Under the Eagle The First World War

Fort Loncin - doomed Belgian obstacle in Germany's path.

The Fort's guardians, among the first of the war's millions of casualties.

In the opening months,

the mould for a new kind of war was cast in the West -

industrialised states locked in conflict,

over 7 million men armed with the latest technology,

11 million civilians under brutal occupation.

A rare wartime recording of Kaiser Wilhelm II addressing the German people.

Germany, with 3.8 million men,

faced a similar-sized French army to her west

but 3 million Russians were attacking in the east.

Germany's resources were split between two fronts

and she couldn't easily smash through France's forts along the border.

But Belgium's defences were weaker.

The idea of going through Belgium was General Schlieffen's,

his way of storming into France and encircling the French army.

But Schlieffen had retired in 1905.

By 1914 his successors had no illusion

that any swift victory was to be had in a two-front war.

At the start of Germany's war,

there was an air of pessimism, desperation, improvisation.

General von Moltke, the German commander,

acknowledged the uncertainties.

I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.

Germany waged war less with a master plan

than a recognition that they must take the war bit by bit.

The first bit was Belgium.

The Germans knew Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality

but reckoned Britain would come into the war

whichever route the Germans took into France.

The Belgians put their faith in reinforced concrete forts,

armed with German Krupp guns.

The Germans brought massive siege guns - Big Berthas,

named after Krupp's daughter - to smash them.

The monster advanced in two parts pulled by 36 horses.

The pavement trembled.

Crows went mute with consternation

at the appearance of this phenomenal apparatus.

Then came the frightful explosion,

The crowd was flung back, the earth shook like an earthquake

and all the windowpanes in the vicinity were shattered.

Colonel Victor Naessens was in Fort Loncin, on the receiving end.

Once the metal shutters were pulled down, the heavy metal doors shut,

the fort and its fate were sealed.

The ventilation system has failed.

The chimney of the generator is blocked.

The fort is filling with concrete dust.

The men's chests heave to get air. They are suffocating.

They don't look like humans any more,

their features distorted with agony and hate.

A German shell had hit the magazine,

bringing down the 6ft-thick concrete roof,

crushing 250 soldiers to death,

The survivors were horrifically burnt.

By the 16th August, all the forts around Liege had fallen.

But Belgium's war was only beginning.

The Germans claimed Belgian civilian snipers - franc-tireurs -

were firing from garret windows and roof tops.

In fact, most shots came from retreating units

of French and Belgian soldiers

or from nervous German troops shooting at each other.

Nevertheless, General von Moltke issued a warning to the Belgians.

Anybody who, in any form, participates without authorisation

will be considered as franc-tireur and summarily shot on the spot.

Rare German newsreel of suspected franc-tireurs being taken prisoner.

Lurid stories filtered back to raw German troops leaving for the front,

heightening their sense of paranoia.

At training sessions, we are told about the nastiness of the French,

that our wounded have their eyes gouged out, noses and ears cut off.

We are given to understand we are to act without mercy.

Pressure to maintain a speedy advance through a hostile population led to atrocities.

Not just the impetuous actions of frightened troops,

they became part of a plan to terrorise and demoralise the enemy.

We've been ordered to kill everyone

and wipe off the map part of the left bank of the Meuse.

It's a tremendously honourable task and we'll be famous for ever.

EXPLOSIONS

The Belgian town of Tamines, on 22nd August 1914.

French troops kept up a storm of fire at the advancing Germans

from across the River Sambre.

The Germans rounded up civilians, including Fernand Scohier,

for a special task.

We are forced to advance, acting as a shield for Germans who follow us,

but they fall, mown down by French bullets.

One charges at us like a man possessed,

only stopping when his bayonet has gone through Materne,

who leaves a widow and three orphans.

After the French withdrew,

the Germans were convinced that Belgian snipers were active

so they torched the town.

They held hostages, like Adolphe Seron, in the church overnight,

then escorted them down the Rue de la Station in the morning.

The soldiers, up on carts, beat us brutally.

Priests in particular were badly treated - jokes, swearing, blows.

Nearly 400 men, women and children,

among them the priest, Father Donnet,

were herded into the main square by the river bank.

A German firing squad was waiting for them.

A whistle blew and the shooting began.

There was total chaos among the crowd.

Some fell dead, others pushed blindly.

I found myself on the ground, the tide moving above me.

I was suffocating.

I was hit by two bullets in the kidneys.

I felt their holes drill into me.

Arthur Fauvelle fell on top of me, dead.

However hard I tried, I couldn't get out from under the pile of corpses.

They cut the head off Achille Leroy, the coalman.

