Was Europe trying to kill itself during those 4 years,
from 1914 to 1918?
In 1914, the Germans attacked.
War spread
across the planet,
like death, with its scythe.
But especially in Russia, Belgium,
Italy, France, the Middle East and the Balkans.
World War I was a massacre, on a vast scale.
It was a huge crime.
Ten million people died.
A quarter of French 20-year-old men were killed.
In 1915,
an anonymous soldier filmed a burial squad.
In 1916, a survivor of the Battle of Verdun wrote:
"They have also killed my emotion."
Millions of widows, orphans and broken-hearted mothers
were left to grieve.
But on 11 November 1918,
news of the ceasefire reached Mme Diaz,
in Bourges.
The armistice had been signed.
A bugler
called Pierre Sellier sounded the war's end.
The long-awaited moment had been 1,562 days in coming.
The war's last shell was symbolically buried.
One billion had been fired,
each at a cost of about 100 euros.
World War I had cost the equivalent
of five trillion euros.
On 11 November 1918, people were dreaming
of a different, fairer world,
in which their children would be happy.
One of the 20th century's great minds,
Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author, wrote:
"The war was over, but at the same time it was not.
"But we did not know that."
APOCALYPSE The Impossible Peace
1918-1926
The armies of the British Empire,
of America, of France and its colonies,
of Belgium, Italy, Portugal,
Serbia, Romania, Russia and beyond
had conquered the German Empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and the Ottoman Empire.
The war had been won.
Leaders told to the crowds
that good had triumphed.
Albert Simonin, a popular novelist, witnessed the general jubilation.
He wrote:
"In the crowd,
"workers and ladies in hats were hugging.
"Men's hands slipped down women's backs,
"or into their blouses as their mouths met."
Everyone thought this was the end
of what they called
"the war to end all wars".
Corporal Louis Barthas wrote:
"I was at last free of the claws of militarism,
"for which I felt
"a hatred that I wanted to pass on to those around me.
"I'd tell everyone that patriotism,
"glory and military honour
"were just words that masked war's ugliness
"and cruelty."
LONDON
Victors or vanquished,
would the great empires survive?
The war's carnage
had stoked desires for independence.
Attacks in the imperial territory of Ireland
shook the British Empire
in 1916.
The English paraded what they saw as Irish rebels
tied to the Union Jack. But how long could that last?
Calls for independence
swept through the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and its defeated people.
Czech, Slovak,
Croat and Slovenian secessionists
wanted support by the USA.
President Wilson had won the war
and now wanted to win the peace.
His promise of a right to self-determination
clearly implied independence.
Wilson wanted to allow people to choose their own nation
borders and regimes.
Empires collapsed.
People rebelled.
Kings fled.
Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria,
and Princess Zita
abandoned their palace
for a less glamorous exile.
Mehmed IV, the last Ottoman Sultan,
saw his empire dismembered
and replaced by the modern Arab world.
Those that had resisted
returned as heroes.
In Belgium.
King Albert I, and Queen Elisabeth,
who was originally German,
but had worked with nurses at the front,
were cheered by the people.
Albert I granted universal male suffrage.
After four years of occupation,
Belgium was overjoyed on 11 November 1918.
Belgians paid tribute to their Canadian liberators,
victors of the Hundred Days Offensive,
the war's last battle,
which had caused two million casualties.
The war seemed to have been suddenly frozen.
In Flanders, Scottish troops found a train
loaded with German grenades.
In northern France,
the Germans had left behind an apocalyptic sight.
They'd methodically destroyed
factories and their machines.
People could return to their lives.
The armistice took effect
on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
But the armistice was not the same as peace.
Combat was interrupted by the difficult work of drawing up
a peace treaty.
The novelist Henry Fauconnier wrote to his fiancée :
"I fear we are no readier for peace
"than we were for war.
"This is the most critical period.
"Fortunately we are the victors."
But did the Germans really feel defeated?
They had occupied Belgium and north France
since 1914.
Their withdrawal included the cession
of Alsace and Lorraine.
A few days later,
a symbolic demonstration was organized
in Paris,
with the far-right Action Française.
Veterans scattered soil from Alsace
to celebrate the territory's return to France.
Alsace had been lost in 1870,
with part of Lorraine,
following the disastrous Franco-Prussian war.
Alsace was French again
and defeated veterans of the 1870 war
showed their loyalty to France.
You will not have
Alsace and Lorraine.
We shall remain French, in spite of you.
You have germanised the plain.
School children and their mothers
kissed the French flag.
You will not have it,
ever.
Not everyone was happy about the return of the French.
Catholics had fared better under the Germans
than under France's anti-clerical Republic.
Many Alsatians had enjoyed the Germans' order
and efficiency for half a century.
But no one consulted them.
The French president, Raymond Poincaré, was from Lorraine.
After the first heavy French losses, in 1914,
Poincaré's attempts
to achieve peace
had proven impossible
due to Germany's attachment
to Alsace and Lorraine.
