Governments in the First World War feared one thing
almost as much as military defeat: revolution.
By 1917, with victory on the battlefield still elusive and morale weakening,
both sides hoped to bring the enemy down from within.
Strikes and unrest were sparks to be fanned into revolution, transforming the war.
Film from 1917 of one of Germany's wildest dreams coming true,
Russian troops stop fighting on the Eastern Front.
It was funny to see our Ivans greeting the Germans.
The Germans gave our lads wine and cigars and they gave the Germans bread.
It turned out that one of the Germans had a camera.
He told us to stand in a line and took a picture.
Later the photographer asked our lads to come and collect the photos.
Governments worried how to contain war weariness,
prevent discontent growing mutinous, stop mutiny becoming revolution.
And governments realised that turning this problem on its head,
offered a startling opportunity.
What if unrest could be harnessed,
reined in hard in your own country, but spurred on in the enemy's?
In Cairo and Dublin, Petrograd and Zurich,
the Allies and Germans set agents working, to exploit unrest and foment revolution.
The glittering prize was to turn a whole people against its masters,
taking it out of the war completely.
In Russia the Germans pulled it off,
backing the Bolsheviks to hijack a spontaneous revolution.
Russia, in 1917, was war weary.
Huge losses, poor leadership and corruption, plus the nightmare logistics of a 900-mile front,
left her army running on empty.
I don't know whether Russia's dream of destroying Germany will ever come true.
Probably not.
We have nothing to fight with: no rifles, no mortars, no explosives, no boots, no overcoats.
Nothing.
But, incredibly, Russia's army held the line.
It was the home front that cracked first.
Petrograd, now St. Petersburg.
Russia's capital and industrial powerhouse, seethed with discontent.
Its factories were swollen with workers, with little to eat and cramped housing.
A demonstration on the 8th of March 1917, began peacefully.
It was a glorious sunny frosty day and all the people were in an excellent mood.
They were singing the Marseillaise and asking for bread.
But the Tsar ordered the protests crushed.
On Znamenskaya Square, in the heart of Petrograd, the killing began.
Sergeant Sergei Kirpichnikov was there.
The ensign ordered the buglar to play three signals.
Then he commanded: "Rifles, ready, aim, fire!"
Everybody scattered.
One man was down, a woman fell.
Over 50 civilians were shot dead.
The massacre forced Petrograd's soldiers to choose.
Whom to defend, the people or the Tsar?
Back in barracks, Sergei Kirpichnikov spoke to his comrades.
It would be better to die with honour,
than obey any further orders to shoot into the crowds.
Our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and brides are begging for bread.
Are we going to kill them?
They shot their duty officer dead and poured onto the streets,
joining other mutineers and workers.
British journalist, Arthur Ransome, cabled his office in London.
About two hundred persons killed, stop.
Local police chief lying dead, stop.
Revolution definitely begun.
The troops gathered support at barracks and factories.
They seized the city centre, set up barricades,
occupied railway stations and the telephone exchange.
Britain's military attaché, Sir Alfred Knox, was in the artillery administration
when the building came under attack.
Outside came a great disorderly mass of soldiery.
All were armed and many had red flags fastened to their bayonets.
Soon we heard the windows and door on the ground floor being broken in
and the sound of shots.
Most of the officers were leaving the department by a back door.
In a matter of days, the Tsar's regime was spinning into freefall.
A revolution has begun. What happiness!
The cursed autocracy is finally destroyed.
The soldiers have gone onto the streets.
The officers are hiding.
It's all so unexpected.
And everything's going at a gallop. We've all gone mad with joy.
Soldiers ordered into the city to restore control, simply joined the mutiny.
The Tsar was forced to abdicate,
and a provisional government formed at the Tauride Palace.
Russia's new rulers had their hands full running a war, while riding a revolution.
Germany looked to exploit the turmoil in Russia.
And Russia's allies, Britain and France, crossed their fingers.
They too had experienced worker discontent.
March 1916, Londoners gather at Tower Hill to protest against conscription.
There was also opposition in Scotland,
inspired by the fiery speeches of trade union leader Willie Gallacher.
