(melancholy instrumental music)
It's now 100 years since the end
of the First World War,
a conflict that claimed the lives
of over 3/4 of a million British men.
Now, featuring rare and previously unseen personal testimony
alongside newly restored archive film,
this groundbreaking three-part series
(cannon shots exploding) will tell the story
of the Great War as never before
from the suffering and sacrifice experienced
by the men on the front line.
The corpses there,
they all had rats nests in the cage of the chest.
And when you disturbed them,
the rats ran out of the chest.
You can't forget things like that.
To the dramatic change in women's lives
on the home front.
Oh, I felt when I was working on munitions,
I really felt,
well, I haven't got any brothers to go and fight.
I'm doing the next best thing,
and I was quite pleased to be able to do it.
In this film,
we'll meet the veterans who volunteered
to fight at the beginning of the war.
I had a pal in the army
and we were the best of pals together
and they called him, Joe.
Poor Joe.
And we'll find out what happened
to those they left behind.
I couldn't really imagine him not being there.
I couldn't imagine it.
I thought maybe one day they'll find out they made a mistake
and perhaps he might turn up one day.
This is the story of the tragedy
and turmoil of Britain's Great War.
(dramatic instrumental music)
(melancholy instrumental music)
(horses clip-clopping)
Britain declared war on Germany on the 4th of August, 1914,
after the German army invaded Belgium on route to Paris.
(army boots stomping in tandem)
Britain's small regular army set sail to engage them
and reserves from the army and navy were mobilized,
ready for action.
(melancholy instrumental music)
(horse huffing)
(crowd cheering)
Fearing a long and bloody conflict,
Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener,
called for 100,000 volunteers to take up arms
in a new civilian army.
(army boots stomping in tandem)
The response was extraordinary.
Your country needs you.
The Kitchener's
famous picture,
so we went
to stop
being taken over by some foreign country.
It was our duty,
nothing out of the ordinary.
It was obvious.
(melancholy instrumental music)
I was working with Chrishall Manufacturing Company
and this war broke out.
And as a young man
it was
my duty and the duty of every young man
to go and defend it against all invaders
and to give, if necessary,
our lives to do it.
Kitchener had no trouble in finding the first 100,000.
Dammit, couldn't get into the bloody army,
there was such a rush to get there,
to get on
and defeat the enemy
and prevent him from taking over this country.
(vehicles humming by)
(horses clip-clopping)
(transport trolley bell dinging)
Well, the war was declared in August
and everywhere you went in Glasgow,
the great, big poster's up of Kitchener
with his finger pointing at you.
No matter where you were,
this finger seemed to be pointing at you.
"Your king and country needs you."
(upbeat Scottish bagpipe music)
I worked in an insurance office
and now and again I could hear a piper and the left, right,
left, right.
And I went to the window and I could see
probably two or 300 men and the pipes always seemed
to do something to arouse my enthusiasm.
And I thought to myself,
well, I want to do something like this.
And when I told my manager of my insurance company,
they said, well,
it'll be a nice six months holiday for you.
Yes, you join up.
So I joined up.
(upbeat instrumental music)
I was only 15 when I joined up.
I was working down the coal mine
at a place called Rainford,
just outside Ormskirk.
(heavy machinery rumbling)
We were about six men
from Ormskirk who used to be on night work.
And this particular night one of the men was late
and he said,
"There's no work tonight, chaps.
"The war is breaking out tomorrow."
So we got to report to the headquarters.
(ominous instrumental music)
They shouted, they said,
"What do you want, sonny?"
"Well," I said,
"I want to join up with the other chaps."
So he said,
"You're so young, aren't you?"
I said, "No, I'm not so young."
I said, "I'm 18."
So he said,
"Are you sure?"
I said, "Yes, I'll go home and get my birth certificate."
He said, "It's all right.
"I'll take your word for it."
Of course, I got home.
And I told my parents
and my mother pled hell
(Dick chuckling)
because I'd no right going and she was going to stop me.
