Global War The First World War

From the start of the First World War,

Germany seized on Britain's greatest weakness - a vast empire,

hard to defend, fatal to lose.

The gamble was that Britain might risk everything to protect it,

even victory on the Western Front.

War for Europe meant war for the world.

It was Germany's idea to take the war beyond Europe,

but it wasn't a bid for expansion, let alone world domination.

The aim was to take the pressure off her armies in Europe

by attacking the British Empire,

hoping to divert Britain's troops, ships and resources

to defend distant colonies.

Britain also had no thought of a bigger Empire.

She just didn't want to lose the one she had.

So while Germany wanted to open the war up around the globe,

Britain was desperate to close it down.

Maurice Hankey, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence,

realised the Empire was Britain's Achilles heel,

and warned against Germany using it

to distract Britain from her war effort.

Forces must not be diverted to minor operations

to the prejudice of the concentration in the main theatre

and the safety of the trade routes.

15 years before,

Germany had proclaimed herself an empire-builder.

The Kaiser had taken his country into the 20th century

as a German admiral creating a global German navy.

Weltpolitik was the big idea.

a policy of overseas imperialism,

the brainchild of his Foreign Secretary Bernhard von Bulow.

VON BULOW: The days when the Germans left the earth to one neighbour,

the sea to another and kept only the heavens for themselves, are over.

We don't want to put anyone in the shade.

But we, too, demand our place in the sun.

Germany had come late to the game of Empires,

but by 1900 she had Togoland, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa,

now Namibia, and German East Africa, now Tanzania.

Her flag flew over patches in the Pacific - New Guinea,

Samoa and Micronesia.

She had a toe-hold in China at Tsingtao,

where she re-coaled her ships and brewed beer.

Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz saw this as just the start.

We are now standing only at the beginning of a new division

of the globe.

Germany alarmed the world with her imperial tub-thumping.

She eyed up Puerto Rico, and considered pouncing on

the Panama Canal the minute it was completed.

But the boldest of all the Kaiser's schemes was Operational Plan III.

The East Coast is the heart of the US

and this is where she is most vulnerable.

New York will panic at the prospect of bombardment.

By hitting her here we can force America to negotiate.

Germany's secret plans from 1903 - to attack the Eastern seaboard

with 60 ships and 100,000 men,

to shell Manhattan and capture Boston.

The outlandish scheme was driven by the Kaiser's resentment

of America's growing power in the Pacific.

He believed in a militarist state

and increasingly hated what the West stood for.

Service to Mammon, greed, self-indulgence, land-grabbing,

lying, treachery and not least murder.

The Kaiser thought capitalism was vulnerable,

that a strong enough attack on its international systems of trade,

credit and insurance could bring the edifice tumbling down.

Operational Plan III was dropped,

but not the hostility towards capitalist empires.

By 1912, Germany had traded in Weltpolitik

for a more realistic policy.

Now her military machine prepared for a European, not a global war,

and the army got the budget increase, not the navy.

The first day of war found Germany's High Seas Fleet trapped

by the mighty British Navy in the North Sea.

And all the German Navy had to threaten the entire British Empire

was a scattered force of 17 cruisers

linked by a wireless network to Berlin.

There was the Koenigsberg off East Africa,

the Goeben and the Breslau in the Mediterranean,

the Dresden and Karlsruhe in the West Indies,

the Leipzig off the west coast of America,

but the greatest concentration of cruisers

was Admiral Graf von Spee's powerful East Asiatic Squadron,

based at Tsingtao in China.

Tsingtao gave Germany a huge area of operations,

across the South China Sea, and into the Pacific.

Seizing it would cut the Squadron's lifeline.

Britain saw the urgency, but lacked the resources.

So, two days into the war, she turned to her ally Japan.

Japan was a growing power,

Britain's call for naval help suited her ambitions perfectly.

Together, Britain and Japan would capture Tsingtao,

vital German base, and the Kaiser's pride and joy.

It would shame me more to surrender Tsingtao to the Japanese

than Berlin to the Russians.

On 2nd September 1914, 60,000 Japanese troops landed up the coast,

violating China's neutrality.

They met up with 2,000 British,

and closed in on the German garrison of 4,500.

It's unbearable.

All we can do is sit and wait for this bunch of monkeys to arrive.

Every day, they get a bit closer.

No-one expects to get home in one piece. No hope of reinforcements.

The noose around our necks is getting tighter and tighter.

For a solid week, the Japanese battered Tsingtao.

On 7th November, they entered the town in triumph.