The bloodbath continued.
The German's retreated cheerfully
and in good order.
But Germany had been profoundly shaken by the war.
Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who had declared war on France in 1914,
had abdicated and gone into comfortable exile in the Netherlands,
as one of the conditions of the armistice.
Germany was humiliated,
but Wilhelm II could not be blamed alone
for the war.
GERMANY
German soldiers were cheered
across the land.
They did not feel they'd lost the war
and saw the armistice as a stab in the back.
Corporal Adolf Hitler was later able to exploit
that bitterness.
The troops felt they'd been betrayed
by the politicians of the new republic,
like the socialist Philipp Scheidemann.
The old and the rotten have collapsed!
The monarchy has crumbled!
Long live change! Long live the German republic!
Rosa Luxemburg
indoctrinated the demobbed soldiers
with revolutionary Marxism.
She claimed:
"Bourgeois society
"claims legitimacy and order while wallowing in blood.
"It is dishonoured, while the Russian Revolution
"honours international socialism."
RUSSIA
In Russia,
Lenin's Bolsheviks
had taken power, imposing the Red Terror
and eliminating anti-communists in a bloody civil war.
Bolshevik propaganda films
showed prisoners,
including British, French and American troops,
who'd fought for the anti-communists.
Lenin denounced
the foreign intervention.
The capitalists are fighting
a war against the Soviets.
They want to give power to the Tsar,
the landowners and the capitalists.
That will never happen!
Lenin's words inspired young people in Russia
and Europe.
Revolution was brewing in Hungary.
Violent communists,
known as the Lenin-Fiúk - the Lenin Boys -
killed thousands in a matter of weeks.
Financed by Russia, they were instructed
"to butcher the counter-revolutionaries
"and choke them in blood before they choke the revolution."
An allied intervention
put an end to their bloodthirsty madness.
By late 1918,
central Europe was in flames,
with Germany following Russia and Hungary.
Communists were on the offensive.
GERMANY
The Spartacus League was named
after the ancient slave revolts.
They were opposed by the Freikorps,
paramilitaries recruited from the army,
who executed revolutionary leaders
including Rosa Luxemburg.
Some German families were nostalgic for the war.
But most wanted a return
to peace and prosperity.
But what fate awaited their sons, twenty years later,
at the Battle of Stalingrad, in the Russian snow?
What fate awaited this Jewish family?
1 December 1918
On 1 December 1918,
according to the armistice, Allied troops
entered Germany
and occupied the Rhineland.
The Rhine was a natural border, the valley of every invasion
and the symbol of Franco-German conflict.
Many Germans saw the presence of French troops
as preferable to chaos.
But resentment and hostility
quickly resurfaced.
The future director Max Ophuls was among those children.
His memoirs describe his distress
at the brutality of the French troops.
African soldiers were accused of rape.
In 1940,
the Germans took cruel revenge on colonial prisoners
and Hitler sterilized the children born of mixed-race relations.
The Germans also felt little affection
for the British army, with its Canadian troops,
who yearned to be back in Winnipeg or Montreal.
Canada belonged to the British Empire
but World War I
gave had created an increasing sense of nationalism.
Things were different
for the 100,000 US soldiers.
The Doughboys, as they were known,
were more popular.
One of them wrote:
"We fought the Krauts,
"as we used to call them,
"but the US wasn't invaded
"and New York didn't suffer.
"We wanted peace, not revenge
"And a good few of us had German roots."
CHRISTMAS 1918
A historic visit to Europe was made by Woodrow Wilson,
the first US president never to have left
the American continent,
shown here with future president Franklin Roosevelt,
then assistant secretary of the navy.
Wilson was to attend the peace conference.
LONG LIVE WILSON
PARIS, 14 DECEMBRE 1918
He arrived in Paris on 14 December 1918,
with his wife, Edith,
the great-great granddaughter of the Indian princess Pocahontas.
He was given a triumphant welcome.
Wilson promised
to create a world that was good to live in,
in which all nations could enjoy the freedom
that France, the USA,
the UK and Italy had paid for so dearly.
Marcel Cachin, the future communist leader,
wrote in L'Humanité:
"Wilson touched the proletariat deeply.
"He alone spoke the language of good will
"and justice."
Wilson was 62.
A former lawyer and president of Princeton,
the Democratic politician was elected in 1912
and re-elected in 1916 on the slogan:
"He kept us out of war."
But once in power,
he took his country into the conflict.
In 1918, he proposed a 14-point programme
of economic and political liberalism
and the maintenance of peace
through the creation of the League of Nations.
In Paris, he faced another political giant,
Clemenceau, the 77-year-old head of the French government.
Taking power at the peak of the war,
he'd governed with an iron will, despite his age.
Known as the Father of Victory or the Tiger,
he wanted to extract
humiliating reparations from Germany,
to pay for the damage done to France.