I saw the head separated from the trunk.

The ultimate cruelty was when the soldiers checked victims one by one.

Any still alive they bayoneted violently,

then threw them in the Sambre.

Photographs of some of those who remarkably survived German bullets,

and those who fell victim.

A total of 6,500 French and Belgian civilians,

including women and children, were killed in the first month of the war.

180,000 Belgian refugees crossed the Channel to Britain.

Stories of German atrocities against plucky little Belgium

provided propaganda to rally Allied public opinion behind the war.

The image of the murderous Hun, the barbaric Boche, was born.

But what drove this nation,

whose soldiers massacred women and children, razed towns to the ground,

shot priests,

yet engraved on their belt buckles, "Gott Mit Uns" - "God is with us"?

The monument erected outside Leipzig

to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Nations

was dedicated yesterday.

In the interior of the monument is a crypt

to the honour of the heroes who fell in the fight with Napoleon.

Amid uproarious cheering,

the Emperor reached the broad flight of steps to the foot of the monument.

The whole concourse sang the beautiful chorale, Now Thank We All Our God.

In 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II celebrated his silver jubilee.

Germany had not known war for 40 years

and was enjoying spectacular economic growth.

The Kaiser depicted his country

not as an aggressor with territorial ambitions,

but as the custodian of international concord.

-KAISER WILHELM:

-Germany is guarding the peace of the earth,

at the door of the temple of peace,

not only of Europe but of the whole world.

But Germany was only as old as that peace,

welded just 40 years before out of 39 separate states.

The Leipzig memorial was a building block for German nationalism,

harking back to a time when German states had joined Britain and Russia

to defeat Bonaparte's France.

Its monumental architecture sought to embed the nation's roots in a shared past.

But the Kaiser, in 1913, realised

that the unification process was not complete, and that spelt weakness.

-KAISER WILHELM:

-Whereas England forms a political unit,

Germany resembles a mosaic

in which the individual pieces are still clearly distinguishable.

This is shown by the army still made up of contingents from German states

all wearing different uniforms.

The young German Reich needs institutions clearly German.

Beneath one flag, Germany remained extremely diverse -

Catholic South, Protestant North, rural East

and industrialised West.

Germany seemed ultraconservative

but boasted a modern welfare state, which inspired Britain's pre-1914 reforms.

I have been shown round one of the new labour exchanges

by the mayor of Strasbourg.

I saw some of Germany's poorest fellows

but they all had an insurance card entitling them

to benefit in sickness, invalidity, infirmity and old age.

There is no doubt that these labour exchanges are tremendous.

The honour of introducing them into England would be a rich reward.

Men would die for Britain in the First World War who had no vote,

perhaps half failed to meet the qualifications.

But in Germany, there was suffrage for all men over 21.

The largest party in the Reichstag, or parliament, was socialist,

yet none of this added up to democracy.

Germany's government was accountable not to her people, via the Reichstag,

but to her emperor.

The call for political reform was growing loud

but Germany entered the First World War governed by an autocrat.

His character was as burdened by paradox as his country was.

One day the Kaiser is a soldier-king,

rigid, traditional.

Suddenly, he is the reform king,

embracing the worker as a brother.

Next, the modern king,

treating the past with contempt,

regarding the factory as a temple, with electricity powering all of Germany.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria's oldest grandson,

cousin to both Britain's George V and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Wilhelm was born with a withered arm for which he compensated with sports -

sailing, riding and hunting.

He had an immature streak, dressing up and playing cruel practical jokes.

Wilhelm's right arm was incredibly powerful.

With rings turned inwards,

he squeezed the hands of dignitaries so hard they would cry out.

A king's insecurities matter little if he has no power,

but the Kaiser was Germany's commander in chief, its supreme warlord.

In no area has the Kaiser views of his own. He doesn't know what to do.

Sadly, he is putty in the hands of clever people

and makes surprising leaps of judgment everywhere.

Everything he decides is motivated by his desire to be popular!

The Kaiser was most comfortable in the company of his officers.

He was obsessed with uniforms and militarism.

His army's ethos was rigidly professional,

though even in peacetime half were conscripts.

Highly disciplined, they were guardians of the German state.

The French were old enemies.

The last time they'd fought, in 1870,

the French had used civilian snipers, franc-tireurs, against them.

The German Chief of Staff's own uncle led that campaign

and passed on a crucial lesson to the German soldiers of 1914.

International rules do not work when soldiers are in fear for their lives

worried that a civilian may pick up a rifle and shoot them.

It must also be remembered

that the greatest deed in war is the speedy ending of the war

and every means to that end must remain open.

German troops going into Belgium and France used terror from the start.

