Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00This is the story of a remarkable journey that began as the echo of the guns from the Great War died away.
00:11A French pilot and his cameraman climbed into an airship and flew over the Western Front.
00:19They made this unique film and captured with astonishing clarity the aftermath of devastating conflict.
00:30Ninety years later, I'm retracing that journey. Flying on a rather safer airship over that very same landscape.
00:41And visiting the battlegrounds where such terrible slaughter took place.
00:48What would we have seen there?
00:50It would have been total devastation. Very much like a lunar landscape, but with just the awfulness of modern war thrown in.
00:57I'll also uncover another of World War One's secrets. A collection of revolutionary aerial photographs.
01:12They gave the generals a bird's eye view of the battlefield.
01:17Now these images can be brought to life using today's state of the art technology.
01:22And I'll be taking to the air in one of those flimsy early aircraft flown by those brave pilots.
01:38Like most people, I've always imagined World War One from the ground.
01:48But seeing it from the air will give me a totally new perspective.
01:53The trench networks that ran for thousands of miles.
01:56The epic destruction that the war left behind.
02:03And the memory of millions advancing to their deaths.
02:09The bullets are coming from this side and that side.
02:12So what you had to do was to walk through a stream of land.
02:19Above all, this is a story of human courage.
02:23And my journey will end with an extraordinary encounter.
02:27When I meet the daughter of the airship pilot of 90 years ago.
02:30What does it mean to you, seeing him like this?
02:34I couldn't expect seeing my father alive.
02:43From the intimate to the truly epic.
02:47Here is the conflict in a way we thought we'd never see it.
02:51The First World War from above.
02:53Deep inside the vaults of the French Army's film archives in Paris,
03:14a unique snapshot of our history has been unearthed.
03:17A 78-minute film which has spent nearly a century hidden from view.
03:28It follows the flight of an airship along the Western Front.
03:32The infamous battle line that divided the Allies and Germans
03:36during the First World War.
03:40The airship's pilot, Jacques Troilly de Prevost,
03:43and his cameraman, Lucien La Sainte, captured a lost world
03:47just months after the end of the fighting.
03:51A city with its proud medieval cathedral reduced to ruins.
03:57Battlefields scarred with shell holes where men waited to die.
04:03And ghostly figures.
04:05People still holding their street market in front of their shattered homes.
04:09This breathtaking film isn't simply a record of the First World War.
04:15It's a showcase for two of the greatest inventions in modern times.
04:19Flight and film.
04:26The First World War had brought about a revolution
04:29in the technology of the air and photography.
04:32What this footage represents is a marriage of the two.
04:37To create a vision of the battlefield quite unlike anything
04:42that had ever been seen before.
04:47Over 90 years later, I'm about to look down on those former battlegrounds
04:51from a modern-day airship.
04:52I'll fly over the same landscape filmed in 1919 to see what remains of the Western Front.
05:09This heavily defended line of trenches stretched for 400 miles from the English Channel down to the Swiss Alps.
05:16The French airship made a series of journeys along that front line.
05:26The story starts at Newport on the Belgian coast.
05:29A town just 50 miles across the Channel from England,
05:33but marking the most northerly point of the Western Front.
05:38Here in the early years of the war, the Belgians flooded the low-lying fields with seawater,
05:42slowing the German advance and pushing the enemy inland.
05:49After Newport, the airship flew down from the coast,
05:53its camera capturing some of the worst killing grounds of the war.
06:00One infamous combat zone was Chemin des Dames.
06:04This plateau in northern France lay between the German army and Paris
06:07and saw some of the fiercest fighting in the war.
06:13This footage shows French tanks lying abandoned in no man's land.
06:22And enormous trenches stretching as far as the eye can see.
06:28Today, there are very few trenches left in the former battlefields.
06:31This small area of woodland near White Sheet in Belgium still contains part of the old German front line.
06:38I've come here with archaeologist Nick Saunders, an expert on trench warfare.
06:45How much protection was provided by these trenches?
06:50I mean, how safe could a soldier feel in here?
06:52Well, they could feel safe from horizontal shrapnel, but they certainly couldn't feel safe from a direct hit,
06:59or indeed a hit on the other side which blew in vast amounts of earth on top and often buried people alive.
07:07Why did they dig in a zigzag pattern?
07:10Well, this is basically for protection.
07:12They found out in the beginning of the war that when artillery shells landed,
07:15the blast effect near a trench could go all the way along a trench and killed half a dozen of soldiers.
07:22So the basic idea of the design was a quick change to a zigzag,
07:26so that only maybe one or two or three got killed,
07:29and the other three, four, five on the other side of the zigzag were safe.
07:33We're in one tiny section of trench, but I mean, it was a vast network on both sides, wasn't it?
07:38Yeah, because on the one hand you had the Allied trenches,
07:41and these were completely mirrored on the other side by the Germans.
07:45And they have support trenches and communication trenches.
07:49And so it just goes on and on and on,
07:51so there are literally tens of thousands of miles of interconnected trenches
07:56from the English Channel to the Swiss border.
08:00Using exact details from Allied and German trench maps,
08:04we can recreate the scars that ran across the Western Front.
