1915. No one, who has not been at the front,
has any idea what the soldiers are living through.
She hasn't had a letter from him since April.
He’s been fighting the Germans for a year,
every hour of every day she wonders when he'll come home.
He writes that the British troops tell of hardship, cruelty, violence.
He writes that to stay alive, the Germans, like them, have dug themselves in.
In the trenches, the men live like rats, among the rats.
APOCALYPSE World War I
In the trenches, every day is the same. Despite repeated attacks,
neither side gains any ground.
When the whistle blows, men go over the top into a living hell.
3/5 HELL
Hell is artillery, the shelling wreaks devastation.
Most terrifying of all is shrapnel, shells filled with lead pellets and gunpowder
that explode in midair.
The writer Maurice Genevoix describes this: “I'm caught in a hail of shrapnel;
the lead shot riddles the ground around me,
pierces muskets and splits men's skulls”.
All around him, men are being disfigured for life;
the French call them “broken faces”.
Doctors encounter horrific wounds never seen before.
They can do nothing for the trauma caused by the shelling -
fits of terror, trembling, paralysis.
Millions of men find themselves caught in the deadly trap of this massive war.
September 1915. In the East, the Turks, the Austrians,
and the Germans battled the Russians.
In the South, the Austrians hold the Italians in check.
In the West, the Germans face the Belgians, French, and British
along the line of trenches that stretches 400 miles(644km).
To hold their positions, the Allied troops need better protection.
So in September 1915, French factories, now staffed by women,
convert to war work with a rush order for 20 million helmets.
These are complicated to produce but are designed to offer protection from shrapnel.
A film features one of these factory workers leaving a note in a helmet,
in order to boost the morale of its wearer.
“Dear soldier, I am a simple Frenchwoman,
wishing you a quick and happy return to your loved ones”.
“May this helmet bring you luck!” Lucie Lambert.
This lucky soldier and his companions also supports new uniforms.
The color, dubbed horizon blue, is supposed to blend in with the sky during assaults.
But the men worry that this new kit is a sign of a drawn-out war.
Although the official cameramen instruct the men to appear smiling and warlike,
one soldier pretends to commit suicide.
Like the French, the British adopt the metal helmet.
A Canadian, Private Corneloup, complains that it's too heavy.
It weighs over 2 pounds(0,9kg) but it is sturdier than the French helmet
and with its shallow shape can be made from a single sheet of steel.
Still, they are outclassed by their enemies with the famous Stahlhelm,
or steel helmet, which comes to symbolize the German soldier.
Its wider shape covering more of the head,
its better suited to this new form of warfare - trench warfare.
In “Storm of steel” lieutenant Ernst Jünger writes:
“It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them,
because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death”.
This artillery warfare requires that the troops hold their ground
beneath every barrage, even when the shells are filled with poison gas.
In addition to helmets, soldiers have issued gas masks,
as a protection against this new form of warfare.
The race is on to discover the most lethal formula, such as chlorine or mustard gas
which appeared at the battle of Ypres in Belgium and killed thousands of men.
A military doctor, Major Faleur writes:
“Men turn purple, they cry for air, and complain of burning in the chest and stomach”.
“We have seen it all, ghastly wounds, and deadly avalanches of steel,
but they are nothing compared to the fog that darken the Sun in the sky for hours
which seems like centuries”.
And these Canadian soldiers, now blind, have to be led by the hand like children.
The International Committee of the Red Cross protests.
Since 1899 the use of asphyxiating gases has been outlawed,
nonetheless, all sides will use poison gas.
The French army perfects its protective measures.
Cotton for the respiratory tract, and a cloth, on which the soldier is to urinate;
this is supposed to help protect against chlorine.
Found to be ineffective, this approach is replaced by goggles and a thick pad,
soaked with a protective chemical.
Like the hoods, used by the British, which make it almost impossible to breathe,
they are soon abandoned.
Finding a German corpse, the French learned
just how much more advanced their enemies are in this technology.
By autumn 1915 the Germans are using the Gummimaske,
a rubber mask with a filter of activated charcoal.
It will soon be copied by every Army and remain in service until the end of the war.
Combatants on all sides now live in constant terror of poison gas,
obsessed with the smell.
As one German artillery officer puts it: “The men sniff about like hunting dogs”.
But once protected, they can hold their ground, the front line doesn't budge.
The Germans occupy almost all of Belgium and ten French provinces,
including the cities of Lille, Cambrai, and Saint-Quentin.
German troops are better supplied than their families back in Brandenburg and Saxony.
They take over the livestock that peasants left behind when they fled the combat-zone,
and the rabbit hutches,
and stores of cheese.