Some Germans sneered at the token British force,

for getting the Japanese to do their dirty work.

The brave British!

They played no part in the capture of Tsingtao

but they joined in the victory parade.

As they went by, we Germans were ordered to turn our backs on them.

The English complained to the Japanese commander

but he said, "We can't repeat the procession just because of that."

The capture of Tsingtao gave Japan a launch pad

to pursue her empire building.

Within weeks she demanded territory and trading rights from China.

Japan also seized all German possessions north of the Equator.

Australia and New Zealand were quick to steal those to the south.

Much to America's frustration,

Britain had empowered Japan in the Pacific.

Key stage in a process

that would lead, a quarter of a century later, to Pearl Harbor.

Germany's loss of Tsingtao, far from neutralising Spee's squadron,

ensured its destructive power would be felt around the globe.

The best German cruiser commanders, like Spee, were fearless mavericks

whom the war turned into heroes.

Superb sailors, with the instincts of pirates.

The Kaiser had given them full authority

to make their own decisions in wartime.

The heavy responsibility of the officer in command will be increased

by the isolated position of his ship.

But he must never show one moment of weakness.

Above all, the officer must bear in mind that his chief duty

is to damage the enemy as severely as possible.

Spee now split his squadron.

The light cruiser Emden, under Captain Karl von Mueller,

made for the Bay of Bengal.

Spee, in the Scharnhorst, led his other ships across the Pacific.

I'm quite homeless, I cannot reach Germany.

I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can.

At the Admiralty in London,

Winston Churchill fretted about where Spee would show up next.

The vastness of the Pacific and its multitude of islands

offered him their shelter

And once he had vanished, who should say where he would reappear?

He was a cut flower in a vase,

fair to see, yet bound to die.

But, so long as he lived, all our enterprises lay under the shadow

of a serious potential danger.

Spee had a constant worry.

Cruisers needed coal every eight or nine days

or they'd be dead in the water.

He made for neutral Chile where he had coal waiting for him.

On 1st November 1914, he ran into a British fleet off Coronel.

The battle which followed inspired a post-war feature film.

The British commander was Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock,

under orders from London.

It appears that Gneisenau and Scharnhorst are working across

to South America. Be prepared to meet them in company.

Cradock had one ship that could outgun Spee's fleet,

but she was slow and had been left behind.

Now Cradock raced towards enemy ships better armed than his.

He had ignored his own rule of thumb.

CRADOCK: A naval officer should never let his boat

go faster than his brain.

-SPEE:

-I immediately ordered Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

to go full steam ahead, and within 15 minutes

I was racing against heavy seas at 20 knots

and came to lie parallel with him.

Cradock's ships were no match for Spee's.

Good Hope and Monmouth were obviously in distress.

Monmouth yawed off to starboard, burning furiously.

There was a terrible explosion on Good Hope

between her main mast and after funnel.

The gust of flames reached a height of over 200 feet,

lighting up a cloud of debris that was flung still higher in the air.

1,600 British sailors were lost.

It was Britain's worst naval defeat for 250 years.

The global war was going Germany's way.

It is only when you get to see and realise what India is,

that she is the strength and the greatness of England,

it is only then that you feel that every nerve a man may strain,

every energy he may put forward,

cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose

than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves.

Britain's Empire and trading network

was the single biggest resource she brought to the war.

And India was at the heart of it.

The cords were never tighter.

All the more reason for Germany to want them cut.

These slender lines on the map were now the focus of intense study

in the British and German admiralties

and chartrooms of warships.

Fingers traced shipping lanes - through the Suez Canal,

around South Africa's Cape.

Minds pondered how to protect them, how to sever them.

One of the sharpest minds was on the bridge of the German cruiser Emden.

A month after she left Admiral Spee's squadron,

Captain Karl von Mueller steered her into the Bay of Bengal.

In 1932, the Germans made a feature film about his odyssey.

He had an indescribable power over the entire crew.

He never gave orders, he just expressed a wish.

From the moment he took command of the ship, he never left the bridge.

This is where he stood, slept, sat, studied the maps.

This is where he wanted to be - stand or fall.

The Emden sometimes rigged a dummy funnel

to look like a British cruiser.

A large steamer appeared dead ahead

and, thinking we were an English man-of-war,

was so overjoyed at our presence, that she hoisted a huge British flag.

I'd like to have seen her captain's face when we hoisted our flag

and invited him most graciously to tarry with us awhile.

Captain Mueller became famous for taking crew and passengers

safely onto the Emden, before sinking their ship.

