold,

self-appointed custodian of 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..."

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.

So tragic that it was almost farcical.

Fine body of men

you've got out there, Blackadder.

Yes, sir, shortly to become fine bodies of men.

Ah, nonsense, you'll pull through. Ha-ha!

I remember when we played the Old Harrovians back in '96.

They said we'd never break through to their back line.

But we ducked and we bobbed and we wove

and we damned well won the game 15-4.

Yes, sir, but the Harrow fullback

wasn't armed with a heavy machine gun.

-That's a good point. Make a note, Darling.

-Sir.

Recommendation for the Harrow governors...

The story became even more poignant

as we watched the last survivors passing away.

To mark Remembrance Day 2009

and the death of the last Tommy Harry Patch,

the familiar phrases and sentiments were all in evidence,

plus a poem by the new poet laureate Carol Anne Duffy,

spinning off celebrated lines from Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est.

"In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

"He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning..."

We will remember them.

We remember.

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 moulded,

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 War's full character and impact.

Of course we can't ignore the mud 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.

One of those shadows was the explosion of democracy.

In the aftermath of war,

three world leaders offered three competing visions of people power.

Again the British experience was very different

from that of our continental neighbours and, as we'll see,

these differences still matter for Britain and the world.