And my father said,
"Don't interfere with him.
"If he wants to go,
"let him go."
(ominous instrumental music)
It never entered your head, really,
to think about what the results was going to be.
(upbeat brass instrumental music)
On the day the war broke out,
I was just 20 years of age.
I thought I'd liKe to be a soldier and do a bit of shooting.
I was fancying being a rifleman,
that was the point.
And I went up to this place in Shepherd's Bush
where we joined on.
And they gave me then the choice
of all three different regiments I could've been in
but the third one was the old Sherwood Foresters.
It's a battalion and they were called the Robin Hood Rifles.
So I fancied that and I thought,
oh, I'd like to be a Robin Hood Rifle.
(upbeat instrumental music)
(horses clip-clopping)
(army boots stomping in tandem)
I didn't understand anything about what war was like
or what it was all about.
When we went to the (indistinct) at Colchester,
you have to ride all different horses,
nothing on them, no straddle,
no bridle, no nothing.
You have to have a stick and a little cane under each arm.
And then when the riding masters cracked the whip,
he didn't say anything.
He just cracked the whip and the horses,
all the horses that you were on stopped dead.
(horse neighing)
I never come off.
I would sit there but I'd put my arms around his neck.
I knew, but half of them fell off.
And the sergeant major shouted,
"Who the hell told you to dismount?"
(Albert chuckling)
See.
(melancholy instrumental music)
(horses clip-clopping)
While Britain's young men rushed to volunteer,
it was their loved ones at home who were left
to deal with the consequences.
The day war was declared,
we as a family were all
living on a farm.
(melancholy instrumental music)
Nobody more excited than my elder brother, George.
Keen for so long to be a soldier,
here was his chance.
(horses clip-clopping)
My father tried to persuade him against going so soon,
"Stopping through the harvesting," he said,
"and go then."
But nothing anybody did or said
would alter him.
He went into my mother's bedroom and he picked up a stick,
tucked it under his arm and marched about the bedroom.
"This is how I shall strut about the London parks," he said.
(Len chuckling)
Jokingly, of course.
(Len chuckling)
And
we sang him the little song.
♪ No more will I work in the harvest field ♪
♪ To reap the golden corn ♪
♪ But I'm going to join the army and I'm off tomorrow morn ♪
I don't think it occurred to any of them
that they might never come back again.
(melancholy instrumental music)
We were desperately in love with each other,
thinking of him day and night and he was me, yes.
We made that promise that as soon as the war was over,
which was about Christmas,
we'd get engaged,
because he was quite convinced that
he was going to be killed.
I didn't know what to say.
I know nothing about war or anything like that.
But all I could do was to tell him
to look on the bright side,
that there were better days in store when it was all over.
That was a promise he went away with in his heart
that it wouldn't be for long.
(indistinct chatter)
By the end of November, 1914,
over a million volunteers had joined Kitchener's army.
(melancholy instrumental music)
Meanwhile, on the Western front,
(cannon shots exploding) the British had already lost
close to 100,000 men.
What had begun as a mobile campaign had turned
to stalemate as both sides settled into the trenches
that would become the defining feature of the war.
They would soon stretch in a continuous line
from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps.
(digging spades clanging in soil)
Transforming Kitchener's new recruits into fighting men,
ready for the demands of trench warfare,
would take training and discipline,
the like of which most had never experienced before.
(trainees chanting)
I certainly enjoyed it.
Some of them were weaklings.
I was a weakling,
being an insurance roller,
but some of them were weaker than I was.
But it hardened me.
The more training you got,
the harder you became and the more used to it.
We began to do these physical jerks, physical exercises.
And this particular sergeant,
he got a nasty wagging tongue and he used to call us all,
"You flipping little mother's boys,"
and all that sort of talk
and used language that we never liked at all.
He used to use swear language too and we used
to absolutely dislike this fellow when he came
and took over.
(army boots stomping in tandem)
There was one little bugger,
a mustache
turned up
and yapping and shouting.