Civilians, caught between the weight of historic fears and current military necessities,

were not going to get the benefit of any doubt.

Belgian and French forces bore the brunt of the German onslaught.

They were soon joined by British troops.

100,000 British Expeditionary Force men crossed the Channel

in the early weeks of the war.

On 21st August, British troops moved into position, with the French army,

near the Belgian town of Mons close to the French border.

Two days later, the British, with 70,000 men,

were hit by a German force four times the size.

I focused the telescope and saw a number of little grey figures.

More and more were appearing.

Women started to wail and rushed for home,

followed by the men,

while children, torn by curiosity, lagged behind, turning to see.

In a few seconds, all the civilians were fleeing along the roads.

The Allies started an epic retreat south,

just ahead of the German tidal wave.

The war on the western front did not begin in the trenches.

The early months were mobile, fast, dangerous.

In the first four weeks, the German army lost over a quarter of a million men,

killed, wounded and missing.

The front was constantly shifting, giving men no time to dig in.

There was nowhere to hide

in fields swept by machine guns and rapid-firing artillery.

British soldier Edward Dwyer won the Victoria Cross on hill 60 in Belgium.

He was just 19.

He recalled the retreat from Mons on a sound recording made in 1915.

He was killed a year later.

I was already in the army when the war broke out

and went to France on August 13th, 1914.

You people over here don't realise what our boys went through then.

The march from Mons was a nightmare.

Unless you were there, you can't imagine how agonizing it was.

We did from 20 to 25 miles a day.

Only one thing could cheer us up on the march - singing.

-TUNE OF AULD LANG SYNE:

-# We're here because we're here because

# We're here because we're here

# We're here because we're here because

# We're here because we're here. #

France has just been the object of a violent and premeditated attack.

She will be heroically defended by all her sons.

Nothing will break their sacred union.

Once again, she stands before the universe for liberty, justice and reason.

Vive la France!

At the war's start, Poincare had appealed to France for national unity

By 2nd September 1914, the Germans were just 30 miles from Paris

and the "sacred union" was starting to crack.

Trenches were dug, sandbags filled,

barricades erected.

The Government left the capital for Bordeaux, triggering a general exodus

A million Parisians - a third of its inhabitants - fled the city.

The fate of Paris and France would be decided on the River Marne.

Fought along a 300-mile front, it was a battle France had to win.

But although the Germans had their enemy's capital almost in sight,

their advance was outstripping supply lines.

There were few lorries in 1914, horses pulled the guns and wagons.

General von Moltke, the German commander, grew alarmed.

We have hardly any horses left in the army which can take another step.

We don't want to fool ourselves.

We have had successes but we are not victorious yet.

Victory means annihilation of the enemy's resistance.

But where are the French prisoners and guns we should have captured?

The French have retreated in a disciplined way according to a plan.

The most difficult time lies ahead of us!

The German right wing was sweeping down towards Paris.

The French had detached troops from the east,

moving them by rail to Paris to attack the Germans in their flank.

The Allies now outnumbered Germans and chose their moment to strike.

As the Germans neared Paris,

a dangerous gap opened up between their 1st and 2nd Armies.

The British Expeditionary Force would be driven in like a wedge.

To the French, it is their own home, but it makes them mad.

We somehow fight on with no increased animosity,

but the French really are giving everything.

It makes one wonder if people in England realise what the advance

of an invading army over a country means.

On the eve of battle,

the French Commander in Chief, Marshal Joffre, addressed his officers...

When a battle begins upon which our salvation depends, we cannot look back.

We must make every effort to repel the enemy.

Troops who can no longer advance must hold the captured ground

and die rather than retreat.

The Marne would consign the battle, fought on a single field in a day, to history.

It was on the cusp between old warfare and new.

Around Paris, armies wheeled and manoeuvred as they had for centuries.

But to the east, the French dug trenches to defend their positions.

Here the battle lines would become static.

The Battle of the Marne began on 5th September 1914.

The fighting has begun.

French shells explode incessantly in front of us.

We seek shelter in a sunken lane.

Stomachs loudly remind us of our hunger.

Constant shelling makes it impossible to reach up for apples.

Some block theirs ears

so as not to lose their nerve with the incessant machine-gun fire.

Our ranks decimated, we cannot hold this position much longer.

Pieces of shrapnel whistle past me.

I felt I had been hit.

My knee was giving way as I walked.

I wasn't sure what had happened.

I stopped and pushed my finger through a hole in my trousers.

My finger kept on going into my leg.

We turned towards gunfire rattling out on our right, beyond Barcy,

where the shrapnel still rains down.

The houses are burning.

