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 seven million men armed with the latest technology;
eleven 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 three million Russians were attacking in the east.
Germany's resources were spread between two fronts,
and she couldn't easily smash through France's chain of 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.
And by 1914, his successors had no illusion
that there was any swift victory to be had in a two-front war.
Indeed, 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.
The Germans went to war less with a master plan,
than a recognition that they would have to take the war bit by bit.
And the first bit was Belgium.
The Germans knew Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality,
but reckoned Britain would come into the war sooner or later,
whichever route the Germans took into France.
The Belgians put their faith in reinforced concrete forts, armed with German Krupp guns.
The Germans brought their massive siege guns, the Big Berthas, named after Krupp's daughter, to smash them.
The monster advanced in two parts, pulled by 36 horses.
The pavement trembled.
The 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 window panes in the vicinity were shattered.
Colonel Victor Naessens was in Fort Loncin, on the receiving end.
Once the thick 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 totally blocked.
The fort is also filling with concrete dust.
The men's chests heave to get air. They're 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 six-foot-thick concrete roof, crushing 250 soldiers to death.
The survivors were horrifically burnt.
By the 16th of August, all the forts around Liége had fallen.
But Belgium's war was only beginning.
The Germans claimed that Belgian civilian snipers, franc-tireurs, were firing at them
from garret windows and rooftops.
In fact, most of the shots came from small units of retreating French and Belgian soldiers...
or from nervous German troops shooting at each other.
Nevertheless, General von Moltke issued a warning to the people of Belgium.
Anybody who in any form participates without autorization,
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 all training sessions we're told about the nastiness of the French,
that our wounded have their eyes gouged out, their noses and ears cut off.
We're given to understand we are to act without mercy.
The pressure to maintain a speedy advance through a hostile population led to atrocities.
These were not just the impetuous actions of frightened troops.
They became part of a systematic 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.
The Belgian town of Tamines,
on the 22nd of 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 the Germans
who follow behind us.
But they fall, mown down by French bullets.
One of them charges at us like a man possessed,
and only stops when his bayonet has gone right through poor Materne,
who leaves behind 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 captive in the church overnight,
then escorted them down the Rue de la Station in the morning.
The soldiers up on carts beat us brutally.
The 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.
No matter how hard I tried, I couln't get out from under the pile of corpses.
They cut the head off Achill Leroy, the coalman.
I saw it, the head separated from the trunk.
The ultimate cruelty was when the soldiers checked the victims one by one.
Any still alive they bayoneted violently, then threw them in the Sambre.
Photographs of some of those who remarkably survived the 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.
The stories of German atrocities against "plucky little Belgium",
provided ideal 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 had the engraving 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 leading to the foot of the monument.
The whole concourse sang the beautiful choral "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.
Germany is standing, 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.
It harked back to a time when German states had joined with 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 process of unification was not complete.
And that spelt weakness.
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 which is still made up of contingents from the various German states,
all wearing different uniforms.
The young German Reich needs institutions which are clearly German.
Beneath one flag, Germany remained extremely diverse:
Catholic South, and Protestant North.
Rural East...
and industrialised West.
Germany seemed ultra-conservative,
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 the poorest fellows in German society,
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 in itself a rich reward.
Men would die for Britain in the First World War who did not have the 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,
and 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.
And 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 he is 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 left arm, for which he compensated with sports:
sailing, riding and hunting.
He had an immature streak, dressing up and playing often cruel practical jokes.
Wilhelm's right arm was incredibly powerful.
With his rings turned inwards,
he would squeeze the hands of visiting 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 and he doesn't know what to do.
Sadly he is putty in the hands of clever people,
and makes surprising leaps of judgment all over the place.
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.
They were highly disciplined, and the 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 the crucial lesson to the German soldiers of 1914.
International rules do not work when soldiers are in constant 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.
The civilian population,
caught between the weight of historic fears and current military necessities,
was 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.
In all, 100.000 men of the British Expeditionary Force
crossed the Channel in the early weeks of the war.