BELL RINGS

We always allowed them time to collect and take with them

their personal possessions.

They usually devoted most of this time to making certain

that their precious supply of whisky was not wasted on the fishes.

Mueller regularly released his grateful captives.

Such was the Emden's impact, that the British Admiralty later drew up

this chart to track her movements.

Mueller even had the audacity

to steam into the Indian port of Madras,

as a crew member recorded in his diary.

22nd September 1914.

9.30pm.

The Emden sneaks closer, then fires 125 shots.

Some hit boats in the harbour.

Huge columns of fire rise above the oil tanks.

The coastal defences open fire, but they all fall short.

23rd September.

We are now 100 miles away.

We can still see the fires at Madras.

In the City of London, freight rates and shipping insurance rocketed.

At one point, the whole British trade fleet in the Bay of Bengal

was kept in harbour,

rather than fall prey to dashing Captain Mueller.

Germany's rogue cruisers

were starting to harm Britain's war effort

Three transports are delayed in Calcutta through fear of Emden.

This involves delaying transport of artillery and cavalry.

The Cabinet took a strong view.

The extirpation of these pests is a most important subject.

While the Emden ran the British ragged

at one end of the Indian Ocean,

25 Royal Navy warships hunted the cruiser Koenigsberg

at the other, off the coast of Germany's East African colony.

She had raided Zanzibar and sunk a British light cruiser

from her secret hideout in the Rufiji delta.

The frustrated British decided to strangle all her possible bases,

starting with the port of Tanga.

On 2nd November 1914, the British steamed into this bay.

In the global war, Imperial Powers got others to do their fighting.

Most of the British troops were Indian.

Their arrival was closely watched by Thomas Plantan,

a 16-year-old African fighting for the Germans.

The approaching British ships had all their lights blazing

and seemed to be making no attempt to conceal their presence.

We were in position with machine guns, waiting in ambush for them,

and many of them were killed when they started to come ashore.

A lot of them were killed before they even got out of the water.

Thomas Plantan was one of 2,500 men under German commander

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

The British thought taking Tanga would be a pushover,

but they reckoned without Lettow.

He was a professional Prussian soldier, hard as nails, charismatic.

He was a remarkable soldier, but stubborn and single-minded

to a degree I have fortunately never experienced before.

His most remarkable quality was the reckless energy

with which he pursued goals.

This was often covered up by his persuasive charm,

which he could switch on if he wanted to.

On the ship to Africa, von Lettow had met Karen Blixen,

who later wrote Out of Africa.

He clearly turned on the charm for her.

A German officer, who belongs to a very old Mecklenburger family,

has been such a friend to me.

You should hear how they talk about him out here.

As the greatest genius of the age.

Despite losing men during the landing,

the British now threatened Tanga.

Governor Schnee ordered Lettow to evacuate the town

rather than see it destroyed,

but Lettow had come to Africa to fight.

LETTOW: It was crucial to prevent the enemy from gaining a foothold

in Tanga, thus giving him a base from which to advance north.

I couldn't let the Governor's order to spare Tanga

take precedence over this priority.

Lettow recced the British positions himself on his bicycle.

He also called in reinforcements.

Three companies of German troops came by rail to Tanga.

Here, on 4th November 1914,

they met the British Indian soldiers, raw and poorly trained.

British intelligence officer Richard Meinertzhagen

watched the ensuing rout.

Half the 13th Rajputs turned at once, broke into a rabble and bolted.

I could not believe my eyes.

They were all jabbering like terrified monkeys

and were clearly not for it at any price.

Everyone in the dense forest, friend and foe, was mixed up together,

shouting in all sorts of languages.

The enemy ran off in wild disorder

and our machine guns mowed down whole companies to the last man.

von Lettow was based here at the German hospital.

After two days of heavy fighting,

the British sent Richard Meinertzhagen

to the German HQ to negotiate a surrender.

The Germans were kindness itself

and gave me an excellent breakfast, which I sorely needed.

We discussed the fight freely as though it had been a football match.

It seemed odd that I should be having a meal today

with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday.

It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war

or whether we'd all made a ghastly mistake.

The German officers were all hard-looking, keen and fit.

They treated this war as some new form of sport.

The British failed to take Tanga and suffered 700 casualties.

Lettow lost just 65.

Germany hailed him as a hero.

A German David is fighting alone

against the British Goliath in Africa.

If we cannot fight by his side,

at least we must make sure that he is well supplied

with shot for his sling.