Thousands of our fellows have sacrificed their lives,
fighting against the very Prussianism they now propose to foist upon us here.
Workers of the Clyde, you must prepare for action.
When this loathsome enemy of freedom raises its head,
you must strike and strike to kill.
Workers marched down Whitehall for better wages and lower prices.
Around 17 million working days were lost to strikes in Britain between 1915 and 1918.
There were strikes by miners in South Wales,
engineers in Coventry, Sheffield and Manchester,
and shipbuilders on Teesside, Tyneside and the Clyde.
The army kept 200.000 troops in Britain to guard against invasion and civilian uprising.
But David Lloyd George, as Minister of Munitions and then Prime Minister,
preferred to give in to strikers, rather than crush them.
Father of the state pension and national insurance schemes,
Lloyd George commanded working-class support.
He used concession, not confrontation, to maintain industrial output.
Negotiators with the unions were given strict instructions.
If a strike appears to be inevitable,
all the concessions asked for should be granted.
But while Britain kept a lid on unrest, France could not.
Throughout the First World War, Paris lived under the shadow of German invasion.
But after three winters of fighting,
France's stability was being undermined by a wave of stoppages and protests.
Many of the dissenters were women,
who couldn't be intimidated by the threat of military service.
Everybody is complaining in Paris.
People are on strike over the price rises and the lack of fuel.
Can't you just hear the rising strains of revolution?
These troubles are justified,
because while the people work themselves to death to scrape a living,
the bosses and big industrialists are growing fat in record time.
And all we can do is grin and bear it.
These ideas did reach the front, but what pushed the French Army towards mutiny in 1917,
was a history of poorly planned and ill-conducted battles.
The final straw was a doomed attack
devised by its own commander in chief, General Robert Georges Nivelle.
The offensive alone can give victory.
The defensive gives only defeat and shame.
On the 16th of April 1917, Nivelle ordered over a million Frenchmen
to attack a heavily defended German-held ridge known as the Chemin des Dames.
After storming this ridge,
Nivelle expected his armies to smash through seven miles of German defences.
We were faced by a forest of wire.
Machine guns appeared everywhere.
There were traps of every description.
The ground was impassable.
40.000 Frenchmen were killed in the first days, but Nivelle ordered the assault to continue.
Casualties reached 150.000 by the 5th of May.
Then the men snapped.
I am one of the most persitent in spreading propaganda.
I know that I am risking my hide but by this means I might save it.
My darling say with me, "Down with the war that separates us
and long live the revolution that, in bringing peace, will reunite us."
I love you and I don't want to die.
The village of Coeuvres, 20 miles south of the Chemin des Dames.
The mayor watched what happened
when the 370th Infantry Regiment was ordered to the front.
The soldiers spilled out into the whole village,
screaming with rage, firing rifles and singing the International.
Towards morning, they formed columns and made their way to the woods.
By June 1917, half the French Army was affected.
Men refused to return to the trenches.
We seemed absolutely powerless.
From every section of the front news arrived of regiments refusing to man the trenches.
The slightest German attack,
would have been enough to tumble down our house of cards and bring the enemy to Paris.
But the Germans had no inkling of the French mutiny.
It was a massive intelligence failure.
Four days after their mutiny,
the troops from Coeuvres gave themselves up at a nearby village.
They emerged from the wood in perfect order,
in columns of four, all flawlessly groomed and polished.
The French soldiers' actions were more like a strike than a mutiny.
They won important concessions,
better leave arrangements, more rest, improved medical conditions.
All we wanted was to call the government's attention to us,
make it see that we are men and not beasts for the slaughterhouse.
Nivelle was sacked.
His replacement, General Philippe Pétain, reversed French strategy,
making defence the order of the day.
The men were given patriotic instruction and reminded why they were fighting.
But Pétain also knew that discipline had to be restored.
The tactic was to execute a few but force thousands to watch.
Photographs taken secretly at a French military execution.
A man is tied to a post.
The order is given to fire.
Soldiers are paraded past the body.
Louis Flourac was one of the 49 death sentences carried out.
He was shot here in Chacrise, by his comrades, some of whom hated what they were doing.
I see the dead every single day in the trenches.
But this is different.
I'm a man who has shot his friends.