(melancholy instrumental music)
And he used to call me Littlefair 'cause he was shouting
and he couldn't get Littlefair.
And I was in one of them good humors,
I never answered him.
So he come up to me,
"Who the hell do you think you are?"
And I just stood.
And he said,
"I think you're a bastard."
As soon as he said that I,
(George clapping fist)
I hit him in the mouth with that.
I said, "Don't prove it."
(ominous instrumental music)
(indistinct chatter)
We saw these boys and they were all
sticking
bayonets into sacks of
straw where children used to play.
And they were running towards them
and told just where about in the sack,
that bayonet had to go.
(ominous instrumental music)
Your bayonets were always there to be used if necessary.
(trainees shouting)
You're killing the enemy when you're learning that,
when you're stabbing a sandbag full of sand.
When you stick that bayonet into it,
you're sticking one of the enemy,
you're not sticking the sandbag
and that's how you're taught.
You had to learn how to use a gun.
You used to go on musketry courses.
I got to be,
as it happened,
quite a good shot.
And I became eventually what they called a marksman
and so for which I got an extra sixpence a day on my wages.
You used to get an extra sixpence a day
if you were a qualified marksman which I was.
(gunfire exploding)
We were all, I think,
very proud to be in the army defending our country
for the people to come after us.
The morale was tremendous.
We were anxious to get on with the job.
We wanted to go to France and stop this nonsense.
(gunfire exploding)
(cannon shots exploding)
Back on the Western front,
the British army was facing a crisis as its artillery shells
were being used faster than they could be produced.
(somber piano music)
So to increase production,
thousands of women left their traditional domestic roles
and instead began making munitions.
Well, I had no brothers to go and fight for us,
so I said to dad,
"Could I go and work on munitions?"
And he said, "No."
And I said,
"Oh dad, we haven't got anybody to go and fight for us."
(somber instrumental music)
I must admit,
dad was always my favorite (Daisy chuckling)
and weedled around him to let me go to the Labor Exchange
and see if I could get work on the munitions.
You were supposed to be 18.
I was three or four months off of my 18th birthday.
But they wanted the workers so badly,
they
said, "Yes, all right then you can come."
I felt, when I was working on munitions,
I really thought I haven't got any brothers to go and fight,
I'm doing the next best thing.
And I was quite pleased to be able to do it.
Meanwhile, the red cross had launched an appeal
to recruit women aged over 19
to work as volunteers alongside professional nurses.
Known as the Voluntary Aid Detachment or VAD for short,
most were recruited from middle and upper class families,
as the job was unpaid.
(relaxing instrumental music)
I had to go up to (indistinct)
to see the head of the red cross.
He interviewed me over a double desk
and I was always very good at reading on the other side
when I was sitting there.
And he said,
"How old are you?"
So I said, "20, sir."
So he said,
"How old?"
And I see him now looking over the top of his glasses
and I said, "20, sir."
I saw him right down, age 20.
Apparent age, 16.
And I said,
"Now you've written it down, sir,
"in black and white,
"you can't alter it.
"But it isn't 16, it's 17."
(Marjorie chuckling)
And he did a grin and left it as it was and passed me.
(upbeat instrumental music)
By the early summer of 1915,
the first units of Kitchener's volunteer army
left their training camps to begin the journey
to the battlefields of France and Belgium.
(horses clip-clopping)
Most had never been abroad before.
I thought it was great,
you know, getting out of England,
going to somewhere new,
that's the feeling,
a lad's feeling as you might say.
It was more or less a novelty to you.
Well, we've never been out of England.
We've never seen out.
Aye, that was how
we felt.
We certainly wanted to
get out and do our bit.
Of course, you never know what it was going to be,
whether you were gonna shoot Germans
or whether they were gonna shoot you.
You never know (Jack chuckling)
what the future held.
(relaxing instrumental music)
I don't think I was ever afraid.
It never seemed to worry me.
Something was happening and you wanted to see
what was happening and you were there to witness it.