The USA and the UK feared that such measures
would ruin Germany
and bring about Bolshevism and civil war.
On 3 January 1919, after spending Christmas
with George V,
he visited King Victor-Emmanuel III,
in Rome.
His European tour
was intended to win popularity and defend his doctrine
of world peace.
And he sought the people's right
to self-determination.
The Italians welcomed him enthusiastically,
but more for his victory than for his ideas.
Nationalist movements worried that self-determination
would lead to territorial losses.
Among the active nationalists
was Benito Mussolini.
The future dictator decried Wilson
as a bandit of the international plutocracy.
Paris, 18 January 1919
On 18 January 1919, Wilson was in Paris
for the peace conference
that would put an end to World War I
and create a new European order,
under new international law.
27 nations were represented,
but for Wilson, the four great victorious powers
were all that that counted.
Clemenceau, from France, evaded the cameras.
Lloyd George, from the UK, sought them out.
As did the Orlando, from Italy.
Over six months,
they discussed the terms that they would impose
on the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires,
which were not represented at the negotiating table.
But the Germans trusted Wilson.
His doctrine seemed moderate
and likely to maintain their national integrity.
The Germans feared Clemenceau,
who was obsessed by his more populous
and productive German neighbour.
After six months of talks,
representatives of the victorious powers
convened at Versailles.
28 June 1919.
The date wasn't chosen at random.
It was a terrible
anniversary.
Five years earlier, on 28 June 1914,
in Sarajevo,
the Archduke Franz Ferdinand
had been shot.
His assassination triggered World War I.
And the place was symbolic, not only to the French.
The German Empire had been declared here, in 1871,
after the French defeat,
heralding its presence as a global power.
Reflecting Clemenceau's desire for revenge,
four heavily mutilated veterans
were present to receive the Germans.
The Germans arrived at 3 p.m.
They were given a few minutes to sign.
The treaty was placed on this table,
in the Hall of Mirrors.
The German army was limited to 100,000,
with no air force or heavy artillery.
Its colonies were taken and its navy reduced.
And it had to pay enormous reparations,
the equivalent of 500 billion euros.
Germany lost 10% of its territory.
As an eastern buffer,
the Allies recreated Poland,
giving it access
to the Baltic Sea,
by cutting Germany in two.
This absurd situation made peace impossible.
GERMANY - POLAND - GERMANY
By 3.15 p.m.
the Treaty of Versailles had been signed.
The four victors
went out to greet the world's press.
Wilson later said
the greatest mistake
was in giving Germany reason
to seek revenge,
thereby sowing the seeds of war
and committing an injustice.
Clemenceau disagreed, confidently saying:
"Germany will pay."
But he was tired and added:
"Making peace proved harder than making war."
The enormity of the disaster
had left people stunned.
Another great intellectual,
Paul Valéry, wrote in 1919:
"Our civilizations
"are now aware of their mortality.
"We had heard of the collapse
"of empires, with their men and apparatus,
"but we felt unconcerned.
"We have now seen that History's abyss
"can accommodate us all.
"We have felt that a civilization is as fragile as a life."
14 July 1919
On 14 July 1919,
France's national day was a celebration
of victory
and of the peace treaty
that had crushed Germany.
But it was also an unhappy festival of widows.
It was hard for the survivors to move on.
In a censored letter
a soldier wrote:
"You can't celebrate millions of deaths."
VICTORY FESTIVAL 14 JULY, PARIS
After the war's end,
Clemenceau ordered a grandiose parade
on the Champs-Élysées,
for all of the victorious armies.
The Outlook,
a major American magazine,
sent Elbert Baldwin to cover it.
He wrote
of the heaving crowd,
with people standing on chairs, to see.
People climbed up on ladders and rooftops.
A canon sounded,
giving rise to a mighty cheer.
Joffre, victor of the Marne, was there,
as was Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief.
Pershing, the US commander,
looked severe.
Someone cried out: "Smile!"
The relaxed Belgians smiled.
The British and Scots received the most applause.
People cheered when they saw the Japanese.
There were Greeks, Poles, Serbs and Portuguese.
But where were the Russians,
who sacrificed
two million man for this victory?
Then Marshal Pétain arrived on a white horse.
The journalist was surprised by his youth.
The renowned Robert de Flers wrote in Le Figaro:
"The uniforms of all countries
"were stained the same colour of blood.
"Those that had left limbs on the battlefield
"hobbled in their glory."
Beyond the parade to the victors' glory,
what became of the eight million invalids
who had lost limbs,
been gassed or blinded,
of psychologically damaged?
BELGIUM
GREAT BRITAIN
UNITED STATES
GERMANY
AUSTRALIA
And those
with facial injuries,
who had lost their teeth,
noses or eyes?
Henriette Rémi, who treated officers
for the Red Cross, wrote:
"I have never seen a more atrocious sight.
"Amid a revolting stench,
"I saw twenty monsters, with nothing human about them,
"their faces in ruins."