The finest residences are reserved for the military brass,
far from the realities of the front.
Among all the belligerents, the class system is upheld.
The Lords inhabit the chateaus, while the peasants, underlings, and servants
huddle in foxholes.
On the French side, excavators tear up the countryside,
digging ever more trenches which are now organizing three successive lines.
The first line of trenches is the most dangerous, the deadliest of all.
Human ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to killing.
Anything can be used to launch explosives at the enemy in the opposite trench.
Grenade launching rifles, flying torpedoes,
even medieval crossbows are put to use.
And then there is the giant slingshot, used by British soldiers
as well as their “plum pudding”, a strange projectile
that is almost as dangerous for its gunners as for the enemy.
Between artillery barrages, the soldiers wait.
They sleep, they play cards, write letters,
and stave off boredom, by cobbling together all sorts of objects
out of copper cartridges.
They construct makeshift shelters and give them suggestive names like this one,
meaning “home miserable home”.
The stench is overpowering, Private Albert Thierry writes:
“No one washes or combs their hair. I've never worn the same clothes for so long”.
At night the soldiers descend to their underground shelters,
one man even builds a cage to protect himself from rats.
Sergeant Beck writes: “One of my men was bitten on the ear, another on the nose”.
“When we are lying down, rats scamper over us like cats,
they devour everything we have; chocolate, Camembert cheese, even our rightful stocks”.
“The men hunt them any way they can”.
“In just one hole they killed 17 of them, like small rabbits”.
The rats carry fleas and scabies. Lice are a scourge in all the trenches.
But for soldiers on the frontline, the appalling hygienic conditions
and the serious diseases they engender are nothing
compared to the terror of going over the top.
And they have to stay at least a week at the front,
before being relieved by troops from the second line, the support line.
After an attack, first line survivors carry the wounded through narrow ditches,
to reach the third line, the reserve line, located among the abandoned towns.
They need time to catch their breath.
Lance corporal Tanty writes: “We read the letters of Hun prisoners;
they are the same as ours; misery, despair,
the monstrous stupidity, of all these things”.
“Those wretches, the Huns, are the same as us, they are like us,
and for all of us the hardship is the same”.
The reserve line allows the French soldiers, known as Poilus,
or hairy beasts, to wash and feel human again.
Lance corporal Tanty writes: “The Poilu is an animal,
halfway between a human and a chimpanzee that the 20th century has bond”.
“The Poilu is the monster of a civilization going backwards,
his only human characteristic is his ability to suffer”.
A Private from Montreal, Georges-Ulric Francoeur, writes:
“I'm trying to avoid the taint beef, all I care about is getting warm,
we are soaked, everything is always damp. We’ve run out of tobacco,
I'm smoking my prayer book”.
October 1915.
In the West, it's a stalemate.
In the Balkans the Germans, Austrians, and Bulgarians,
who have entered the conflict, overrun Serbia in one month.
The French and British open a new front in Salonika to assist the Serbs
and to bring Greece into the war on their side.
On the morning of October 12, 1915,
Sergeant Potard aboard to French cargo ship writes:
“Having come from the Alsatian front, still red with the blood of our comrades,
we arrive at what has been described to us as an unknown destination”.
Salonika comes into view a simply marvelous site,
bathed in the golden light of the Orient”.
“The city spreads out before me,
bleached white with its minarets on mosques and domes on churches”.
“Imagine my stupefaction when I land;
the dock is crowded with people of every race and every language,
all one sees are faces, ravaged by jaundice and smallpox”.
Disease will decimate the 500,000 men, concentrated around Salonika;
a 100 square mile(259 KM²) enclave on Greek territory, protected by a ring of artillery.
What is known as “the Army of the Orient”, is an amalgam of British,
French, Serbs,
Montenegrins, Italians,
Russians, and Annamese or Tonkinese from French Indochina.
They will be dragged into a series of ambushes against the Bulgarians
who prove more combative than expected.
Temperatures hit 105F (40,5C) in the shade and the swamps team with flies and mosquitoes,
leading to 6,000 deaths from malaria alone.
For the time being “the Army of the Orient” does not see combat.
These immobilized French and British divisions
could've been more useful in the trenches of northern France.
As one German journalist writes ironically:
“The allies have parked themselves in the biggest internment camp in the world”.
In London, King George V
is concerned about his government’s talk of withdrawing from Salonika
and about the fate of his troops on all fronts.
He writes: “I shall follow your every movement with the deepest interest,
indeed your welfare will never be absent from my thoughts”.
King George and every other head of state should be seeking a way to halt the massacre.