I hear from both sides. It's our own guns shooting at us!

I stick very close to the ground, face against the earth.

For all its modernity,

there were elements of the battle Napoleon would have recognised.

Cavalry, armed with lances, played an active role.

No-one wore tin helmets.

And, as these original colour photographs of the Marne show,

some soldiers' uniforms owed more to the parade ground

than the needs of camouflage.

There were easy targets in the early months.

My rifle went to my shoulder.

Two Frenchmen fell.

I fired again. Nothing.

My magazine was empty.

I reached for my bayonet. I expected to be killed by a bullet any second.

Then the rest of my men burst through the undergrowth

and the enemy vanished.

The Germans were in a shade of field grey.

The British were even more difficult to spot,

as another German enviously noted.

The colour of English clothing is more suited to the terrain than ours

It's a sort of browny-green, a really dirty colour.

This is an advantage, although we shall still win.

With men dug in along so vast a front,

aerial observation became vital.

Balloons and planes gathered crucial information.

They also began to take on a more active role.

A French plane suddenly appears.

It turns and drops something.

The air fills with a whistling, followed by a violent explosion.

It's dropped a bomb!

Seven horses killed, three men lost.

For us, this is something new.

None of us knows how to defend ourselves

from this monster of the skies.

German reconnaissance planes monitored the worsening situation

at the Marne.

Pilots' reports went to Count von Bulow's 2nd Army HQ, at Montmort.

Handwritten reports, like this one, revealed the Allies' steady advance

into the lethal gap between his men and the 1st Army.

On 8th September 1914, von Bulow ordered his forces to retreat.

We continued to fall back, passing through French villages.

In the faces of every inhabitant, we saw scorn and derision.

Women leaned out of their windows and thumbed their noses and sneered.

To them, we were the defeated army.

The French referred to the battle as "the miracle on the Marne".

France had been saved but at a cost of a quarter of million casualties,

the same losses as the Germans.

No future battle on the western front would average

so many casualties per day.

Louis de la Grandiere, a French ambulance driver,

was based at St Sophie farm, in the thick of the battle.

We are surrounded by dead bodies, thousands piled one on another.

We are used to the shelling. We don't even look up.

The whole area has been devastated,

the local people gone.

33 German generals were quietly sacked.

Moltke was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, after a tactful pause.

The German people were never told the truth about the Marne.

The myth at the war's end would be

that the German army was undefeated in the field.

But, in a sense, they lost the First World War here,

never having again the chance they had at the Marne

to win a resounding victory against the Allies.

Germany was now committed to a long war,

and she didn't have the resources for it.

In November 1914, Falkenhayn ordered his troops

to fall back to high ground and dig in.

Unable to break through, the Allies had few options but to dig in as well

The pattern for the western front was now set,

with its line of trenches stretching from the Channel to Switzerland.

500 miles of mud and horror

that would be home to the living and the dead for over three years.

27-year-old Bernard Montgomery, the future victor of Alamein,

wrote home to his mother.

The situation is strange here.

I eat peppermints with a dead man beside me in the trench.

German trenches are only 700 yards away.

The weather is vile, wet, and it's starting to get cold.

My clothes are soaked and muddy but it is too cold to take them off.

Any warm things you send will be appreciated.

Beyond no-man's-land, beyond the German lines,

11 million French and Belgian men, women and children were learning

to adapt to their changed lives as civilians under German occupation.

PIANO PLAYS

-BOY:

-Tuesday, cruel Tuesday.

The German troops ride past my window.

I hear a guttural order - aarrarrnchar!

Soon the town is filled with Boche,

the beasts, the swines.

They confiscate all weapons

and demand a quarter of a million francs in gold.

The extraordinary diary of a ten-year-old French schoolboy

titled Journal Of The Franco-Boche war.

Yves Congar lived with his family

here, in Sedan, eastern France.

Yves' mother encouraged him to write a diary during the summer holidays.

It became a unique record of the Occupation.

What Yves had seen when the Germans marched into Sedan

was forced requisitioning.

At the outset,

Germany adopted a policy of state intervention for war production.

In peacetime, Germany imported raw materials

but she knew that the Allies would impose a blockade.

So German industrialist Walter Rathenau drew up plans

to ensure the most effective use of what materials Germany had.

But after a few weeks of war,

Germany had most of France and Belgium's industrial and mineral resources

at its disposal.

These were now taken back to Germany -

millions of tons of raw materials, plant and foodstuffs.

But the asset-stripping wasn't limited to government.

The German army was ordered to live off the occupied territories.

What the soldiers wanted, they took.

Moved on towards Fromelles.

The inhabitants were pensioners.