Italy's soldiers were also growing war-weary.
But, unlike its French counterpart,
the Italian High Command saw punishment as the only way to maintain morale.
Chief of Staff, General Cadorna, was merciless.
Every soldier must be convinced of the fact
that his superior has the sacred duty to shoot all cowards and recalcitrants immediately.
Cadorna's iron grip led to massive discontent.
For months it simmered below the surface, until the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917.
The Italian Army was hit here, in the Isonzo river valley,
by a massive Austro-Hungarian, German attack.
Resistance in armies took many forms.
The Italians didn't openly refuse to fight,
they just began surrendering to the enemy en masse.
By dawn we were surrounded
and the Germans finally took us all prisoner,
and we were happy because we had saved our lives.
Farewell Italy.
Farewell family.
I am now in the hands of the Germans.
A young lieutenant in the German Alpenkorps, Erwin Rommel,
took over 1.000 Italians prisoners without firing a single shot.
The soldiers threw away their weapons and hurried to me.
In an instant, I was surrounded and hoisted onto Italian shoulders.
"E viva Germania!" Sounded from 1.000 throats.
An Italian officer, who hesitated to surrender, was shot down by his own troops.
For the Italians on Mrzli Peak the war was over.
They shouted with joy.
I am writing this at 11 o'clock at night,
most comfortably ensconced in the Italian officers' mess.
There is a huge stock of delicious wines,
which we are getting through in record time,
so I hope there is no question of a counterattack.
We've captured machine guns, heavy artillery and personal weapons.
These are of the highest order but show little sign of actual use.
Dietro il ponte un cimitero
Some 300.000 ltalian soldiers surrendered in the winter of 1917.
As many again retreated down these mountain tracks, with fleeing civilians.
They stroll past with their hands in their pockets.
When questioned, they all say that they've pulled out because they were told to.
Who told them? No-one knows. The next man along.
Cimitero di noi soldati
Forse
Un giorno ti vengo a trovar
What a terrible and heart-wrenching sight it was.
The poor women with their little ones bundled up,
walking towards Italy, to save their lives.
Italy's High Command sacked General Cadorna,
and regained control by easing discipline
and making concessions to the soldiers as the French had done.
But the price of unrest was high. The fighting strength of the Italian Army had been halved.
And while governments wrestled with unrest at home, they were also stirring up trouble abroad.
Britain had been plotting to destabilise the Ottoman Empire since the war began.
Ottoman Turkey was Germany's ally in the Middle East.
Her empire stretched across Arabia into the Hejaz,
a vast desert area which included the holy cities of Medina and Mecca.
Their loss would seriously undermine the Turks' standing in the Muslim world and boost Britain's.
The British turned to the Arabs of the Hejaz,
holding out the carrot of independence if they rose up against their Turkish masters.
If the Arab nation assist England in this war that has been forced upon us by Turkey,
England will guarantee that no internal intervention will take place in Arabia,
and we will give Arabs every assistance against foreign aggression.
The idea of Britain backing Arabian independence worried the India Office.
A strong Arab state might be more dangerous to Christendom than a strong Ottoman state,
and Lord Kitchener's policy of destroying one Islamic state merely for the purpose of creating another,
has always seemed to me disastrous.
The India Office needn't have worried.
Kitchener was playing a cynical game,
never intending to hand real power to the Arabs of the Hejaz.
But the British showered the Emir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, with gold,
and dropped hints that if all went well,
he might realise his dream of becoming leader of the Arabs.
On the 5th of June 1916, the Arab revolt began.
Mecca quickly fell to the rebels, but the main Turkish garrison at Medina held its ground.
The Turkish commander, Fahri Pasha, refused to surrender.
Until my soldiers are buried under the rubble of Medina,
in a crimson shroud of blood and fire,
the red flag of the Ottomans shall never be removed from the castle turrets of Medina.
The uprising commanded no popular support.
But the British did have a man on the spot:
T.E. Lawrence, a charismatic 28-year-old officer, attached to Sharif Hussein's forces in the Hejaz.
Lawrence spoke Arabic. He saw where the Arabs' strengths lay.