(whistle blowing)
I never thought of being killed.
I never thought of that.
And I thought it'd be good fun killing somebody.
(train clackety-clacking on rails)
(train horn blowing)
We were the best country in the world,
the best everything in the world.
We were all very proud of ourselves and that's why,
I think, Kitchener had no difficulty
in finding 100,000 men to go
and defend it against all invaders
and to give, if necessary,
our lives to do it.
(melancholy instrumental music)
(train clackety-clacking on rails)
Joining the men on their way
to the front were the nurses who'd look after them.
At the beginning of the war,
volunteers in the VAD weren't allowed to go overseas.
But as the casualty figures soured,
inexperienced recruits found themselves on route to France.
You don't know the word,
fear, at 17.
At least I don't think you do.
I never felt that at least.
I think the worst moment was really saying goodbye
to mother and father and wondering about coming back or not.
(crowd cheering)
(motivational instrumental music)
(ship horn blowing)
We landed at Baloise.
Of course, we had no idea where we were going to.
We were just on foot marching as it were,
laden right up with all our equipment
and all you could carry,
you know, everything on.
And you wondered what it was gonna be like.
(motivational instrumental music)
We were all happy.
We'd start singing.
No, there was no unhappiness about because
at that time we hadn't been in the front line trenches.
We didn't know what war really was.
You could probably
hear a very,
very faint noise of gunfire,
very, very faint.
And then the nearer we got, of course,
then we realized what we're in against.
(melancholy instrumental music)
Suddenly you begin to see the sky lighting up, flashing,
flashing, flashing,
and you begin to hear the noise of the guns.
You know you're getting nearer.
You're getting nearer.
You can't help feeling butterflies in your tummy.
(gunfire exploding)
You began to shake then.
You began to shake then the nearer we got to the front line.
When you heard that noise you began to realize that
we're for it.
You went up the line wondering what it was like,
will I come back.
All these things went through your mind, aye.
If a bloody Jerry comes for me,
I'll give him the bayonet.
Yeah, no,
all that went through your mind.
(melancholy instrumental music)
And then, of course,
you get on the front line and the first thing you want
to do is where are the Germans?
You put a foot up on the fire step,
which might be 18 inches,
two feet up and somebody says,
"Sit down, you silly bee,
"you'll get shot."
You still wanted to look over to see where the Germans were?
(melancholy instrumental music)
For the most part,
life in the trenches consisted of daily routine,
lack of sleep and utterly miserable conditions.
When you get in the front line,
you're completely lost and you're cut off
from the rest of the world as it were
and you got to be there until you can be relieved.
(wind howling) (rain trickling)
When the rain came down,
it would just stay there and you'd be walking about in mud.
(water splashing)
And then when that dried you can guess the condition
of your feet or your legs,
particularly to those who wore a quilt.
If the mud would work up onto their bare knees,
it was pretty painful at times when the mud dried
and the hairs were rubbing.
It was pretty painful.
(water splashing)
(mud squishing)
You never get a chance of a wash or a shave
for several days,
nothing like that.
So you can just imagine the state we were in.
You had to sleep more or less sitting up.
You can't sleep sitting down in the mud,
for instance, could you?
You couldn't sleep in the mud.
You were sitting on what they call a fire step.
You just sit on there and doze.
You couldn't lay on the ground unless it was dry weather.
(somber instrumental music)
Once their shift in the trenches was over,
the men could enjoy a few days respite behind the lines.
Here, they could relax,
get clean and rid their bodies of the lice
which were a constant nuisance.
The worst thing in the war was being so lousy,
you could run along with a candle with your shirt
today and you'll be just as bad tomorrow.
That was terrible.
That was the worst thing of the lot.
I used to get paraffin out of a damn Tilley lamp
and just rub me,
rub myself all over with paraffin.
That killed the buggers.
(upbeat brass music)
Safe behind the lines,
the men often put on their own entertainment
to boost morale.
Someone lent me an old drum.
It wasn't much good but there was a drum
and there was a couple of sticks to it.