Our boys found a stash of wine and eggs... We helped ourselves.

In the meantime, the church was shot to bits.

Not a single house was spared.

They have taken, rather stolen, from us -

straw, copper, oats and the belongings of over 8 million people.

They have looted cellars, empty houses,

the walnut trees, the telegraph poles and the livestock.

One doctor in Lille pleaded with the German authorities.

My patient, Mme Lefebre, is 86 years old.

She is in a state of great weakness and serious malnutrition

which makes it absolutely necessary for her to keep her mattress.

It wasn't just material loss.

The Germans rounded up thousands of teenage boys and girls

for forced labour.

-WOMAN:

-The last three weeks we have spent

in terrible anguish and moral torture possible for a mother.

At 3am, these German heroes go out with a military band,

machine guns and bayonets fixed,

to hunt down women and children to take them away.

God knows where or why.

Yves's brother got a job at the railway station.

Robert is unloading wagons of animal carcasses,

already green, covered with rotten pieces of flesh crawling with vermin

He has to touch these stinking dead animals with his bare hands.

Occupied France was run like a military state

as this film of the German military police in Lille shows.

Clocks were set to German time, new identity papers issued.

The Germans generally made us parade at 5am.

One night, however, the whole commune was called out at 1am.

An old man of 92 asked to be allowed to stay in bed

but the troops made fun of him, pushed him out of the house

and said that "fresh air was good for the dying".

Ordinary people had stark choices to make

about how to deal with the occupation.

There was some resistance against the Germans, mostly passive.

Belgian opposition was spurred on

by the head of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Mercier.

His letter, Patriotism and Endurance, was read out

in every church in February 1915.

God will save Belgium, my brethren, you cannot doubt it.

Nay, rather, He is saving her.

Across the smoke of conflagration, across the stream of blood,

have you not glimpses of His love for us?

There is no perfect Christian who is not also a perfect patriot.

Whence, in truth, comes this irresistible impulse,

which carries the will of the whole nation

in a single effort of resistance in the face of the hostile menace?

Mercier kept up his resistance,

calling the Germans "an army of evil" and "Lucifer's own".

This embarrassed not just the Germans but the Vatican.

Like Pope Pius XII during the Second World War,

Pope Benedict XV refused to condemn German atrocities.

The Germans placed Mercier under house arrest in a bid to silence him

but it only increased his popularity.

The Germans also unwittingly created another martyr.

Edith Cavell was the British matron of a hospital in Brussels.

After Belgium was overrun,

she helped Allied soldiers escape into neutral Holland.

In August 1915, she was caught, tried and condemned to death.

The night before her execution by firing squad,

she told the prison chaplain...

I have no fear or shrinking.

I have seen death so often that it is not fearful or strange to me.

This I would say, standing as I do, in view of God and eternity -

patriotism is not enough.

I must have no hatred or bitterness against anyone.

The British exploited to the hilt

stories of German atrocities against women,

especially the shooting of Edith Cavell.

Films like this one were made to show in neutral countries,

particularly America.

I closed her eyes and placed her body in the coffin.

She was the bravest woman I ever met,

going to her death with poise and bearing.

She had, however, acted as a man towards the Germans,

and deserved to be punished as a man.

The Germans rounded up underground leaders,

then posted notices of their execution.

They used another method to ensure civil obedience. They took hostages,

including Yves Congar's father.

The hour is near.

The last meal together, the goodbyes, the hugs.

I want to cry.

Father walks to the station with us boys.

I bite my lip and feel my eyes tightening.

Father says, "I love you. Farewell. Remember me",

then he kissed us.

Every night I'll say a prayer for my father and the other hostages.

Civilian men, women and children were packed into cattle trucks,

sent to concentration camps as hostages and forced labourers.

Several thousand French and 58,000 Belgians.

The rounding up of civilians by the enemy has been tragic.

The weaker, because they were the most harmless, were detained

without understanding the reason for their arrest

without time to collect belongings, considered as criminals,

taken to camps to assure security in occupied areas.

These civilians became simple pawns in the hands of their captors.

A doctor's daughter from Lille

learned what her father was suffering.

Papa was locked up for five days for refusing to assist an operation

carried out by a Bosch.

All food packages are opened and classified.

The prisoners come each day to collect their provisions,

but there is only one container.

Milk, fish, fruit, all tipped into one bucket,

because the Germans use the tins to make grenades.

Far from being broken by the German occupation,

Yves Congar, a prisoner in the Second World War, was politicised by it.

There's hardly any bread.

The swines will leave us to die of hunger.

Too bad. After all, we are French and if we have to die,

we shall die, but France will be victorious.