I think one company of Turks properly entrenched in open country,
would defeat the Sharif's armies.
Their real sphere is guerrilla warfare.
They would dynamite a railway, plunder a caravan, steal camels better than anyone.
The Turks were most vulnerable along their stretched lines of communication.
Lawrence and the Arabs became experts in railway sabotage.
The last stunt was the hold-up of a train.
The whole job took ten minutes and they lost 70 killed.
My loot was a superfine red Baluch prayer rug.
I hope this sounds the fun it is.
It's the most amateurish Buffalo Billy sort of performance.
A German on the train saw the attack differently.
The Bedouin mob came bursting into the carriage, to kill and plunder.
I could feel the blood pouring down my body but I was left alone.
The thieves' minds were drawn towards looting, having killed 40 men, women and children,
and taken the rest captive.
T.E. Lawrence adopted the cause of Arab nationalism.
I hope that the Turkish flag may disappear from Arabia.
It is so good to have helped in making a new nation,
and I hate the Turks so much, that to see their own people turning on them is very gratifying.
Lawrence now dressed as an Arab. He asked his mother for help with his costume.
If that silk headcloth with the silver ducks on it,
last used I believe as a tablecloth, still exits, will wou send it out to me?
Such things are hard to get here now.
Capturing Turkish-held Jerusalem was a key British objective in 1917.
Seizing the port of Akaba would strengthen the Arabs' case for a role in the campaign.
Lawrence realised that all Akaba's guns pointed out to sea.
The town was defenceless from the rear.
That meant a 600-mile ride across the Hejaz at the height of summer.
Mud flats are purgatory.
Sun reflects from them like mirror, flame yellow, cutting into our eyes.
Seven weeks later, the Arab force reappeared outside Akaba,
catching the Turks totally off guard.
The town fell just four days later.
The Middle East was stunned.
General Allenby, commanding British forces in the region,
now wrote the Arab revolt into his Jerusalem campaign,
reinforcing it with armoured cars, air support, artillery and colonial troops.
On the 11th of December 1917,
Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot with his officers, including Lawrence.
The Arabs would find they had won not self-rule, but new masters.
Lawrence had known all along that the Arabs of the Hejaz
were merely the tools of British subversion, as he admitted long after.
The Arabs saw in me a free agent of the British Government,
and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises.
So I had to join the conspiracy and assured the men of their reward.
I was continually and bitterly ashamed.
Had I been an honest advisor of the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home,
and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff.
While Britain was sponsoring subversion against Germany's ally Turkey,
she had her own weak spot, right on her doorstep:
Ireland.
Britain had promised Ireland Home Rule, but the First World War shelved all that.
200.000 Irishmen, Catholics and Protestants, would fight for Britain.
About 30.000 of them would die.
But the Irish Republican Brotherhood, forerunners of the IRA,
believed England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity.
Pádraic Pearse saw the war as a chance for Ireland to free herself from British rule.
The European war has brought about a crisis which may contain,
as yet hidden within it,
the moment for which generations have been waiting.
It remains to be seen whether if that moment reveal itself,
we shall have the sight to see and the courage to do.
Germany, for many republicans, had always been a good place to plot revolution.
Erskine Childers was famous in Britain, the country he now sought to undermine.
His bestselling novel, "The Riddle Of The Sands",
had warned Britain of the dangers she faced from the German Navy.
By July 1914, his sympathies had switched.
He put to sea in his yacht, the Asgard, to run guns.
He photographed the operation.
Leaving Hamburg under tow.
Sailing back to Ireland.
His wife and a friend with two of the 900 rifles they had collected from Germany.
And the scene after Childers docked outside Dublin.
Crowds cheer as the guns are driven away by car.
Two years later the German guns were put to use,
when 1.600 Irish revolutionaries rose up in Dublin.
Easter Monday 1916.
Sinn Féiners occupy railway stations, the GPO and other places.
They have blocked the streets nearing Stephen's Green,
and are shooting at anyone they see in khaki.
We used to think we were clear of the war, here in Ireland,
but we've certainly got it close enough now.
The moment for which Pádraic Pearse had been waiting had come.
He read out the historic proclamation of the Irish Republic,
a document which acknowledges the support of "gallant allies in Europe".