08:07An alien landscape of man-made furrows.
08:12Rat runs where men lived, fought and died.
08:16The trenches were not only photographed by the French airship in 1919.
08:22During the war, there'd been another revolutionary way of looking at these vital communication lines.
08:28For the first time, commanders would no longer rely on the worm's eye view from the trenches.
08:37Now they could look down on enemy positions.
08:40Photography from aeroplanes would change warfare forever.
08:43Today, many of World War I's aerial photographs, the first ever taken,
08:57are kept safe by the Imperial War Museum in their original wooden caskets.
09:01Dave Parry, the museum's aerial photography expert, has brought me to see these images, known as the Box Collection.
09:14Look at all of these. How many?
09:17In all, about 145,000 to 150,000 remaining. In fact, there were about half a million, but these are the only ones which survive.
09:26What were these pilots looking for as they were flying over the Western Front?
09:29I mean, what kind of material can we see in these incredibly heavy boxes?
09:34That is, that is so. All right, well, here's one. Let's take a look at this. Wow, look at that.
09:42Now, what are we seeing here? What's all this?
09:45These look like trenches under construction. Because it's a negative, all the spoil which is thrown up by the trenches looks dark, but in fact, chalk.
09:55Chalky soil. Chalky soil, indeed. Of Northern France.
09:57Yeah, that's right.
09:58I'm trying to imagine the British commanders, their reaction when the first box of these glass plates comes in.
10:07And they see for the first time, in their history of warfare, an aerial photograph of the enemy.
10:13It must have been quite a moment.
10:15It's a revelation to them. They've never seen anything like this before.
10:19For the first time, they could see the depth of the defences, the number of machine gun posts, trench mortars.
10:25It was all laid out for them with amazing clarity.
10:29I presume developing these must have been an incredibly primitive business, you know, given that the conditions are, to put it mildly, far from ideal.
10:37It was very difficult indeed. Very often, the members of the photo section were reduced to washing them in the ditches by the sides of the roads.
10:47And here they are, they've survived. It's our last link with these men and their flying machines.
10:51Indeed it is, yeah.
10:56These flying machines were another revolutionary part of the First World War.
11:01For the first time, men took war to the skies.
11:07And I've come to try out one of the original aircraft at the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire.
11:11During the war, more pilots died in training than in actual battle.
11:21Three, two, one, go!
11:24And the most dangerous part of all was take-off.
11:28If the engine cut before you got airborne, the plane simply drove itself, and the pilot, into the ground.
11:37This was an advanced aircraft for its time, as it was built in 1917, towards the end of the war.
11:57Traveling in it today is petrifying. You really do get a sense of the risks taken by the pilots.
12:03Flying these planes over the Western Front was phenomenally dangerous.
12:10You had ground fire coming up, enemy fighters trying to hunt you down.
12:15These early pioneers of aerial photography were men of untold courage.
12:20It's extraordinary to think that when the First World War started, men had been flying for barely a decade.
12:37It was only in 1909 that Frenchman Louis Bleriot had developed an aircraft good enough to fly across the English Channel.
12:44Just five years later, in August 1914, four squadrons of Britain's Royal Flying Corps flew back across the Channel to France.
12:58This time, they were going to fight in the great war against the Kaiser's men.
13:03Britain's first wartime aircraft were a ramshackle collection.
13:13The technology was new and unreliable.
13:17One plane had even crashed before it reached Dover, killing both of its crew.
13:21As for the men who made it to France, flying over the Western Front would carry even more danger.
13:30Now they were targets for German anti-aircraft fire.
13:37And as I come to the end of my flight today, I can begin to understand why the life expectancy for pilots was actually worse than for men in the trenches.
13:49Well, there we are, terra firma, at last.
14:05What an extraordinary experience.
14:08You know what I felt up there? The most amazing vulnerability.
14:11Very much so.
14:12We were doing this on a beautiful summer's day. What was it like? In winter, with fire coming at you from every angle. What was it like for them?
14:22Well, they were a long way up. They operated over the front lines at over 12,000 feet, so it was cold, freezing cold.
14:32There'd be fighters to contend with, there would be anti-aircraft fire, so there were lots of things to contend with, as well as taking the photographs.
14:39Which must have been pretty cumbersome if you had to lean out of this aircraft.
14:43Indeed.
14:44That far up.
14:45The camera was big, the air speed was high, you've just experienced it.
14:50Although it's an old aeroplane, we were travelling at 100 miles an hour.
14:54So to hold a camera over the edge, steady enough to take a photograph of something 12,000 feet below you, must have been hugely difficult.
15:03Despite their primitive and unwieldy cameras, the Royal Flying Corps managed to take hundreds of thousands of detailed photographs.
15:13The results of their work were invaluable for the British generals planning the war.
15:17And a hundred years later, these images still have stories to tell.
15:29Belgian archaeologist Birger Stickelbau has been digging deeper into the aerial photographs.
15:35I think it's a major overlooked source. Nobody ever looked at the entity of World War 1 photographs.
15:45Nobody ever looked at using them as a primary source of information.