Henriette Rémi accompanied one of the wounded men
to meet his son, who screamed when he saw him.
"He wept and said:
"'Am I so horrible?
"'To have been reduced from a man to this,
"'a terror to my son, a burden to my wife
"'and the shame of humanity. Let me die!'
"He killed himself."
A man,
who had married in 1914,
before leaving for the war,
wrote:
"My face scares people.
"I howl in despair.
"My face is reduced to a snout
"and from that snout
"comes the baying of a hunted beast."
"The war has left cemeteries and ruins,"
wrote Marcelle Capy,
one of the female workers
from the munitions factories,
Women were denied the vote
that was given to British women.
And they were fired from their work,
to make way for the returning men.
Their only hope was for a lasting peace.
Marcelle Capy became a militant pacifist, writing:
"The so-called peace treaties
"are really a source of conflict.
"Inspired by vengeance,
"they make a dogma of injustice and a chaos of Europe.
"The Versailles treaty is absurd."
The treaty fed into Hitler's discourse
of revenge.
This is the earliest known footage of him,
at a far-right demonstration in 1919.
At that time he was just an anti-Bolshevik informant,
but he saw how he could make use of the untenable treaty.
He wrote:
"Versailles is a disgrace
"and represents the spoliation of our people.
"France, our mortal enemy,
"is strangling us, pitilessly."
Hitler saw hardship
everywhere around him.
He said:
"May the shame and hatred of 60 million Germans become
"a torrent of flames."
The Treaty of Versailles
required the Germans to surrender
any weapons that they had retained.
Their planes and canon were destroyed,
on Allied orders.
Germany's leaders shared in the additional humiliation.
Their downsized army
became an elite instrument
for their future revenge on France and Britain.
Unable to take power,
they pressured the government,
until finding an ideal leader
in Hitler.
In 1919,
swastikas were seen on helmets.
One officer, Ernst Jünger, wrote:
"The violence is just beginning, not ending."
Lieutenant Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz wrote:
"We laughed when they said the war was over,
"because we are war. Its flame burns within us."
German high society supported the army and Hitler.
Those that made guns and uniforms
formed a new, improvised elite.
The Berliners called them Raffke -
"money grabbers".
Alongside the extreme poverty,
they lived it up, cynically.
The French trenches were empty
and the birds had started to sing again.
But the Allies were finding it difficult
to demobilize nine million men.
The military censors
were still active and intercepted a letter
from one of the forgotten soldiers,
who wrote:
"We hope they'll help us, after four years of suffering.
"We hope for deliverance. We feel increasing disgust.
"Now that the war is over, let those
"that saved you return to our families."
And to their wives,
as Mistinguett, the biggest star singer of that time put it.
My only joy and happiness on this Earth
is my man.
I've given all I have, my love and my heart,
to my man.
Even at night, when I dream, I dream of him,
of my man.
It's not that he's handsome, rich or well-built,
but I love him, foolishly.
Five million French soldiers couldn't even be provided
with civilian clothing.
Dyeing their uniforms was deemed impossible,
so they were each payed the equivalent of 40 euros.
Many were farmers and went back to work.
In France and elsewhere,
city workers had more trouble finding work.
Women were fired from factories,
but arms production was scaled down
and industry couldn't adapt immediately.
Australians and New Zealanders
experienced the greatest problems
after being demobilized.
While stuck in insanitary transit camps,
the disillusioned soldiers and officers
tried to kill time,
putting on strange shows
about the death that they'd cheated,
but had returned to threatened them
in the form of a flu epidemic that was thought
to have originated in Spain.
It was a bird flu and it killed over 20 million,
more than the war itself,
among a population weakened by privation and poverty.
The troops' return was complicated.
Earl Sutherland, from Toronto, wrote to his mother:
"I hope you'll accept
"my marriage to a girl whose father is German.
"Rosa is kind and serious
"and has been good to me.
"Please don't judge her before meeting her."
Lieutenant Arthur Lapointe, of the 22nd French Canadian regiment,
returned to Quebec, writing:
"I'm overjoyed to see
"this land that I thought was lost to me."
Part of his family had died of flu.
His neighbour had lost her husband in 1917
at the Battle of Vimy.
A special commission noted of the returning troops:
"Most are returning in a state of mental lethargy.
"They have become so used to military discipline,
"and to being fed and clothed
"they've lost their autonomy."
Canada's military hospitals commission stated:
"All invalided soldiers should know
"that the word 'impossible' is not in our dictionary.
"Their future success in work
"will depend on their energy
"and commitment during re-education."
478,000 Americans also returned from France,
after being disinfected
and cleansed of parasites
from the trenches or brothels.
Doctors main concern was the Spanish flu.
Black soldiers regretted leaving.
After escaping racism in France,
many were going back to the segregated south,
where violent attacks perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan
were on the rise.