After 16 months of the war, 5 million men are already dead,
but no one wants to stop.
Even most of the widows call for vengeance,
and the leaders judge the human and material costs to be so high
that the enemy must be made to pay and so war goes on.
On December 6, 1915, the military and political leaders of France,
Great Britain, Belgium, Russia, and Italy convene in Chantilly, near Paris.
They agree to improve the coordination of their armies
to stop depleting the resources in separate attacks
and to organize a United Anglo-French offensive for the summer of 1916.
The offensive will originate from the British and French positions on the Somme River.
But the Germans beat them to it, by launching their own offensive on Verdun.
Verdun is a gateway city on the Meuse River
but the French consider it to be a quiet sector.
They have dismantled the canons of its forts and sent them to the hot spots on the front.
The garrison has been reduced to a minimum yet the Germans are only 12 miles (19km) away.
In early February 1916, the Germans begin massing troops and artillery,
for what they hope to be the decisive battle.
German cameramen arrived to film Kaiser Wilhelm II
who has come to encourage his son and heir.
The crown prince leads a force of 150,000 men.
Their plan - either capture Verdun and open the road to Paris
or, if the French army digs in, the Germans decimate it.
At 7:15 on the morning of February 21, 1916,
the crown prince launches operation “Gericht” or judgement.
Within hours 1 million shells have pummeled the French positions.
95 miles (153km) away, troops in the Vosges can hear the bombardment.
For their attack on Verdun, the Germans deploy a terrifying weapon, the flamethrower.
They break through the French lines and enter the Caures forest
where the trees have been blasted by shells.
Here the Germans encounter unexpected resistance from the French soldiers
who survived the barrage.
The sacrifice of Colonel Driant’s men slows down the crown prince,
but he remains confident and congratulates the Stormtroopers.
Shaken, the French General Staff decide to defend Verdun to the end.
A new commander is named; General Philippe Pétain, who has remained on the sidelines.
The 60-year-old general is known to oppose the French strategy of offense at all costs
and he implements a defensive strategy.
His orders are to dig in and hold on. The French stop the German advance.
The battlefield becomes a slaughterhouse.
Verdun survivor and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature Jean Giono later writes:
“We are nine in a hole, nothing will get us out of here”.
“But we've eaten, we must relieve ourselves”.
“The first of us to feel the urge climbs out”.
“He has been there for two days now, 10 feet away killed, with his trousers down”.
“We crap on paper and throw it up and out, when we have no more paper,
we go in our haversacks”.
“The battle of Verdun continues, we go in our hands”.
“Dysentery flows between our fingers, we crap blood, we go where we lay,
we are devoured by flames of thirst, we drink our own urine”.
“If we remain on this battlefield, it is because they won't let us get away”.
Two second lieutenants, Herduin and Millant, are executed for desertion.
They have retreated after the Germans had smashed through the French lines.
With so many killed, there is insufficient manpower.
High command institutes a rotation system
so that nearly every regiment of the French army is forced through this Hell.
This torrent of men is backed by a massive industrial effort;
a fleet of 12,000 trucks and special railway transport the 2,000 tons of ammunition,
required each day to defend Verdun.
The French and Germans each fire 300,000 shells a day,
20 million shells during the entire battle.
How are the millions of soldiers to be fed?
The generals think that the men need to eat lots of meat.
Troops get far more than civilians behind the lines.
The armies’ butchers slaughter the horses wounded in combat.
In the battle of Verdun, 7,000 horses die in a single day.
It takes an enormous effort to transport the food to the front lines
and a great deal of courage.
Marksmen on both sides target the supply convoys.
The trenches lack water.
Private Potcher writes: “We are dying of thirst,
but I drink more hooch in one day here than I have in my entire life”.
Hooch or rum, keeps the men going before an assault.
To cope with the horrors of daily life, there is an endless supply of rough wine or "plunk".
Private Hoques writes: “A glass of "plunk" too many
and they break into song to dispel the gloom
that gnaws at them like some invisible animal”.
The Germans too need comfort.
They find it in schnapps, in camaraderie, and religion.
Their experience mirrors that of their adversaries.
Corporal Carl Fritz of the 10th Mountain Battalion writes:
“We spent three days lying in shell holes, looking death in the eye,
expecting it at any moment”.
“One shell buries the dead the next one uncovers them again”.
In Verdun, in this cold month of March 1916, only the aviators escape the trenches.
The Kaiser's pilots are Lords of the skies. Mounting their wooden canvas deeds,
they see themselves as modern-day Knights.
One of them is Hermann Göring, 23 years old, aggressive and ambitious.
He amasses aerial victories and develops the heart of a merciless killer.