Who were these gallant allies and what had they done?
Germany had long seen subversion in Ireland as a way of destabilising Britain.
In August 1914, Sir Roger Casement,
an Irish republican and one-time darling of the British establishment,
gave the Germans the opportunity they were looking for.
He wrote to the Kaiser with an offer.
We draw Your Majesty's attention to the part that Ireland necessarily,
if not openly, must play in this conflict.
Ireland must be freed from British control.
Thousands of Irishmen are prepared to do their part to aid the German cause,
for they recognise that it is their own.
Casement sailed for Berlin in disguise and in the winter of 1914 he met Arthur Zimmermann,
a future Foreign Minister, and the man in charge of Germany's subversive operations.
Zimmermann was impressed by Casement
and began to wonder if a small German landing on Irish soil
might cause the British massive problems.
His diplomats in America raised funds from the Irish community in New York.
It is proposed to undertake an invasion
with 25.000 troops, with 50.000 extra guns.
Then undoubtedly the co-operation of all Irish in the British Army will follow.
There is strong friction between Irish and English in northern France.
Zimmermann's uprising was to be four-pronged:
the dispatch of German weapons to Irish rebels,
the landing of a German expeditionary force on the west coast,
German submarines to seize Dublin harbour,
and diversionary zeppelin bombing raids on London.
Germany's High Command got cold feet and refused to commit an invasion force.
But in April 1916, the zeppelin raids did take place,
a submarine was sent to the west coast...
and an arms boat carrying 20.000 rifles, 10 machine guns
and a million rounds of ammunition,
was dispatched for Ireland, under the command of Captain Karl Spindler.
Gradually rising out of the water was Inishtooskert Island, our rendezvous.
Within half an hour at the latest, the pilot boat must make her appearance.
But the Irish expected him two days later...
so the Germans sat in the bay till caught by a British patrol.
Captain Spindler scuttled his boat rather than surrender the arms.
The German naval ensign was run up, bidding defiance to the British.
Then there was a muffled explosion.
Beams and splinters flew up in the air.
The Aud sank with a loud hissing noise.
The uprising's hope of success sank with the German arms.
Many rebels now abandoned the project.
But a hard-core minority,
armed with the rifles Childers had brought in from Hamburg two years before,
decided to make a symbolic gesture of defiance.
On Easter Monday 1916, they seized key points in Dublin.
The British responded with machine guns and artillery fire,
and shipped in 10.000 men from the mainland.
Few Dubliners mourned the crushing of the rebellion.
Guinness brewer, Edward Phillips,
had his disused boilers converted into improvised armoured cars for the British.
Rang up military and offered motor lorries. Gladly accepted.
Sent out for drivers who lived close. They all consented.
Over 1.000 civilians were caught in the crossfire.
And as the British took the rebels into custody,
the people of Dublin pelted them with vegetables
and emptied chamber pots over their heads.
Many had sons and fathers fighting on the Western Front
and were outraged by the uprising's German connections.
But now the British made a terrible blunder,
throwing away their moral authority and transforming the Easter Rising
into the seminal event of Irish statehood.
They sentenced the leaders of the uprising to death, starting with Pearse.
He admitted to the court:
I asked for and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force.
My aim was to win Irish freedom.
Over ten days, the men were brought into the execution yard at Kilmainham Jail and shot.
James Connolly was so wounded in the uprising that he had to be shot sitting down.
Dublin fell silent as Britain turned 16 men into martyrs.
People who had thrown rotten fruit at them, now saw them as heroes.
Britain turned the failed uprising into a national cause.
Zimmermann's next challenge was in a different league.
Could Germany exploit Russia's revolution of March 1917,
to lever Russia out of the First World War?
Almost all the ingredients were in place:
a major civilian uprising,
restless troops at the front, and a toothless leadership in the rear.
The Germans lacked just one piece of the jigsaw... a charismatic leader.
But they had someone in mind.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was leader of the Bolsheviks,
a small group of extreme Russian radicals.
They had spent many hours over the past 14 years
plotting revolution in coffee houses and prison cells.
When at last it came, they were caught on the hop.