Slavery was never far from the plantations,
where the children sang a well-known spiritual,
"Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen".
Meanwhile,
in the north, in New York,
the black troops were celebrating.
The bandleader James Reese Europe wrote
of people cheering from the windows and in the streets.
As the regiment advanced,
it was greeted by mothers, friends and brothers.
They were known as the Harlem Hellfighters.
They French had taken them out
of the kitchens and garages
and they'd fought heroically.
They paraded on Fifth Avenue.
One of their supporters,
Marcus Garvey,
stated his belief in equal rights
for black people.
President Wilson supported segregation
between blacks and whites,
while pursuing self-determination
for people outside the USA.
Back in the USA,
he went on tour to raise support
for the peace treaty.
Wilson knew that the Senate was unconvinced.
Voters of German background
opposed a treaty that they saw
as an insult to their former country.
Wilson also knew
that senators were hostile to the creation
of the League of Nations.
LN imposed a duty of mutual protection,
with the potential to draw the USA
into further conflict.
Wilson tried to convince people, claiming that
failure to support the League would break the world's heart.
Wilson was exhausted
and suffered a stroke, which left him paralysed and mute.
What would the senate do?
If it voted against the peace treaty,
would peace even be possible?
While it waited on the USA,
Europe prioritized reconstruction.
Belgium and Serbia were damaged,
but France was in ruins,
with its north and east completely devastated.
Stefan Zweig wrote:
"Those horsemen of the apocalypse
"have spread revolution, famine, terror and disease
"and, worst of all,
"the plague of nationalism,
"the poison of European culture."
War had destroyed a third of France's wealth.
The results were staggering,
whole villages had been wiped off the map
and the land poisoned by shells, mines, booby traps and gas.
The poison had to be cleared away.
In northern France,
the long, dangerous task
was experienced
by these peasants that had to clear shells from their fields.
Then they could go back to the lives
they'd lived in past centuries.
MINES - MORTAL DANGER DO NOT ENTER
The French forced German prisoners
to clear the mines,
in violation of the Geneva Convention.
300,000 German prisoners remained in France.
At the awful Souilly camp, near Verdun,
Hellmuth Korth wrote:
"They seem to see me as a criminal.
"Each hour reveals the cynicism of the French
"and their hatred for us.
"They want to make us pay."
22,105 prisoners
died in the ruins or simply of hunger.
But the French suffered too.
The price of beans and potatoes
had quadrupled since 1914.
Help came from rich Americans,
like a banking heiress,
Anne Morgan,
and Dr Anne Murray Dike,
who set up the Comité Américain
pour les Régions Dévastées de France.
They reforested shell-ravaged regions
and used a chateau as a dispensary.
Anne Morgan told her mother
of her joy in her work
and at being useful
to a people that had been occupied
and reduced to eating roots
and sleeping on the cold ground.
Six million European orphans needed homes.
Young Poles
that had escaped the fighting
went to the USA.
Orphans from Montmartre, in Paris,
were given a special status
as children of the nation
until they were adults.
RUSSIA
Vast numbers of Russian orphans
lost their parents in the civil war.
The communist victory, in 1922,
brought with it the gulag,
Lenin's and Stalin's concentration camps.
Other orphans
were put onto the streets
and became criminals.
GREAT BRITAIN
Great Britain
faced a similar problem with delinquency among orphans.
The radical solution
was to ship them out
to the farms of west Canada.
James Woodsworth, an Ottawan MP, pointed out
that the children were cheap labour.
10% of Canadians are now descended from those children.
The UK completed the policy by deporting women
that couldn't find husbands.
These surplus women,
former military auxiliaries, were sent to Australia.
How would the survivors grieve?
Milosz, the great Baltic poet,
described what felt the parents,
widows and children
as they walked by the unending crosses,
stars and crescents.
He wrote:
"Ah, the dead, the dead, the dead
"Are ultimately less dead than I am."
Many families repatriated their dead,
so they could be buried at home.
Their remains had to be disinterred.
Special US army units were filmed
going about their morbid task.
230,000 bodies were sent home to their families.
But French cemeteries still hold
700,000 French and colonial graves,
750,000 German graves,
300,000 British graves, including 60,000 Canadians
and 34,000 American graves.
People everywhere
tried to make contact with spirits.
Spirit, are you there?
Spiritism had been in vogue since the 19th century.
Léon Denis, a notable spiritist,
wrote:
"Countless souls hover above us,
"keen to communicate.
"Those that died on the battlefields
"want to contact their loved ones."
But unfortunately it was never more than trickery.
To honour the dead and unite people in their memory,
every country, town and village
had a monument to the dead.
Some celebrated heroic combat while others were more pacifist,
like this bronze moose,
a tribute to 814 Newfoundlanders,
who were buried
in unmarked graves during the war.
Sculptors across the world set to work
to make thousands of commemorative monuments.
It was a boon for the mediocre.
Everyone made money.
London, 11 November 1920
London, 11 November 1920.