And so I got up there and I Sanmao number
with the drum.
And it was.
♪ Beholded me, a one-man band ♪
♪ There once were six but down the strand ♪
♪ We clicked for a bob and five got canned ♪
(Jack imitating drumming music)
♪ So I have just come here to say ♪
♪ Everybody's got to live some way ♪
♪ And the only tune that I can play is ♪
(Jack imitating drumming music)
And I had went on,
there was about three verses to that one,
till when I got to the end I stuck the sticks right
through the bloody drum.
(Jack chuckling)
And of course that caused roars of laughter at the back.
(men chuckling)
(cannon shots exploding)
But all too soon the men were back
in the trenches where the greatest danger came
from German artillery fire.
(cannon shots exploding)
And the first dorsal trenches I had was Sint-Elooi
on the right of Ypres.
It was supposed to be the cushy part of the line
which still a lot of shit flew over the top of your head.
(George chuckling)
(canon shots exploding)
You could see the trench mortars coming over,
a great, big thing like that with a sort of
two-foot handle on it.
It looked like that from just up in the air.
You could see it coming,
going up and then you could see it coming down.
If it's coming and you think it's coming towards you,
you run to the left or run to the right.
And if you're lucky you miss it.
If you're unlucky, well,
you've gone.
(cannon shots exploding)
All the time you wondered
whether you were gonna be the next one to be killed.
(canon shots exploding)
The padre used to say a little prayer.
And he said,
"However near," and that helped us and that helped me,
"however near you are to death,
"there's somebody nearer."
And that always happens in the trenches.
(dramatic ominous instrumental music)
(gunfire exploding)
I was with a friend and all
of a sudden there was this terrific bang overhead.
(canon shot exploding)
It was a terrific bang so it must've been very near to us.
And all of a sudden, of course,
all the earth above us all suddenly collapsed
and came right down straight on top of us,
absolutely as we were sitting there,
buried us just completely alive.
It covered us right in.
And I knew I must've been struggling hard to breathe.
I couldn't move.
I couldn't move a hand, foot,
only my toes in my boots.
How I survived on whatever breath I had got in my body,
I have no idea from that day to this.
(melancholy instrumental music)
Wounded men were taken
to casualty clearing stations
behind the lines for treatment.
Here, inexperienced volunteer nurses worked
alongside their professional colleagues,
dealing with the terrible injuries caused
by bullets and shrapnel.
You were called the dirty nurse and you had
to do all the mucky things.
And they had just amputated the leg and they had put it
in a bucket and I had to take the wretched thing away
in a bucket down to the incinerator.
I didn't like it.
You have no idea what a leg weighs
when its one that's amputated.
I had to take it like that
with the foot sticking up like that,
all the way down to the incinerator.
I didn't enjoy that at all.
(melancholy instrumental music)
The girls of my age or inexperienced girls of any age,
it wasn't what you do normally.
But, of course,
in war you do different things
from what you do in other times.
You just carry on as soon as you can.
For the men on the front line
who lived with the constant threat of death,
comradery was vital to morale and close bonds
of friendship were formed in the trenches.
Well, they would ask,
where do you come from,
what did you do,
what did you work at, any cigarettes,
you got a light,
you got a gasper?
And they're all friendly.
Are you married, no.
Any girl, oh yes,
half a dozen.
Yes.
Yes, very friendly.
I had a pal in the army
and we were the best of pals together
and they called him, Joe.
He was a grand lad.
(melancholy instrumental music)
We had our ups and downs between us, but still,
we were always good pals.
We
helped one another.
Aye.
What I had
was his and what he had was mine.
If he had no writing paper
and wanted to write a letter and I had it,
he got it, a pen.
We were all like that.
Aye.
(indistinct chatter)
The ritual of writing
and receiving letters was one of the few treats the men had
to look forward to.
Around 2 billion letters were delivered
by the British Army Postal Service
over the course of the war.