15:49Many people who study World War 1 use trench maps, they look at perhaps some aerial photographs,
15:55but one of the mistakes they make is that they focus on the area of the battles,
15:59but much more happened 40, 50 kilometers behind the front line.
16:02This photograph, taken over Dixmutter in Belgium, shows how some German soldiers unwittingly gave away their position.
16:12The men's barracks were safely camouflaged under trees.
16:15But to relieve the boredom, the soldiers had been gardening.
16:20And to the British photographic experts, the German flower beds were clearly visible from above.
16:26Many of the officers or men on the ground didn't have an idea of how things look like from the air.
16:31On this photograph, we can see a lot of military barracks, in fact, but we can see that something else happened here.
16:40When we go to a detailed photograph of this, we can see that these are the barracks.
16:48And in fact, these are actually flower beds. Flower beds that were constructed to make life in this military camp more comfortable, to feel more at home.
16:57But the new technology of aerial photography was about to bring devastation to the German soldiers.
17:04Once the British commanders saw the flower beds, they uncovered the barracks and directed the big guns onto the position.
17:11The act of making flower beds really draws the attention towards the site.
17:18This is actually what happened a couple of months later.
17:22Around the area, we can see that the landscape is already peppered with these shell holes.
17:27And a lot of the barracks have already been destroyed.
17:31The art of interpreting aerial photographs soon became highly developed in the war.
17:38As experts scrutinised each inch of the enemy front line, life on the ground would no longer be hidden.
17:44As the war progresses, you have aerial photography, and it completely changes life for men in the trenches.
17:57Because now, everything can be seen from above, and there's much more accurate targeting.
18:01Yeah, that's true. But as time went on as well, different sides decided that they could develop the idea of camouflage.
18:07So there was a lot of faint and counter-fainting going on here.
18:12And basically, it was much more developed, the systems were deeper, they were more organised,
18:18and yet at the same time, the aerial photography from the other side enabled them to take camouflage.
18:24Let me have a look at what, because you've got some examples of aerial photography here.
18:28What do these patterns tell you about the experience of the men who lived and died in these trenches?
18:34I think it was chaotic and horrific. The trenches gave a lot of protection.
18:41It was partly psychological, but it was constantly trying to outwit the enemy, outthink the enemy, outdig the enemy.
18:49And so on the German side and on the British side, they were constantly finding new trenches were being built,
18:55new connections were being made in order to get troops from one place to another safely.
18:58So for the ordinary soldier on the ground, there was a psychological dimension to the safety, and particularly in a dugout.
19:07But in reality, at the end of the day, they had to get out of the trench and go across no man's land.
19:12And that was just lethal.
19:13No man's land, the thin strip of ground separating the two armies, turned into a vision of hell after unceasing pounding by heavy artillery.
19:27Villages and towns were reduced to shells.
19:31And the French airship captured this destruction in intimate detail.
19:40Flying over Armantier on the border between Belgium and France, pilot Jacques Troly de Prevost flew so close to the shattered church, he and his cameraman nearly came to grief.
19:50The two men filmed mile after mile of the ruined landscape.
19:58But there's one infamous battlefield you won't find in the footage.
20:03The Somme, the place where I'm heading now.
20:07In summer 1916, this 15-mile stretch of the Western Front would see the darkest days in the history of the British Army.
20:17And the build-up to this epic battle was captured by tens of thousands of photographs of the German defences taken by the British aerial photographers.
20:30Using these images, we can reconstruct a part of the German frontline just days before the Battle of the Somme began.
20:38The photos show just how complex the German trenches had become.
20:42A network of interlocking lines and heavily defended redoubts.
20:49Crucially, the Germans also held the high ground.
20:53In some cases, just yards above the British positions.
21:01The attack was planned for the 1st of July.
21:03For seven long days before, there was a massive artillery barrage, an attempt to weaken the German defences.
21:12120,000 soldiers assembled in the frontline trenches, ready to go over the top.
21:19These men now sat waiting in the tense moments before the start of the battle.
21:24On the day of the battle, the pilots were out early, photographing the German front lines.
21:3918-year-old Cecil Lewis was one of those flying above the Somme that morning in July.
21:44Years later, he wrote about one of the most shocking things he'd witnessed.
21:49A massive explosion just moments before the attack began.
21:56The earth heaved and flashed.
21:59A tremendous and magnificent column rose up into the sky.
22:03There was an ear-splitting roar, drowning all the guns, flinging the machines sideways in the repercussing air.
22:12Then the dust cleared.
22:16The infantry were over the top.
22:19The attack had begun.
22:24Up in the air, Lewis could have had no real idea of what was about to unfold.
22:28On the ground, as soon as the men climbed out of their trenches, the battle plan went catastrophically wrong.
22:39Historian Peter Barton is taking me across a stretch of no-man's land at La Boiselle,
22:45one of the Somme's most notorious killing fields.
22:48We're just crossing the British front line now.
22:51You would have climbed out of a trench about here to go into the attack across no-man's land.
22:54So all those lines ahead of us, the German front lines, would have been erupting day and night for a week.
23:01And that filled everybody with a tremendous sense of confidence.
23:05You can see that in the Test of Nien letters.