But the British blockade of Germany

prevented reinforcements reaching Lettow.

Further east, across the Indian Ocean,

Mueller was still causing havoc.

He'd sunk two warships and captured 23 merchant ships.

On 9th November 1914, the Emden anchored at the Cocos Islands

to destroy the British wireless station.

But the radio operator spotted the Emden's bogus fourth funnel

and put out a call for help.

The Australian cruiser Sydney picked up the message

and ended the Emden's maverick career.

Captain Mueller was taken prisoner.

He and the other survivors were well looked after.

Dear loved ones, I'm well and healthy.

The British were very friendly.

They took loads of photos of us

and asked for our addresses to send us the snaps.

Yours, Walter.

Now Admiral Graf von Spee's luck also ran out.

Britain took the risk of detaching two of her latest battle cruisers

from the crucial North Sea blockade of Germany to deal with him.

On 8th December 1914,

German Commander Hans Pochhammer sighted their huge masts

as they re-coaled in Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands.

He realised the Germans were out-gunned and out-paced.

We choked a little at the neck, our throats contracted and stiffened,

for that meant a life and death grapple,

or rather a fight ending in honourable death.

The German fleet tried to get away,

but the British battle-cruisers were too fast.

At 1.25pm Spee turned to face them.

But the British were careful to stay out of range of his guns,

firing their own from 16,000 yards.

Lieutenant Harry Bennett on HMS Canopus watched what happened

and painted these watercolours.

At 4.17pm, the Scharnhorst went down with Admiral von Spee and all hands.

At 6.02pm, the Gneisenau sank with most of its crew,

including Spee's younger son Heinrich.

His other son Otto was on the doomed Nurnberg.

The sight was one of fearful awe.

She turned over and sank with a graceful gliding motion,

as would a tumbler pressed over in a bowl of water.

Those who went down were game to the end,

for we saw a party of her men standing on the quarterdeck

waving the German ensign as she sank,

and so they went down into their watery grave.

The Battle of the Falklands

heralded the end of Germany's cruiser campaign.

Her global war would increasingly have to be fought on land.

Again, her commanders would stretch slim resources

to lead the British Empire a dance.

The Suez Canal presented a rare opportunity

for Germany to harass the British Empire,

a crucial British sea-lane vulnerable to attack by land forces.

But Germany couldn't spare any men from the Western Front,

so Berlin turned to Ottoman Turkey, her ally since November 1914.

The Turkish 4th Army was stationed in Palestine,

just 150 miles from the Suez Canal.

The Turks agreed to help capture Suez, assigning these 19,000 troops.

They saw it as the first stage in their re-conquest

of Egypt and Libya.

We marched at night and only by moonlight.

My heart was filled with a deep melancholy,

mingled with great hope of success,

at the sound of the song, The Red Flag Flies Over Cairo

to the accompaniment of which the advancing battalions forged ahead

over the endless waste of desert,

feebly illuminated by the pale gleam of the waxing moon.

The Turks had to transport howitzers, floating pontoons,

food and water across the Sinai Desert,

and didn't lose a single man.

In the early hours of 3rd February 1915 they reached the Suez Canal.

The German colonel who had planned the operation

now watched it go horribly wrong.

A sentry noticed our attack and fired.

The shots created panic.

The English then blasted the banks with machine-gun fire.

The Turks found the Canal defended by nine British warships

and 30,000 Indian troops, dug in to defensive positions.

The Ottoman troops suffered 1,200 casualties.

The survivors retreated across the desert.

The attack had failed,

but Africa was now a battleground in Germany's global war.

She had three bases of operations - the Cameroons, German East Africa,

where Lettow was still at large,

and German Southwest Africa, with its ports and wireless stations.

Luckily for Britain, she had a colony right next door.

Unluckily, it was the one whose loyalty she could least rely on.

The Union of South Africa was racially diverse -

blacks, Boers and British settlers.

Just 15 years before,

Britain had fought a long, bloody war against the Boers.

Many still had little love for Britain.

Their loyalty could not be counted on.

As one commander told South Africa's Prime Minister, Louis Botha...

My men are ready, whom do we fight - the English or the Germans?

But South Africa was ideally situated

to launch an attack on German Southwest Africa.

British Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt took the gamble.

If your ministers desire

and feel themselves able to seize such part of German Southwest Africa

as will give them the command of the wireless stations there,

we should feel this was a great and urgent Imperial service.

South Africa's government readily agreed

because it had mini-imperial ambitions of its own.

It wanted to seize German Southwest for itself.