King George V and his sons, the future monarchs,
led the first commemoration of the unknown soldier.
The coffin held an unidentified soldier,
chosen at random,
to commemorate 500,000 similar losses
and all the dead of the Empire.
The French heard of the ceremony
a month earlier
but had planned nothing similar.
The press was indignant.
A left-wing member of parliament recorded a speech
to express his outrage.
Take your rightful place, so no one may claim that the country
you saved
forgot its humblest sons
and most glorious heroes,
so that the grieving mothers,
with no place to weep,
may kneel before your tomb and say:
"My child, perhaps this is you."
France's unknown soldier
rests at the Arc de Triomphe,
below an eternal flame.
Others have adopted that powerful symbol.
In Belgium,
King Albert I
presided over a national ceremony.
Washington DC, 11 November 1921
In Washington, on 11 November 1921,
a ceremony for the unknown soldier
was attended by Marshal Ferdinand Foch,
the Supreme Allied Commander.
The Crow Nation chief,
Plenty Coups, had allied with the Americans
against the Sioux
just 30 years earlier.
At Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington,
Plenty Coups laid his coup stick, a magical weapon,
on the tomb.
Foch asked General Pershing, who had commanded
the US forces
if he could meet the Far West tribes.
In North Dakota, he met the enemy of the Crows,
the Sioux chief Red Tomahawk.
He was welcomed with a fur coat
and a peace pipe.
Marshal Foch
was given the name Charging Thunder.
In Washington, President Wilson,
had been weakened by his stroke
and reacted badly
to Congress's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles,
which reflected the American public's
deep-seated isolationism.
They wanted no part in international affairs
or further wars.
Zelda, Scott Fitzgerald's wife,
described the typical 1920s woman
awakening from an adolescent lethargy,
sporting a bob,
her finest pair of earrings,
and a good dose of audacity and lipstick
to go into battle,
flirting for fun,
flaunting her figure in a one-piece swimsuit,
refusing to be bored and doing
what she'd always wanted to do.
But by refusing
to sign the Treaty of Versailles,
the US Senate
had imperilled Wilson's dream
of a League of Nations.
The League of Nations set up by Lake Geneva,
in neutral Switzerland.
But without America,
could this assembly of most of the world's nations
actually guarantee peace?
The treaties that followed from Versailles
caused endless conflicts.
The 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
and the 1920 Treaty of Trianon
broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire
giving rise to a shrunken Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
and a remodelled Hungary and Romania.
The right to self-determination
hadn't really been respected.
Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia,
Hungarians in Romania,
and Croats in Yugoslavia
had formerly lived in relative peace
in a single empire.
Similarly,
the Ottoman Empire had kept Arab tribes from fighting.
But at the Treaty of Sèvres, on 10 August 1920,
the Ottoman Empire was punished for supporting Germany
and reduced to what we know as Turkey,
minus the Greek enclave of Smyrna.
TURKEY
Britain and France redrew the Middle East.
The French sought to expand its empire,
by taking Syria and Lebanon.
SYRIA - LEBANON
The British created new countries
in Transjordan,
Palestine
and Iraq, taking control of its oil.
SYRIA - IRAQ
Wilson had supported a Kurdish state,
which existed for a few months,
until the Turks dismantled it.
The Romans had expelled the Jews from Jerusalem,
in Palestine, 2,000 years earlier.
The 600,000 Arabs there
were suspicious of the rising Zionist movement
and the arrival of Jews
from Russia and central Europe.
During the war,
the British, including Colonel Lawrence,
seen here at the Sèvres treaty talks,
had promised the Arabs
an end to Jewish immigration
in exchange for their support.
But Lawrence was manipulated
and the promises were broken.
The British authorized a Jewish national state,
which was to become Israel three decades later.
Chaim Weizmann, its first president,
called for immigration,
to make Palestine as Jewish as America is American
or England is English.
An unending war begun.
TURKEY 1920
In 1920,
Turkey was defeated
and the situation in its capital was tense.
The Allies still occupied part of the country
and nationalists rose up
against them.
They were led by Mustafa Kemal,
who had resisted
British and French landings in 1915.
He rejected the Treaty of Sèvres
and the loss of Smyrna.
He said: "If we give in to Allied demands,
"we will never stop them."
Over two years
he fought the Allies and the Greeks
to win back the occupied territories.
On 9 September 1922,
his army took the last Greek bastion of Smyrna.
Smyrna
The city was torched.
The Turks wanted to oust the Greeks
and all non-Muslim minorities,
especially the Armenians.
Only a few escaped
to exile in Europe.
In Geneva
the League of Nations
had failed to stop wars and massacres,
but managed to save millions
thanks to an exceptional man,
Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian polar explorer,
the High Commissioner for Refugees, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
He created the Nansen passport,
for stateless persons,
like Chagall
and Stravinsky,
allowing them to cross borders.
nine millions men, women and children
became refugees of peace.