23:07We're going to do great things tomorrow.
23:09And, er, well...
23:12Well, within seconds of getting up, many men didn't make it over the parapet, did they?
23:16That's right, the Germans were prepared.
23:17And the moment that barrage lifted, that was the signal for the Germans to start firing across this ground here,
23:25at the height of this wheat.
23:27They would fire their machine guns at the height of this wheat, so you're being cut down here.
23:31And that's why you read so many accounts of people being cut down, as if they're being scythed down.
23:37That was it, they were being scythed down.
23:38And the bullets were coming from this side and that side.
23:42So what you had to do was to walk through a stream of lead.
23:48And men kept going.
23:50I think that's what the, er...
23:53The thing that affects me so much is that the second wave would have seen what happened to the first wave.
23:59The third wave would have seen what happened to the second wave.
24:02Second wave, and on, and on.
24:05One of the things which a lot of the accounts tell us is that whenever the firing stopped,
24:11men could suddenly hear the sound of skylarks and other birds.
24:15We can hear it now, what they would have heard.
24:20That's right, there were little windows in that barrage.
24:24The birds just kept on singing.
24:25By the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 60,000 British soldiers had been killed or wounded.
24:37All but a handful of the attacks had failed.
24:41And the slaughter would continue for another four months.
24:48By the time the battle ended in November 1916,
24:51there had been more than a million casualties.
24:55To this day, here in no man's land, they're still finding fragments of the lost,
25:00like this button belonging to the tunic of a French soldier.
25:04A British private, Jay Macaulay, who was assigned to bury the dead,
25:08remembered how, for weeks afterwards, the smell of decay lingered in his nostrils.
25:13If only the world could see this, he wrote, how nearer we would be to perpetual peace.
25:19Macaulay must have known, of course, that he was writing more in hope than anticipation.
25:28Today, it's hard to imagine that this peaceful landscape was the scene of such terrible slaughter.
25:35But inside this area of woodland, owned by a local French family,
25:39the ground has been left pretty much as it was when the fighting stopped.
25:43What was in here?
25:47Well, you're walking through a German communication trench leading to the front line up here.
25:53This path takes us up to the German front line, from where they could easily have seen the British.
25:58That's right, yep. When we get to the top of this crest, you'll see how close they were.
26:02Here is your German front line, along this crater's edge,
26:04and on the far crater's edge is the British front line, so 35 metres away.
26:10You could have seen them very, very close.
26:12They could smell each other's cooking.
26:16What's this down here?
26:18It looks like a German shell. This is the most common shell that the Germans used.
26:24But that's a large shell. Is that still live?
26:25It is still live, yeah. It's been fired, you can tell by the band at the back of it.
26:30And the fuse is still on it, so that is still live, so we don't kick it.
26:34Let's move on.
26:37Areas like this, which, as you can see, there's craters within craters.
26:41Over 18 months of war, this ground has been thrown up in the air and landed back on top,
26:46and again, and again, and again.
26:48And whoever was buried in here is still buried in here.
26:51And we know there are many Frenchmen beneath our feet, British and, of course, Germans.
26:56So this is a mass grave that we're walking on, and there's no way these men could ever be found.
27:01And there you have the dead.
27:03That's right, and that's precisely why this family preserve this piece of ground on their behalf.
27:10One feature of the Battle of the Somme still stands out among the wheat fields.
27:23An immense crater right in the middle of what was once the German front line.
27:27This is a different part of the Somme story.
27:30The great explosion Cecil Lewis saw from the air was really a drama played out underground.
27:37Because it was on the Somme that the British High Command turned to an old form of warfare,
27:44tunnelling under the enemy and setting off enormous mines.
27:47To create this mine, what did they have to do?
27:52Well, they started tunnelling several hundred metres back in that direction in the valley behind,
27:57dug down to a depth of about 90, 95 feet, and then literally went under no man's land to this point here.
28:04Planted the mine in two chambers and then blew it at a time given by the divisional commander.
28:09What's it like when a man is digging, or a group of men are digging their way towards the German lines?
28:16The tunnelling war was a very particular kind of conflict.
28:20It was private, it was secret, it was in tiny constricted spaces underneath no man's land, underneath the enemy lines.
28:28And you were either listening for the enemy coming your way and trying to destroy him underground,
28:32or you were trying to undermine his trenches.
28:34And the closer you get to the enemy, although you're 90 feet down, you have to be ever more quiet.
28:40So by the time they've reached this spot, they'd be picking out lumps of chalk 90 feet down with a bayonet,
28:46and catching them before they hit the ground, so they couldn't be heard by the Germans.
28:50And one of the strange things about this is, although they're only working, digging with one candle,
28:55they are surrounded by pure white chalk, and they actually became snow blind, these tunnellers.
29:00And they had to be taken out of the tunnels, until their vision came back again.
29:05Then you'd go back in, and it would happen all over again.
29:09If you're tunnelling, and you hear the enemy, how do you kill him if you can't see him?
29:14Well, you can hear him tunnelling towards you, and what you do is, after his tunnel has got close enough to yours,
29:20you plant a charge in your tunnel, block your tunnel off with sandbags, and then blow that charge.