On 14th September 1914,

South African forces crossed the Orange river into German Southwest.

But the Germans were one jump ahead, as the South Africans found out

when they paused at the watering hole of Sandfontein.

MACHINE GUN FIRE

SHELLS EXPLODE

The South Africans were beaten, but there was worse to come.

Part of South Africa now rose up in armed rebellion.

Commanding the forces in the Northern Cape was Manie Maritz.

Fearless and uncompromising,

Maritz had fought a vicious guerrilla campaign

against Britain in the Boer War.

His sympathies lay entirely with Germany.

MARITZ: I received a telegram ordering me to take a large commando

into German Southwest Africa.

I was determined not to fight on behalf of the British Empire,

and my officers and troops were in full accord with me.

In October 1914, Manie Maritz crossed the Orange River

into German territory at Schuit Drift to enlist German support.

Two days later, Maritz addressed his troops under this tree.

Now, men, we don't want to be ruled by the Jews

and the financiers of England.

General Beyers, General de Wet and myself have decided

to form an independent South African Republic,

and have entered into an agreement

with the Governor of German Southwest Africa.

They will provide us with arms and ammunition, guns.

On this step depends the freedom of the masses of the country.

Britain's request for help had brought her dominion

to the brink of civil war.

In London, the Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt feared

the break-up of the Union of South Africa.

He secretly ordered 30,000 Australian soldiers

diverted to the Cape to smother the rebellion.

Safety of the Union is first and paramount consideration.

We attach no importance to German Southwest Africa in comparison.

The Australians weren't needed.

In the winter of 1914, loyal South Africans defeated the Boer rebels.

This is rare film of 50 of them being led to trial in Cape Town.

But they never caught Manie Maritz.

By July 1915, South Africa cornered the Germans,

forced their surrender, and annexed their colony.

And Britain had more work for South Africa,

north this time, to deal once and for all with von Lettow.

London turned to South Africa's Defence Minister

to lead the campaign - Jannie Smuts.

Smuts, too, had fought in the Boer War,

but was now passionately pro-British.

More a statesman than a soldier,

Smuts made an indifferent general of conventional forces.

And he was up against Lettow.

British officer Richard Meinertzhagen

was now Smuts's intelligence officer.

Smuts is quite determined to avoid a stand-up fight.

He told me he could not go back to South Africa with the nickname

"Butcher Smuts".

If von Lettow is clever and Smuts not clever enough,

there's going to be trouble.

Lettow was clever.

Here, at his headquarters at Moshi railway station,

he thought through the idea of depriving Britain of manpower

in Europe, by opening up the war in Africa.

The question was, could we, with our small forces, prevent

considerable numbers of the enemy from intervening in Europe,

or inflict substantial damage on their armaments and troops?

I strongly believed that we could.

By August 1916, Lettow had become expert at his cat-and-mouse game.

Von Lettow is slippery and is not going to be caught by a manoeuvre.

He knows the country better than we do.

I think we're in for an expensive hide-and-seek,

and von Lettow will still be cuckooing

somewhere in tropical Africa when the cease-fire goes.

Smuts has cost Britain many hundreds of lives and many millions of pounds.

Lettow ran his force of up to 15,000 soldiers, mostly black,

on scrounging and improvisation.

No supplies from Germany reached him after March 1916,

but he made a little go a long way,

as Ludwig Deppe, one of his medical officers, noted.

When there was no ammunition,

Lettow would try to produce his own cartridges.

If the men asked the commander for weapons or clothes

they were told, "Take it from the enemy".

Lettow made war at cost price.

He would have been justified

in displaying this war at a country fair with a for-sale sign,

"Cheapest War in the World."

Jannie Smuts had five times Lettow's force, and resources to match.

But the further he went into German East Africa,

the more stretched his supply lines.

And he reckoned without the killer tsetse fly.

The life expectancy for his 50,000 horses was just four weeks.

Torrential rain, mud, dust and boiling heat

further slowed his progress.

Intelligence was sketchy, maps inadequate.

Telephone cable often had to be raised to eight metres

to avoid damage by giraffes.

This is like warfare of bygone days.

We come along where no road had ever been,

where probably white man had never trod before.

The river is in flood and we can't get across.

On the other side the German patrols are watching us,

but the crocodile hold the peace between us very successfully.

Lettow played with Smuts, refusing to fight, slipping away,

luring him deeper into Africa.

As they went, they spread the war's grief and destruction,

dragging in more and more of the people of Africa.

This war was being carried on the backs of black Africans.