Stalin was in Siberia, Bukharin was in New York and Lenin was in Zurich.
"What torture it is for us", Lenin wrote, "to be sitting here at such a time."
He knew the Allies would never allow him passage.
The obvious route lay through Germany and Sweden.
But would Germany let him through?
German agents had long been watching Lenin.
They knew he wanted their enemy, Russia, out of the war.
Lenin's strong side is his organisational talent.
He possesses the most brutal and relentless energy.
Lenin's view is: "It doesn't matter who wins the war.
The defeat of Russia is preferable, victory worse."
Zimmermann counselled the Kaiser to approve Lenin's passage.
Since it is in our interests
that the influence of the radical wing of the Russian revolutionaries should prevail,
it would seem to me advisable to allow transit.
The Kaiser exploited Lenin as cynically as Lenin used the Kaiser,
each thinking he had the better of the bargain.
On the 10th of April 1917, Lenin, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya,
and his former mistress Inessa Armand,
boarded the train for Germany with other Bolsheviks.
"The Kaiser's paying for the journey", jeered rival Russian socialists.
"You'll be hanged as German spies."
Lenin stood listening and smiled.
"Hiss as much as you like", he said.
"We Bolsheviks will shuffle your cards and spoil your game."
To counter charges of working with the enemy, Lenin devised the fiction of a sealed train,
claiming total isolation from the outside world.
In fact, the group travelled in a regular carriage on a train that stopped frequently,
taking four days to cross Germany.
Though the train halted in Berlin,
there's no evidence that Lenin met any German representatives.
He knew the Germans were giving money to his Bolshevik party, but avoided direct contact.
Germany's greatest help to Lenin's cause was getting him back to Russia.
The night he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin addressed the crowd.
Some were hostile.
Ought to stick our bayonets into a fellow like that. Must be a German.
But Lenin was soon winning converts, as Countess Irina Skariatina saw.
Lenin is bald, terribly ugly, wears a crumpled old brown suit,
speaks without any oratorical power,
more like a college professor giving a lecture,
yet what he says drives the people crazy.
And what he said was: end the war.
And by doing so, give the people what they want
and what the Provisional Government had failed to deliver: peace, land and bread.
Zimmermann had agents in Petrograd monitoring Lenin's progress.
Lenin's entry into Russia successful.
He is working exactly as we would wish.
Just as the Germans hoped, Lenin's ideas spread to the front.
The regiments have turned into hordes of bastards,
holding meetings led by the Bolsheviks.
Military life has come to a standstill.
The soldiers want peace, no matter what the conditions are.
They want to go home to work the land and enjoy the results of the revolution.
On the 18th of June 1917, news of secret German funding of the Bolsheviks leaked.
Lenin fled the city, heavily disguised.
But the Bolsheviks countered claims that Lenin was a spy,
using printing presses bought with German money.
And they set about building worker support,
helping arm the most militant to create the Red Guard.
Lenin reappeared on the night of the 6th of November 1917,
leaving this safe house for the Bolshevik HQ.
He knew power had to be seized now.
We must not wait.
We may lose everything.
The government is tottering, we must deal it the death blow.
To delay action is the same as death.
Journalist John Reed was at the HQ.
In the hall, I ran into some of the Bolshevik leaders.
One showed me a revolver.
"The game is on", he said and his face was pale.
Throughout that night, the Bolsheviks secured key points across Petrograd
with hardly a shot fired.
The city awoke to a new world order.
I've just heard some stunning news.
The Provisional Government has been overthrown.
The telegraph wires are buzzing with decrees of the new Bolshevik government.
All land is to be transferred to the people.
The first thing the Bolsheviks did was to take Russia out of the war,
freeing the Germans from a crippling fight on two fronts.
Germany's gamble on Lenin had paid off.
The Bolsheviks have brought about the crucial event of the century,
they've dicharged millions of Russian soldiers and freed the Germans' hands.
A hot steam bath awaits the Allies.
Revolution and subversion had released 44 German divisions for the Western Front.
Germany now had a chance to win the First World War.
In the next episode of the First World War:
Germany launches a huge offensive on the Western Front, but her alliances start to crumble.
It would be a race between victory and collapse.