29:25And by doing that, you either obliterate him, or entomb him, or gas him underground, as the gases from the explosion.
29:32And those men are trapped down there.
29:35And if you got trapped underground, your comrades would make every possible effort to find you.
29:41If you are killed underground, if you can try to imagine decay on the surfaces bad enough, the decay of a human body on the surface,
29:51but trapped within a tunnel, deep under no man's land.
29:54The tunnels were always dug on a slight upward angle, for drainage purposes.
29:58So, the remains of that man would drain back towards the rescue team, if you know what I mean.
30:04So, the blood would run through the chalk.
30:07One of the starkest images of warfare I've ever heard.
30:12It's utterly unimaginable.
30:14And anybody who was on top of this in the German positions, they were obliterated in an instant.
30:20Vaporised these men, yeah.
30:25As a result of the tunnelling, this mine and nine others exploded on the first day of the Somme.
30:30This was a war of annihilation, as seen in this box collection photograph.
30:39The Somme proved that tunnelling could be devastatingly effective.
30:44The British would escalate their use of mines in 1917 at Messines,
30:50an area of high ground stretching south from the most famous city on the Western Front, Ypres.
31:00The story of Ypres in Belgium has come to symbolise the First World War's epic destruction.
31:10Over the course of the war, the medieval city was pounded relentlessly by artillery fire.
31:18Using data from aerial photographs, we can reimagine those four long years of bombardment.
31:23When the guns were at last quiet and the French airship flew over the city centre,
31:35all that was left of this once beautiful place were the remains of its 13th century cloth hole and cathedral.
31:41Pilot Jacques Troilly de Prevot waved down at people, wandering through the ruins.
31:49He then directed his airship towards the battlefields, beyond the city's medieval moat.
31:55Today, Ypres has been rebuilt in almost the exact image of what it once was.
32:09Beyond the city, you can look down on the scene of a surprising British breakthrough.
32:15The Messines Ridge is a line of villages stretching for nine miles on high ground that in 1917 was held by the Germans.
32:27If you look today, there are 17 deep craters now filled with water.
32:31These holes were all made within 30 seconds of each other, with huge amounts of high explosive.
32:39450 tonnes of it planted right under the Germans' feet.
32:44The culmination of the biggest British tunnelling operation of the war.
32:52These photos show the heavily defended Messines Ridge before the start of the battle.
32:57The audacious British plan was to dig tunnels for over a year and place mines beneath the German lines.
33:08These would all be detonated at three in the morning, shortly before the infantry attacked.
33:14When the mines exploded, the enemy defences would be obliterated in an instant.
33:19In the early hours of June 7th, 1917, a British general turned to his officers and said,
33:28Gentlemen, we may not make history, but we'll certainly change the geography.
33:33In fact, they did both.
33:36The biggest explosion in the long, bloody story of warfare ripped through this countryside.
33:41Mankind came face to face with his own capacity for destruction.
33:54One by one, the mines exploded, sending pillars of flame into the sky.
33:58The explosions echoed across Western Europe, even rattling the teacups in Downing Street.
34:14Two years later, the French airship filmed parts of this battlefield.
34:26Pilot Jacques Troly de Prevost flew over Mont Kemmel, the highest point overlooking the Battle of Messines.
34:33Kemmel offered the perfect viewpoint for the British generals to see if their tunneling operation would work.
34:44At three in the morning on the day of the attack, the top brass gathered here to watch.
34:50There had been an artillery bombardment, so the Germans were pretty shaken up as it was,
34:58but they had no idea of what was coming next.
35:01No, they didn't. They knew that there was probably a battle coming,
35:06and they might have expected artillery and perhaps a mine or two,
35:10but they had no idea that there were going to be 19 mines in sequence.
35:14I mean, that would have taken them completely by surprise.
35:16And that's one reason why the battle was such a success for the British.
35:20Because they got that crucial element of surprise and this awesome explosive power.
35:25Yeah, and also, psychologically, they saw the mines exploding and coming towards them.
35:30So by the time you get down to the south, by Plug Street Wood, they'd had a chance to see and hear all the other ones going off and coming towards them.
35:38In quick sequence?
35:39Absolutely. Just in a few seconds.
35:41So there's no way to run?
35:42No, nowhere to run, nowhere to go.
35:44So by the time the last one went off, the Germans around there were in complete shock.
35:49I mean, they were totally paralysed. They had never heard or seen anything like this at all before.
35:55I remember reading that the largest part of the German they found after these explosions was a foot in a boot.
36:00Yeah, I think that was true.
36:02Foot in a boot is probably what they found just after the battle.
36:06But when we do archaeology in this region, we find bits and pieces of human beings which are no bigger than a fingernail clipping.
36:13So they were completely fragmented.
36:15Tiny pieces of bomb.
36:16Yeah, fragments, minuscule fragments, and that's all that's left of the Germans who were underneath the mines at the time.
36:22To understand the underground attack on Messines, it's best to take to the air.
36:35The craters left by 17 of the mines that exploded look today like pretty ponds in the landscape.
36:45Until you think of how they were made.