Let raised the spirits and a reassuring note
from a sweetheart could ease the pain of separation.
I used to write letters to him and tell him
that I missed him,
missed him an awful lot and
I wish that he was a bit nearer so I could see more of him.
I'd always tell him that I wouldn't look at anybody else
while he was away and that I'd wait for him,
I'd wait for him for eternity.
As long as ever it was necessary,
I would wait for him.
I said to him, I said,
"Just think of the future,
"the future and us."
And that's what I thought of.
I was living for the future and to live my future with him.
(canon shots exploding) (ominous instrumental music)
Back on the Western front,
it was the job of the army's marksmen
to harass the enemy whenever they could.
This often meant leaving the trench
to crawl into no man's land.
You had a camouflage hood made of this big wooden thing
that's all like green leaves with holes
in the front so you could see.
You had a camouflage suite on.
You had camouflage gloves and a camouflage sort of
to hide your gun till you got lying down.
And if you see anything
that's really worthwhile having a pot at,
you used to have a shot or two.
(ominous instrumental music)
If your target is close enough
and your target is still enough that you've got the time
to think of when to shoot,
I should probably shoot at the head.
(gunfire exploding)
- For many, there was always the temptation
to take a pot shot from an observation post
within the trench.
My best friend, Lenny (indistinct),
I'd had five or six shots and then he said,
"Let me have a go, Smiler."
And he jumps onto the fire trench.
I'm down in the trench and the fire trench is up there
where you stand on and shoot through that little hole.
And
he said, "Let me have a go."
And he had two or three and then I could see him falling.
The sniper had got him right through that little hole and
his rifle was still stuck in the hole up there.
Lenny, Lenny's rifle still stuck in the hole there.
The sniper had got him through there
and the bullet went right through here and out the back.
(melancholy instrumental music)
That finished me as far as that go,
thinking at the minute I had got two
or three other good mates, but Lenny,
I never really forgot it,
not till this day.
(melancholy instrumental music)
After a year of stalemate in the trenches,
(horse huffing)
the allies planned a major offensive
against German positions in Champagne and Artois,
to begin in the autumn of 1915.
(horses clip-clopping)
The British would attack 40 miles south of Ypres,
at the French coal mining town of Loos.
It would be the first time over the top
for the men of Kitchener's army.
You've got to get on with the job.
You've got to go forward and beat the enemy.
You were surrounded with a lot of damn good chaps.
They were all damn good fellas out to fight
for their country.
As Kitchener said,
"Your king and country needs you."
And we were out (indistinct).
If you got shot,
well, that's too bad.
Not too bad but you got to get on with the job.
(horses clip-clopping)
A huge artillery bombardment
to knock out the German defenses would precede the attack.
At home, Britain's munitions workers toiled around the clock
to meet the demands.
12-hour shifts each time.
12 hours day one week,
12 hours night the next week.
You came off at 07:30 Sunday morning and you started
on day work 07:30 on Monday morning.
Week in, week out.
I had never stayed up all night in my life
when I started on night work.
I never thought I'd get through that shift.
But I did and like everything else,
it's surprising what you can do when you've got to.
(Daisy chuckling)
(melancholy instrumental music)
(canon shots exploding)
(gunfire exploding)
Your main object was to get to the German weir
as soon as you got your coat.
You got to feel like
in a race.
You're waiting to start off in a race,
a sprint or a long distance race
and they're just waiting for the word,
for the off.
(bomb exploding)
(whistle blowing)
At 6:30 a.m.,
the men went over the top under a barrage of artillery fire.
(gunfire exploding)
I was that near to one of the guns
that it burst my ear
because the eardrum, it bled.
It bled and they had to pack it with cotton wool.
So I went over the top with my ears already wounded.
(gunfire exploding)
The Battle of Loos, yes,
it was the 25th of September.
Well, I was afraid then.
(gunfire exploding)
You get the word, advance,
and you advance.
You're not on the parade ground when you're over the front.
The parade ground,
you've got to be so many inches away from each other.