But in reality, pilots face every bit as much danger as foot soldiers.
Rarely strapped in, with no parachutes,
German aviators fly over the French lines of Verdun;
to photograph enemy positions or if possible, drop bombs on them
that is if they can evade French fighter aircraft.
The Germans also shoot down the balloons of artillery spotters.
It takes a lot of courage to go up with these balloons but it is a vital work.
Link to the ground by telephone, the officers direct artillery fire.
Protecting them becomes the priority as general Pétain affirms with this order:
“Sweep the Germans from the sky”.
With the development of AckAcks or antiaircraft guns,
the appearance of new and faster airplanes,
and the arrival of squadrons of fearless and implacable young pilots
in just three months’ time, France regains the upper hand in the skies over Verdun.
After five aerial victories fighter pilots earned the title of “ace”.
They become famous like Second Lieutenant Georges Guynemer, the 21-year-old,
who would be rejected by the Army in 1914, as too scrawny.
Now promoted “flag bearer for the public”, he is a national hero,
decorated with the “Legion of honor”, a model of devotion to his country.
The war in the sky is every bit as brutal as the war in the trenches
and more often than not ends in the same mud.
April 1916 sees the spring thaw; the Verdun soil, torn up by shelling,
turns into an impassable quagmire.
But the Army wants to project an image of determination.
After a French counterattack that advances the front of the few short yards,
a cameraman films another cameraman, filming an infantryman
who is laying new barbed wire.
In no-man's-land, the deadly expanse between the opposing trenches,
the enemy returns the very same night to cut down the barbed wire.
In Verdun, for 300 days and 300 nights, the Germans attack and the Allies hold on.
Yet there are touching human stories. When his entire company is gassed,
Corporal Pierre Weber, whose lungs are burnt,
is carried out by his less severely wounded comrades.
In a large hospital, far from the front,
Pierre Weber is cared for by a nurse Charlotte, they fall in love.
He is granted permission to recover in L’Étang-la-Ville, outside Paris,
and he brings Charlotte with him. Here they are,
in the Rose Garden of her sister Jaqueline, who is married
to a pioneer of home movies René Ferrari.
At 40, too old to fight, René Ferrari is assigned to the medical service
and is allowed to sleep at home.
Many such men serve on the home front, posted to factories or offices,
soldiers on leave view them with envy and bitterness.
Charlotte, like thousands of women,
devotes herself to her handsome military invalid
but does she really have a choice, already there are few men left.
Women don't want to be old maids and even worse fate then being a young widow.
In England, it is now common to marry in a heist, before groom returns to the front.
She will receive his pay after his death.
Everyone senses that the worst is yet to come.
Across the British Empire, a vast recruiting campaign enlists 500,000 more men.
Fathers and sons, cousins, neighbors, often enlist together,
but these patriotic volunteers cannot meet the ravenous needs of the major offensives.
Voluntary enlistment is eventually replaced by conscription.
French Canadians, have been reluctant to volunteer,
they do not identify with England, which they don't consider the motherland.
United by an unshakable Catholic faith, they are mistrustful of France,
which they see as anticlerical, but at the urging of their parish priests they sign up.
Upon their arrival in France, they are grouped in an entirely French-speaking unit;
the Royal 22nd Regiment or The Van Doos.
They are sent to the front on Somme River in early summer 1916.
They are pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome they received, but after all,
the local men and women speak French just as they do or almost as they do.
In the Van Doos, Édouard Légaré from Québec recounts:
“To strike up a conversation with a pretty girl, the favorite joke was to ask:
“Excuse me miss, where is the road to Berlin?””.
For French president Raymond Poincaré and the British King George V,
the Somme offensive decided upon at the conference of December 1915,
will break the German lines and open the road to Berlin.
However, French Commander-in-Chief, General Joffre,
now argues in favor of relieving the French forces, still entrenched in Verdun.
The fighting there has inflicted enormous losses - 40,000 dead in six months.
General Foch of France and General Haig of Britain
will have the honor of commending this huge offensive,
aimed at putting an end to the war, and they proudly display their full confidence.
The British are massed to the north of the town of Albert and the French to the south.
Their goal is to march on the occupied towns of Péronne and Bapaume,
penetrating the German trenches along at 30-mile(48km) long front.
The plan is familiar by now; crush the Germans with artillery fire,
before sending in the troops.
The size of the force is staggering - 40 divisions,
almost 600,000 men, and 4,000 pieces of artillery.
Lieutenant John Buchan writes: “Troops were everywhere on the move,
and the shifting of ammunition dumps nearer to the firing line, foretold what was coming”.