Many wanted to reach the USA
and congregated in Cherbourg, in France,
in a bottleneck.
The French had just built the Hôtel Atlantique,
an emigrant transit centre,
providing medical and administrative support.
The journey could begin.
The USA has always taken in those in need -
Irish, Italians and Jews.
The Statue of Liberty,
sculpted by a French, Auguste Bartholdi,
is inscribed with lines written by the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus:
"Give me your tired, your poor...
"Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me."
MONTREAL
30,000 Jews demonstrated in Montreal
to alert people to the fate of Jews in Ukraine.
100,000 Jews were killed during the civil war
between Tsarist Whites and Communist Reds.
After four years,
the Bolsheviks triumphed,
having proved more pitiless than their enemies.
On 22 December 1922,
Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -
the USSR.
A vast part of the planet became communist.
The whole economy collapsed.
Harvests were commandeered to feed soldiers.
The first great famine of 1922 claimed 5 million victims.
The whole world sent humanitarian aid.
William Shafroth, a member of the US mission,
which saved many lives,
saw people eating grass mixed with bone meal
tree bark and mud,
horses, dogs, cats, rats
and straw from roofs.
He saw skeletal bodies with sunken faces
and spindly legs.
Dozens died every day
amid a terrible stench.
After the war,
1.5 million Russians fled the country.
400,000 White Russians came to Nice,
or to the wealthy districts of Paris.
Those that escaped with their money
could live like kings.
Prince Yusupov, one of Rasputin's assassins,
and an adviser to Tsar Nicolas II, wrote:
"How could we not trust in Paris,
"whose smile delights foreigners?"
The prince's lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri,
lived with
the famous fashion designer:
Coco Chanel.
To launch her fifth perfume,
Dimitri encouraged her
to use a Russian officer's vodka bottle.
But not all of the devotees of the last Tsar
were aristocrats.
Yusupov wrote in his memoirs:
"There are new Russian business,
"restaurants, shops,
"Orthodox churches, with schools and retirement homes."
Paris became a centre for emigration.
Russian Refugees
The Tsars generals and officers of the Imperial Guard,
knowing little beyond soldiering,
became taxi drivers
and were long part of Paris's folklore.
The last of them retired in 1970, aged 92.
White Russians, like this taxi driver,
worried about the Soviet global influence.
Social tensions born of the cost of war
pushed people towards the generous project
promised by communism,
in London,
Berlin, New York, Milan
and in Rome.
After staying in Moscow,
Antonio Gramsci
became one of the first Marxist theoreticians, writing:
"To live is to be partisan."
Fighting the communists,
ex-servicemen were led
by a grandiloquent poet
and war hero, Gabriele d'Annunzio.
He'd denounced
the Treaty of Versailles,
for placing Italians
in Dalmatia and the city of Fiume
within Yugoslavia's borders.
He saw that as a denigration of the Italian victory.
He started a militia saying:
"Italy, your hour has come. Wonderful years lie ahead!
"I hear the thunder of eagles, whose talons
"are tearing the night."
Gabriele d'Annunzio
seized the town of Fiume.
Who rules Fiume?
We do!
But the regular army chased his men out again.
Gramsci saw the tragicomedy
as proof of bourgeois decadence.
He said:
"The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.
"In this interregnum, morbid symptoms appear."
Those symptoms included Benito Mussolini.
His wife, Rachele, wrote:
"He had phosphorescent, piercing, bright eyes.
"His pupils flashed lightning
"and he knew it.
"His eyes had tremendous power over people."
Mussolini had started out as a socialist journalist.
The war made him a nationalist.
In 1919 he created the fascist movement,
named after the fighting units
formed by his militants.
Mussolini drew on Gabriele d'Annunzio's prestige,
copying
the black shirts,
Roman salute, brandished daggers
and cry of "A noi! A noi!" - "Ours!
"Ours!"
But whereas Gabriele d'Annunzio had 2,500 men in 1919,
Mussolini had 300,000 in 1922.
Mussolini's populism
brought together ex-soldiers,
invalids, the unemployed,
the middle classes the mentally challenged,
who could hardly make the salute.
and the downtrodden,
who'd write on their bandages:
"Me ne frego" - "I don't care."
Mussolini promised to reinstall order
and issued wooden sticks
encouraging people to attack communists.
Mussolini said:
"I'll reinstall discipline in factories,"
which pleased Agnelli,
who founded Fiat, and Pirelli, the tyre manufacturer.
To bolster his legitimacy,
on 28 October 1922,
Mussolini staged what he pompously called
"the March on Rome".
He took the train from Milan.
Rather than a black shirt,
he wore a suit and tie,
amid his fascist henchmen.
King Victor-Emmanuel III gave him power,
to the Italian people's misfortune.
With the Church's blessing,
using masterful propaganda
and new concentration camps,
he set up an authoritarian anti-communist regime.