But when you go over the top,
you can't measure that.
Some can run faster than the others.
(bombs exploding)
You didn't do anything bloody daft.
You know, I'm a British,
that style, you didn't do that.
You went over very quietly
and where there was a bit of shelter,
you took it.
Aye.
(motivational instrumental music)
As the men moved forward,
it became apparent that the bombardment had failed
to destroy the German defenses.
It's not a nice experience to see neighbors,
if you like to call it,
neighbors falling by your side.
(gunfire exploding) (gunfire whizzing)
You could feel the whizzing of the machine gun
while its flying past you,
just missing you kind of thing.
You hadn't to stop.
You had to keep on no matter what happened.
Even if you're losing men by the thousands,
you had to keep on going.
(gunfire whizzing) (gunfire exploding)
And the guns would fire almost straight at you.
(gunfire whizzing)
More than once you could hear the whiz
of a shell going past.
The chap here on my right,
I was speaking to him about something
and then I turned to this fellow,
I turned back again,
he was missing.
One of those shells straight at him.
He was missing.
Then I turned to this fella on my left,
I said, "Bill's gone."
And I turned to this fellow,
lying there, he's down.
(canon shots exploding)
(gunfire exploding)
The shells bursting
and there was shrapnel flying all over.
I knew what had happened and down he went and groaned.
If I'd had time to do it,
to lift his head up and try to talk to him,
that's what I would've tried to do.
But
no good,
you had to keep going,
either that or get trampled on.
Poor Joe.
(melancholy instrumental music)
We'd not even said so long to one another.
Aye.
(horses clip-clopping)
By the end of the battle,
British casualty figures totaled over 50,000 men.
Over 16,000 had been killed.
Among them was Len Whitehead's brother, George.
The first we knew of it,
of his being killed was
a pal of his,
who joined up at much the same time,
wrote to my mother.
"Dear Mrs. Whitehead,
"I am writing to tell you your son, George,
"has been killed."
My mother, of course,
burst into tears
and
after a time when she calmed down a little she said to me,
"Go and tell your father."
My father was plowing in the field near to the farmhouse
and I waited for him
to finish about with his plow and two horses.
"George has been killed,"
I told him.
And
he didn't answer
but left his horses all steaming in the
mild
late October weather
and we walked back in silence to the house.
When we got to the house he went to the bottom
of the stairs and called up,
"That's all right, (indistinct)."
He made no attempt to go up to comfort my mother
but went into the kitchen.
Sat in his wooden armchair and put his arms on the table
and his head on his arms for a little while,
wept, I think,
and he went back to his plowing.
(melancholy instrumental music)
(horses clip-clopping)
Across Britain, scenes like these
were now becoming all too familiar as thousands were left
to mourn lost loved ones.
And with no body to bury,
it was hard for some to accept that those dearest
to them would not be coming home.
I was working at Palace Hotel Buxton,
a little
housemaid, and one of the porters came up with this letter
from the War Office.
When I saw it my heart sank a little bit.
I thought it must be something very, very important.
And
I thought if it was a letter from Ted,
it'd be an ordinary,
it'd be a smaller affair
and a soldier's one.
But this one looked quite important.
(melancholy instrumental music)
When I opened it,
it was to say that they regretted to tell me
that Ted had been killed.
The letters from me were found on his body
and
that's why they could find out where I was,
you see.
I couldn't really imagine him not being there.
I couldn't imagine it.
I thought maybe one day they'll find out they made a mistake
and perhaps he might turn up one day.
I couldn't imagine life without him, I couldn't.
But it dawned on me after a while
but stayed with me for years,
years after.
(somber instrumental music)
I thought to myself,
if my time comes let's hope it's a bullet,
let's hope its sudden.
(whistle blowing)
If I've got to go,
I've got to go.
Let's hope its sudden.
(cannon shots exploding)
We were able to see the infantry
(cannon shots exploding) going forward.
In some cases they didn't get very far.
They were just wiped out.
(dramatic instrumental music)