36:47So basically we've got three big craters here which have been reincorporated into a rebuilt farm after the war.
36:57So they're now part of people's gardens.
37:00And this is the southernmost part of those mines that could stretch up to war depots.
37:08And this big one over here, what's that? Is that from a mine?
37:12That's almost certainly two mine craters because of the huge size of these things.
37:19But they also have been incorporated into modern buildings.
37:23Well in fact they've been incorporated into a golf course.
37:30Quite exploring.
37:31It's also something to bear in mind that almost certainly there are many, many human remains at the bottom of these lakes.
37:42So although they may be landscaped through a golf course or part of somebody's garden,
37:47you know, if you drive them out and excavated them, you'd almost certainly find human remains.
37:52Below the craters, many of the tunnels are still there and relics of the underground war can be found across this region.
38:06Even today, solid ground can suddenly collapse as one farmer's wife discovered to her terror.
38:13I'd just finished cleaning the windows and I was taking my ladder over to the barn.
38:22I looked down and I saw some weeds.
38:25Right here.
38:29So I came back to get my bucket.
38:32But when I stepped here, I fell down a hole.
38:34The hole led into a network of tunnels, the roof of which was just three feet below the farm's foundations.
38:44Waist deep in the muddy water, Simone de Lou had no idea of what had just happened or how she'd get out.
38:52At first I thought I'd fallen into a cesspit.
38:56Then I had to wait an hour for my husband to get home.
39:01I knew he wouldn't be out forever.
39:04I was already in for her ticking off, for staying out too long.
39:08I had to look for her first, you see.
39:10I searched everywhere, even in the attic.
39:13Then I changed into my normal clothes, I went to look for her again.
39:17While I was standing by the kitchen table, I looked out of the window and I saw her hands sticking out.
39:23Just a hand, that was all.
39:27She had her hand up like that.
39:29Then of course I ran to find a ladder.
39:32I lowered that in and she was able to get out.
39:37For the men who dug the tunnels, Messines was a stunning victory.
39:41Once the mines had exploded, the British infantry easily overran the German trenches on the ridge.
39:46After Messines, it seemed as if the stalemate was at last over.
39:54The British commander, General Haig, told his men they were now to wear down the enemy's resistance.
40:00But on the German side, General Eric Ludendorff ordered that every piece of ground lost was to be retaken by ferocious counteroffensive.
40:09It was that determination which created the mud and the slaughter of a place whose name has become synonymous with the sacrifice of the First World War.
40:20Passchendaele.
40:21The Battle of Passchendaele would be defined not by trenches or tunnels, but by weather.
40:32The summer of 1917 was one of the wettest since records began.
40:36The French airship would film a stretch of the Western Front that had been turned into a sea of mud and blood.
40:47During the fighting, men were as likely to drown as they were to be shot dead.
40:58Today, Passchendaele has returned to what it once was, a tranquil village in rural Belgium.
41:06But the box collection photographs show how the fighting in World War I flattened everything in this landscape.
41:13Britain and its allies fought for control of the village in an attempt to outflank the German army.
41:19After nearly four months of shelling, Passchendaele was almost wiped off the map.
41:25All that was left were the shattered ruins of the church.
41:27I've met up with the historian Nigel Steele to find out more about those aerial images.
41:36The photographs tell a huge amount of the story, don't they? The aerial photographs?
41:39Yes, I think we can learn a lot by looking at the sequences that you can find from these aerial photographs.
41:45I mean, this is a nice example here.
41:47This is a photograph taken before the battle begins, shows us the footprint of Passchendaele.
41:53You can see the roads coming up, coming from Zonneby, going around the top.
41:57Just see the church sitting in the middle of the village here, do the square in front of it.
42:01And when the battle reaches the top of the ridge, washes over it, it becomes something almost inconceivable.
42:08You can actually see.
42:09Dear Lord, that is extraordinary.
42:11This is something you can only see from the air.
42:15You can actually still see just the shape of the road, the remains of the church, which sits in the middle, everything else, totally obliterated.
42:24And everywhere these shell craters filled with water.
42:27Filled with water.
42:28In which men drowned.
42:29That's right.
42:30If you were carrying any kind of weight of equipment, you were just going to go down into this.
42:33And if you fell into it, quite often you would drown in it, you'd get sucked down into it.
42:36It's like crossing quicksand.
42:39How many lives did it take to capture small pieces of ground?
42:42I mean, if you wanted to advance a mile, how many people would that take?
42:46Well, over the course of the battle, 275,000 casualties are thrown up as a result of moving from the start line to the top of the Passchendaele Ridge.
42:57Oh, we're talking about 20,000 plus casualties to gain 1,500 yards at one point.
43:02And that's for something that looks like a relative success.
43:06When you see this period in September and October, when it stops raining and they're able to go forward and hold the ground, you're still incurring casualties of around 20,000 per step.
43:18Now, when you say those words nowadays, I think people find them hard to believe, because you simply wouldn't accept that level of casualty in a modern war fought by the British Army.
43:26No, I mean, it's inconceivable and it's something which today, I think, still makes people shudder and sits at the back of your mind as to what the worst of the First World War was actually about.