On the 21th of August, British troops moved into position alongside the French 5th 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 these 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.
These 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 13, 1914.
You people over here don't realise what our boys went through in those days.
That march from Mons was a nightmare.
Unless you'd been through it you can't imagine what an agonising time it was.
We used to do from 20 to 25 miles a day.
There was only one thing that could cheer us up on the march and that was singing.
We're here because
We're here because we're here
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, Poincaré had appealed to all France for national unity.
By the 2nd of 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 all the French prisoners and guns we should have been capturing?
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 the 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 and it makes them mad.
We somehow fight on with no increased animosity.
But the French really are giving everything, and 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 the nation's salvation depends, we cannot look back.
We must make every effort to attack and repel the enemy.
Troops who can no longer advance must at all cost hold the captured ground
and die rather than retreat.
The Marne would consign the set-piece battle, fought on a single field in a day, to history.
It was on the cusp between old warfare and new.
Around Paris, great armies wheeled and manoeuvred,
as they had done 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 the 5th of 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 and fetch an apple.
Some block their ears, so as not to lose their nerve with the incessant machine-gun fire.
Our ranks are decimated. We cannot hold this position much longer.
Pieces of shrapnel whistled past me. I felt I'd 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 turn towards the gunfire that rattles 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 that Napoleon would have recognised.
Cavary, 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 to 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.
But then the rest of my men burst through the undergrowth,
and the enemy vanished.
The Germans were in a shade of field grey.
But the British were even more difficult to spot, as another German enviously noted.
The colour of the English clothing is much more suited to the terrain than ours.
It's a sort of brownie green, a really dirty colour.
This really is an advantage, although we're still going to 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 fill with a strange whistling followed by a violent explosion.
It's dropped a bomb!
Seven horses killed, three men lost.
For us this is something completely new.
None of us know 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 headquarters at Montmort.
Handwritten reports like this one revealed the steady advance of the Allies
into the lethal gap between his men and the 1st Army.
On the 8th of 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.
The women leaned out of their windows, and thumbed their noses and sneered at us.
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 a 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 top of another.
We've got used to the shelling now, 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.
Indeed, 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.
The German trenches are only 700 yards away.
The weather is perfectly vile, very wet, and it's starting to get cold too.
My clothes are soaked and muddy but it's too cold to take them off.
Any warm things you can send me and the men will be greatly appreciated.
And 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.
Tuesday, cruel Tuesday.
The German troops ride past my window.
I hear a guttural order "Aarrarrnach!"
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 in this house in Sedan, eastern France.
Yves' mother encouraged him to write a diary to keep him busy 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 Walther Rathenau
drew up plans to ensure the most effective use of what materials Germany had.
But after a few weeks of war,
the German state 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 eight million people.
They have looted the cellars, the empty houses, the walnut trees,
the telegraph poles and the livestock.
One doctor in Lille pleaded with the German authorities.
My patient Madame Lefebvre 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.
The last three weeks we have spent in the most terrible anguish and moral torture possible for a mother's heart.
At three in the morning, these German heroes go out with a military band and machine guns and bayonets fixed,
to hunt down women and children, to take them away.
God knows where or why.
Yves' brother got a job at the railway station.
Robert is unloading the wagons of animal carcasses,
already green and 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 5 a.m.
One night however the whole commune was called out at 1:00 in the morning.
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 across Belgium 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, come this irresistable 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 spoke to the prison chaplain.
I have no fear or shrinking.
I have seen death so often that it is not fearful or strange to me.
And this I would say standing as I do in view of God and Eternity.
I realise that 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.
And 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 just 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 any belongings, suddenly considered as criminals,
then taken to concentration camps, to assure security in the 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 Boche.
All food packages are opened and classified.
The prisoners come each day to collect their provisions.
But there's 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, who became 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.
In the next episode of The First World War:
global conflict rocks empires, as Germany beats the Royal Navy in the Pacific,
and maverick armies rampage through Africa.