For the Lettow campaign alone,

the British recruited over a million black porters.

One in five died, from malnutrition and disease,

Death rates comparable with those on the Western Front.

They endured their ordeal quietly.

They only had duties and hardly any rights.

They tumbled into the splashing mud with their heavy loads

and were then ruthlessly forced to move on and catch up.

Oh the Lindi Road was dusty

And the Lindi Road was long

But the chap what did the hardest graft

Who could not do but wrong

Was the Kavirondo Porter

with 'is Kavirondo song

It was, "Come here, Porter!"

It was, "Omera, hya! Git!"

And Omera didn't grumble

He simply did his bit.

What Smuts saves on the battlefield he loses in hospital

for it is Africa and the climate we're really fighting,

not the Germans.

Out of 20,000 South Africans,

over half were invalided home by the beginning of 1917.

They were replaced by black troops from Nigeria and Ghana.

Recruitment of blacks soared in East Africa as well.

Over the course of the war,

the King's African Rifles rose from 3,000 men to 35,000.

Fololiyani Longwe spoke for many black soldiers.

Think of yourself buried in a hole

with only your head and hands outside,

holding a gun, death smelling all over the place.

Listen to the sound of exploding bombs and machine guns,

smoke all over and the vegetation burnt and, of course, deforested.

Watch your relatives getting killed, crying, finally dead.

These things we did, experienced and saw.

Lettow survived undefeated to the very end,

marching triumphantly through Berlin in 1919.

The British never caught him,

even though they turned it into an African war,

and set an army on his tail.

But Britain and France had such reserves of manpower

in their colonies, that from 1914 they shipped them to Europe.

Remarkable French colour photographs

of the world that came to serve on the Western Front.

French General Charles Mangin had calculated

that France could raise up to 300,000 from her empire for Europe.

No-one believed him.

But in fact they mobilised double that number.

Black troops have precisely those qualities which are demanded

in the long struggles of modern war - endurance, tenacity,

the instinct for combat, the absence of nervousness

and an incomparable power of shock.

Not only do they enjoy danger, a life of adventure,

but they are also essentially disciplinable.

People started hiding and running away from the camp.

There were all kinds of illnesses, even psychological illness.

People didn't know where they were going

or even why they were fighting.

There were rumours that we would never come back,

that we are going to be sold as slaves.

India provided Britain with 1.75 million men in the war.

They'd been thrown into some of the toughest fighting from the start.

One Indian wrote to a friend...

The war is a calamity on three worlds,

and has caused me to cross the seas and live here.

The cold is so great that it cannot be described.

We have not seen the sun for four months.

Thus we are sacrificed.

I have neither sleep by night nor ease by day.

There can never have been such a war before,

nor will there ever be again.

Some men, like Jason Jingo,

used to the habitual racism of colonial rule,

returned home with greater self-esteem.

We had liked our time in France.

It was our first experience of living in a society without a colour bar.

We were different from the other people at home.

Our behaviour, as we showed the South Africans,

was something more than they'd expected from a native.

We had copied the manners and customs of the Europeans,

and not only copied, we lived them.

But it wasn't the same Africa Jason Jingo and the other survivors

came back to after the war.

The empires which once carved it up

had now turned parts of it into a wasteland,

as German medic Ludwig Deppe realised.

Behind us we leave destroyed fields,

and, for the immediate future, starvation.

We are no longer the agents of civilisation.

Our path is marked by death, plundering and deserted villages.

It would be years before African Nationalism took off,

but a few had begun the journey.

In 1914 John Chilembwe challenged the basis of the war,

and Africa's place in it...

..and his words would haunt colonial officials for years to come.

Let the rich men, bankers, titled men, storekeepers,

farmers and landlords go to war and get shot.

Instead, the poor Africans who have nothing to own in this present world,

who in death leave only a long line of widows and orphans

in utter want and dire distress,

are invited to die for a cause which is not theirs.

Germany had fought a remarkable global war,

but it cost her her cruisers,

her wireless network and all her colonies.

Yet Germany had forced Britain and France to call on their Empires

and lean on their allies.

In the process these flexed their muscles

and formed empires of their own.

The First World War saw the last scramble for Africa.

And the ideas the Kaiser had so hated - land-grabbing,

avarice and capitalism had, in fact, been spread wider.

For the moment, imperialism looked more successful

than it had ever been.

In the next episode of The First World War,

the call goes out for jihad, holy war in the Middle East,

the nightmare of Gallipoli and the agony of the Armenian people.