43:36If you know what to look for, this aerial photograph of no man's land contains a secret story.
43:45A famous British tank bogged down in the mire.
43:49The crew of nine men inside it found themselves stranded between British and German lines at the height of the battle for Passchendaele.
43:56The tank's commander was a grocer with a sense of humour and he gave it the nickname Freybentos after a famous tinned meat.
44:09And now the photograph has helped to pinpoint the very spot where this happened.
44:15So we're right in the middle of the German battle zone.
44:17Where we're standing now is almost smack bang in the middle. You had British front lines over here, Germans coming up to here.
44:25The British bring up tanks ahead of the infantry and one tank gets isolated.
44:31Yeah, the Freybentos tank was one of the number that ditched in this hollow here.
44:36It ran to a halt. The problem was, at the time it ditched, it was in the front line with the infantry.
44:41But the infantry were then driven back by the weight of the Germans pushing backwards and forwards.
44:44So Freybentos found itself way out in front of the British line.
44:49And it gradually became surrounded by Germans.
44:52Over the course of three days, the eight guys inside the tank fought off the Germans.
44:57They were on the roof. They were firing at them. They were trying to blow them up from the inside.
45:00They were shelled and hit by shells coming over the top.
45:03And all that they could do was try to make their way back over the ground here, past where they'd come from,
45:08to get back to the British lines, which is what they did in the end.
45:10And one of the reasons why the story stands out is that that little group became very heavily decorated.
45:17So you get two military crosses for the officers, two distinguished conduct medals for the sergeants,
45:22and then four military medals. And you think that's eight people, all the gallantry award,
45:26which is a testament, I think, to the repeated bravery that they showed in fighting off the people who were literally swarming all over their tank.
45:33Passchendaele was eventually taken by Canadian troops on the 10th of November 1917.
45:41Corporal H.C. Baker wrote that the village was so thickly strewn with shell-exploded bodies
45:48that a fellow couldn't step without stepping on corruption.
45:51Just over a mile from the village, Tyne Cot, the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world,
45:58holds 12,000 of the men who died.
46:02When you add the names of those whose bodies were never found, the numbers are even more sobering.
46:09140,000 men killed just to capture five miles of enemy territory.
46:18Barely two inches of ground for each man lost.
46:24A senior British officer who came to Passchendaele after the battle and saw the destruction burst into tears
46:31and asked, my God, did we really send men to fight in this?
46:37Well, they did, and again and again, for another year of war.
46:48In the year following Passchendaele, the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies.
46:53America finally committed to joining the conflict, and by the middle of 1918,
46:59the influx of new soldiers was helping to tip the balance.
47:03As the year came to a close, German soldiers started to surrender in massive numbers.
47:09And in October, Germany admitted defeat.
47:15At 11am on the 11th of November, the guns were at last quiet.
47:20Slowly, the people of France and Belgium came back to their shattered lands.
47:35The airship filmed extraordinary scenes as communities tried to rebuild lives out of nothing.
47:42Pilot Jacques Troly de Pavot flew low over the French city of Lens.
47:47Here they still held their weekly market, next to houses so damaged,
47:53all that remained were the gaping holes of what were once sellers.
48:00Therese de la Roel still lives in the same area that her parents returned to in 1918.
48:06After the war, when your parents came back, what did they find? What was here?
48:13Everything was demolished. There was nothing left.
48:17It was a field of ruins.
48:19My father had always dreamed of going back to his farm, and he was ruined.
48:25But they wanted to have a nice family, and what mattered to them most was the children's education.
48:30What did they find? Was there anything left of all that they had owned before the war?
48:38When they came back, my parents had absolutely nothing.
48:43But they did find one thing under the ruins of the house.
48:47I'll show it to you.
48:48It's what people used in those days for a bread knife, before the First World War,
48:54because my grandparents had a bakehouse, a building with a bread oven.
48:58This was the only thing that was left from the ruins of the war, a bread knife?
49:05Yes, a bread knife.
49:10And she also had her clock. My grandmother had taken it with her.
49:15It was her treasured possession.
49:18She'd taken it to Normandy when they were refugees.
49:22And these are the only two things we have left that belonged to our grandparents before the First World War.
49:28In the months and years that followed the war, life began again in this ravaged corner of Europe.
49:38But there remained the task of burying the dead.
49:42Hundreds of British and Commonwealth cemeteries were built along the Western Front.
49:47There were also a handful of German cemeteries, like this one at Free Corps on the Somme, where 17,000 soldiers lie buried.
50:03By the time the war ended, there were a million and a half dead Germans.
50:09And the country faced a massive bill for reparations, six and a half billion pounds.
50:14Already broken, Germany would now be humiliated and made to pay.
50:23After his epic journey along the Western Front, Jacques Troly de Prevost turned his airship back home to Paris,
50:31filming the French capital untouched by war.
50:36Near here, the world's leaders had been gathering to discuss how to deal with Germany in the aftermath of the fighting.
50:45At the Grand Palace of Versailles, they drew up a peace treaty, designed to punish Germany and to ensure that this really was the war to end all wars.
51:00By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 7th 1919, most of the men who'd fought in the war and survived had gone back home to try and rebuild the civilian lives they'd known before.