GERMANY
In 1923, in Germany, too,
veterans had rallied around their war leader,
General Ludendorff, an associate of the Nazi leader,
Adolf Hitler.
Hitler said:
"Our people are in such poverty
"that if we don't take action, they'll go to the communists."
A succession of Allied mistakes
largely helped Hitler.
Like the Belgian and French occupation of the Rhine,
to take coal, as reparations,
causing an economic crisis and spiralling inflation.
By printing money,
the value of the mark depreciated.
Germans were buying bread
for 460 billion marks.
The 13-year-old Irma Lang wrote:
"When our father brings home his wages,
"we spend it immediately,
"but its value quickly reduces to nothing."
Tensions rose between the Germans, French and Belgians
in the Ruhr.
OCCUPIED ZONE LIMIT
10 March 1923
On 10 March 1923,
a French officer struck some Germans,
for failing to doff their hats at a funeral procession.
Such events provoked Hitler to try to take power
on 9 November 1923.
9 NOVEMBER 1923
But the army and police remained loyal
to the German republic and the putsch failed.
Hitler was jailed, for the time being.
Stefan Zweig reflected the general opinion, writing:
"So, this year of 1923 will see an end
"to swastikas and assault troops
"and Hitler's name will be forgotten."
But Zweig was wrong.
Hitler was planning his revenge.
In his cell, he wrote Mein Kampf,
a manifesto of hatred for Versailles and for France.
SPAIN
The totalitarian threat was real.
In Spain, General Primo de Rivera,
inspired by Mussolini,
took power on 23 September 1923
and set up a dictatorship,
This coup d'état delighted a certain
Francisco Franco,
who celebrate with his family.
Known for his discipline and ferocity,
at 33 he became Europe's youngest general
and Spain's future dictator.
In 1921,
he became a leader
in the Spanish Legion,
tasked with managing the Rif,
a Spanish-controlled zone
in French-ruled Morocco.
During World War I,
overexploitation of the region's iron mines
to supply French armament factories
had led to a revolt among the Moroccans
Abd el-Krim, an Arab nationalist leader,
came to the fore.
The learned 50-year-old
united the tribes around him
and won a stinging defeat against the Spanish
at Annual on 21 July 1921.
21 July 1921
20,000 Spanish troops suffered
13,000 casualties.
The Spanish forces were routed.
The French intervened alongside the Spanish.
Was the colonial era coming to an end?
The Rif War was a foretaste of the horrors to come.
This Moroccan, fighting for the Spanish,
is holding an insurgent's head.
Atrocities were committed by both sides.
The French and Spanish
dropped bombs.
Some contained mustard gas,
which the Germans had used in 1917.
Attacks on the enemy's rear
and the use of tanks,
brought about Abd el-Krim's defeat.
He surrendered on 27 May 1926.
27 May 1926
Abd el-Krim's surrender was shown in cinemas,
with this reassuring text.
HIS FATHER AND FAMILY
SEEK PROTECTION FROM THE VICTORS.
The Rif War
inspired the anti-imperial wars in Africa
and across the world.
It marked a turning point.
The conflict lines of the future
would be different.
The loss of faith and identity
during the war
imbued politics with a sense
of promise and vocation.
Fascism was on the rise
in 1926,
including in England,
as was communism,
even in New York.
The USA tried to expel its communists.
giving them a one-way ticket to the land of socialism
on The Soviet Ark.
Beyond the red scare,
America was under prohibition.
Conservatives banned alcohol
to dampen people's high spirits with a sense of morality.
Local and Canadian alcohol traffickers
were hunted down.
The police ostentatiously destroyed alcohol seizures.
Prohibition helped the Italian-American mafia
to gain a foothold in the USA.
Al Capone became a legendary gangster.
America partied.
Jazz rhythms gave rise to the Charleston.
People just wanted to forget.
John Dos Passos predicted
an American 20th century,
dominated by American thought
and guided and coloured by American progress.
He saw no turning back from the world's
physical and moral regeneration.
Jazz crossed the Atlantic.
In Paris, Josephine Baker set the tone.
When Jean Cocteau first saw her, he wrote:
"Eroticism has found its style."
It was the jazz age in Montmartre and Montparnasse.
In Ernest Hemingway's last book, A Moveable Feast,
he described life in Paris
as a feast that stays with you.
The Charleston was heard
in Berlin, too.
Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday
that as money lost its value,
other values soared.
It was an ecstatic time, mixing impatience
and fanaticism,
a golden age of extravagance.
In those wild post-war years,
some wanted to feel alive,
to escape the memories of disaster and death.
Others awaited Hitler
to overturn the peace treaty
and rearm Germany.
Financial crises weakened democracies
and another world war that had seemed unthinkable,
became threatening and then inevitable.
But after 11 November 1918,
people had shown an incredible capacity for rebirth.
But could they succeed
in preventing another war?
Could they keep the peace?
Subtitles: ECLAIR