Buchan adds: “There was a curious exhilaration everywhere”.
“For the soldiers, the great offensive had finally come,
but these young recruits, smiling at the camera, have received minimal training,
this will be their first battle”.
The British are also counting on underground explosives to destroy the German front-line.
Since the introduction of trenches, each side has tried to tunnel
under the enemy trenches and blow them up.
It’s a sort of parallel war, harrowing and hidden.
Everyone listens for sounds coming from underground
which can mean either that the enemy are burrowing toward you
or that you’re closing in on his trench.
This time British sappers dug a tunnel nearly a mile (1.6km) long beneath the German trenches,
filling it with 24 tons of a powerful explosive.
July 1, 1916, 7:20 AM, the mine is blown up,
leaving a crater 300 feet across.
But the Germans had heard the sappers and withdrawn.
The most powerful underground mine of the war left no victims.
20 other mines are blown up.
7:30 AM, the British artillery which have been shelling the German lines for eight days
hold their fire, opening the way for an assault.
But the shelling hasn't cleared the barbed wire or destroyed concrete bunkers.
The Germans come out, stunned, but alive.
For 10 minutes nothing happens, the Germans have time to set up their machine guns.
7:40 AM, the British prepare to attack.
All these young inexperienced men are afraid.
To reassure them, Captain Billy Neville, 22,
is the first man over, dribbling a soccer ball across no-man's-land.
Until he is felled.
By the end of this hellish day, the British have suffered 20,000 dead.
40,000 troops are wounded.
They will have to endure a long and excruciating journey to the hospital.
Most of the time does delay means gangrene, amputation, or death.
Survivors report that the shelling destroyed nothing.
This doesn't stop General Haig from ordering further suicidal attacks.
In Paris, in the Élysée Palace, the president of the French Republic
Raymond Poincaré writes in his diary:
“Saturday, July 1, 1916”.
“Blood is flowing like water north of the Somme,
meanwhile sunlight dabbles the trees of the Elysée”.
“Elms, sycamores, chestnut trees, acacias,
radiate greens of every hue and delicious harmony”.
“Blackbirds, wood pigeons, and smaller birds, frolic on the lawn".
And he concludes: "Over there; in Verdun and the Somme,
thousands of brave young men are dying”.
In September at the Somme, the British unveiled a new weapon,
capable of piercing the barbed wire and opening the way for the infantry.
To mislead enemy spies, they refer to these armored assault vehicles as tanks.
At first, the Germans are terrified by the tanks,
but slow and vulnerable and deployed in too small numbers,
the early models prove easy targets for enemy artillery.
And day after day the carnage continues.
The troops of the Somme question their leaders’ intractability.
As a result, 50,000 Frenchmen die.
Overall 130,000 British troops also fall, including 23,000 Australians,
8,000 New Zealanders, 30,000 South African, 24,000 Canadians,
and every single volunteer from the then independent Dominion of Newfoundland,
as well as 160,000 Germans.
On November 18, 1916,
the French and British announce the end of the bloody battle of the Somme,
which has lasted five months.
They have advanced only 10 miles(16km) and reoccupied some German trenches,
where they take prisoners, either exhausted or death from the shelling.
Here, in Courcelette, the German prisoners and their captors,
French Canadians of the Van Doos, briefly put the war behind them.
A German doctor, Georg Batlin, of the 26 infantry division writes:
“It is inconceivable that this horrible fighting can continue much longer”.
“In the end, there will be no one left”.
“But how can there be peace, when we are intent on mowing down a whole generation
in the flower of its youth?”
In the spring of the following year, after the disastrous offensive,
known as the “Chemin des Dames”, French troops by the thousands
will refuse to move up to the front line which they know is a direct route to a mass grave.
In the prisonlike universe of the trenches, the men smoke nonstop
to mask the odor of rotting flesh,
and they vent their despair with the song “La Chanson de Craonne”,
named after the village where hundreds of their fellow soldiers were killed.
Farewell to life, farewell to love, Farewell to all women.
It's all over now, we are done for good with this awful war.
It’s in Craonne, upon the hill that we must meet our maker,
cos we are all sentenced to die, we've all been sacrificed.
On June 15, 1917, at the court-martial of the 17th division,
one of the French mutineers is found guilty of having said:
“We need to end the war not through victory, but through revolution”.
Revolution which has already broken out in Russia in February 1917,
the Russian soldiers have also mutinied.
The Czar has been driven out.
Will the revolution mean an end to this war?
Who can put an end to this inferno, when it is fanned by so many forces
and so much rage?
TIMING & TRANSCRIPTION danel32 /eng. to.est@gmail.com/