51:12But the conflict had also created a restless generation, men who now looked to the future for adventure and challenges, men like the airship pilot Jacques Troly de Prevost.
51:25De Prevost's flights over the Western Front had been a unique experience, starting with its most northerly point and the floods over Newport, flying over landscapes studded with shell holes and scarred with lines of trenches, and filming towns and villages that lay in ruins.
51:47But just twenty years later, the great promises of Versailles would be broken and de Prevost's country threatened once again.
51:59A new world war began, and Paris was occupied by the Germans.
52:06Jacques Troly de Prevost would fight the enemy in very different circumstances.
52:11Flying the airship along the ruins of the Western Front had turned Jacques Troly de Prevost into a staunch patriot, determined to defend France in the future.
52:23And that determination would lead him ultimately to tragedy.
52:28Twenty years after his flight, when the Second World War began, Jacques Troly de Prevost was living in Paris.
52:43There, he'd met and married a beautiful Polish fashion model, Lotka.
52:51Three years into the fighting in 1943, they had a daughter named Aud.
52:59Aud still lives in Paris, and I'm going to meet her to find out more about her father.
53:05Both her parents died when she was still a baby.
53:08But in the last few years, Aud's been piecing together their incredible life story.
53:16By the time of the Second World War, your father is a captain in the French Navy,
53:19but he decides that he's not going to give up the fight, he's not going to surrender.
53:24And so he stays, and really acts as an agent, a spy, along with your mother.
53:29Yes. They're a team.
53:31What was their life like during that period?
53:33My mother was always on the roads with documents to deliver,
53:42or accompanying people to hide them, or to bring them to a safe place.
53:49And my father was pretending he was a shopkeeper,
53:54travelling with goods to show and to sell.
53:57Was his cover?
53:58Yeah, his cover.
53:59The Gestapo eventually closed in on your parents.
54:02Yes.
54:03They arrested them.
54:05Among them, there was a threat-off.
54:07And they went to my mother's house and arrested her.
54:11And she had just a few seconds to take me and give me very quickly to my nurse,
54:19saying, hide the baby, hide the baby.
54:20So she was taken to, and they were arrested and tortured,
54:26and nobody told anything.
54:30They kept the silence.
54:33It was pretty brutal torture, wasn't it?
54:35Yes, it was.
54:36They used electric shocks, they immersed them in water, among other things.
54:40Yes, yes.
54:42But they never spoke?
54:43They never spoke.
54:44After their arrest, did they ever see each other again?
54:48They saw each other when they were killed, when they were shot, yes.
54:54They took them to this airfield and they dug trenches, isn't that correct?
54:57Yes.
54:58Stood them in front of the trenches and machine guns?
55:00Yes.
55:01And, yes, that was the end.
55:08Do you know that your father took an airship right across the Western Front at the end of the Great War?
55:19No.
55:20Yes.
55:22And he also brought with him a cameraman, and they filmed it.
55:26Huh?
55:27Yes.
55:28Really?
55:29And there is footage.
55:32There is a film.
55:33Huh?
55:34Which was taken by your father.
55:37Are you sure?
55:38I'm absolutely positive.
55:40What?
55:41And you can see your father in this film.
55:46Would you like to see it?
55:47Oh, yes.
55:48A film?
55:49Yeah.
55:50Yes.
55:59He was smiling.
56:00Was he?
56:01Yeah.
56:02I never...
56:04On all the photos, he's always so severe.
56:06I couldn't imagine him smiling.
56:07And now I saw him smiling.
56:08What does it mean to you, watching him like this, seeing him like this?
56:18It's very, very moving.
56:19I couldn't expect seeing my father alive.
56:21It's a big shock.
56:24Big shock.
56:25Mm-hmm.
56:26Mm-hmm.
56:27What does it mean to you, watching him like this, seeing him like this?
56:34It's very moving. I couldn't expect seeing my father alive.
56:40It's a big shock.
56:57Is this a happy moment? Oh, yes. Happy, but painful too. Yes.
57:09It's a great moment. It's like as if he was alive. Really? Yes.
57:16The story of men like Jacques Trolley de Prevost epitomises a generation that faced the challenge of total war.
57:37On the other side of Paris, beneath the Arc de Triomphe, is a monument commemorating those who died in the First World War.
57:47The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
57:51A single grave containing the body of one unidentified combatant.
57:57Killed in a struggle that had claimed the lives of some 16 million people.
58:05Those four years between 1914 and 1918 would change forever the way war was fought.
58:12But they couldn't alter the fundamental truth of the battlefield,
58:15and that is that war is fought between individuals.
58:20And to them belongs its courage, its terror and its sacrifice.
58:25The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:26A remembrance tale told by Jeremy Paxman.
58:30Thursday at 10 on BBC4.
58:31The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:32The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:33The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:35historically a remembrance tale told by Jeremy Paxman.
58:36The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:40The story of renowned First World War poet, Wilfred Owen.
58:41The story of renowned First World War poet Wilfred Owen
58:47A remembrance tale told by Jeremy Paxman
58:50Thursday at 10 on BBC4