"When British International Pictures offered a bouquet of red poppies to the British Legion if only I would stand up to the camera and be shot at once or twice," "I thought to myself, "Why not?"" "My second thought was, "Why me?"" "So I said," ""There are Admirals of the Fleet" ""and there are Air Marshals of the air" ""and there are world-famous Field Marshals." ""Why me?"" "And they replied," ""Because this film does not treat" ""of world-famous men," ""it treats of forgotten men." ""You have been in many wars" ""and many forgotten wars." ""For instance," ""you were our only link" ""with the war of 1870."" "That was true enough." "So now, perhaps, you would like me to tell you whether I would not have liked to have avoided those wars." "I could not have avoided them, except by flying to another planet." "I lived for war and by war." "War was my life." "But this war on the Western Front is war with the individual humanity abstracted." "It is a species of war which is undescribable, except by moving objects." "Forgotten men." "These, their memorials." "And paltry though they seem, there were many hundreds of thousands of forgotten men who have not so much." "To give of one's best, to be struck down and swallowed into earth, is a common fate." "Nor is it the worst that may befall." "It is harder to do one's duty, to suffer and to serve and to live forgotten." "Many of you men whom I am addressing here have known and still know the bitterness of neglect." "And it is the problem of how best to remember you and your hundreds of thousands of comrades, known and unknown, who have paid the price that most perplexes those of us whose task it is to tell and re-tell the story" "of those mad, monstrous but heroic things that happened in the years 1914 to 1918." "Picture to yourselves the pleasant land of France in that golden autumn of 1914." "Look well at these lovely ways of life, never again to be quite the same." "Old world peace and beauty are about to be banished from the world, it would seem, forever, for the shadow of war is coming to darken all these fair prospects." "For a moment, the camera recalls a state meeting between King George and the Kaiser in the old, friendly days." "A passing glimpse of the Tsar, Tsarina and the little Tsarevich, eventually to meet a horrible fate at the hands of the Bolshevists in a cellar near the Siberian border." "The multifarious industries of peace." "The foundries." "The factories." "The cotton mills." "Soon to be turned to very different uses." "There is, however, one sinister exception." "Krupp's immense works where they make guns and armaments are perhaps busiest of all." "The fruits of all countries of the earth, the products of man's labour everywhere, distributing in peaceful trading to the seven seas." "The sun is setting on a world of peace." "Clouds are gathering." "War clouds." "First appearing when that assassin's bullet at Sarajevo kills Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria's imperial throne, and explodes the powder magazine of Europe that blows up half a world." "In swift succession the nations declare for war." "Germany, Austria," "Russia, France, Britain." "Look at this historic document." "The mobilisation order for the German armies." "This is the Kaiser's scrap of paper." "The most expensive piece of writing the world has ever seen." "It cost the nations of the world £40,000 million, or nearly £1,000 for every man, woman and child alive in Great Britain today." "The people cheer their leaders..." "Germany's All-Highest." "And now the pathos of farewell." "In nearly a dozen different countries of Europe, men are marching to war." "They go forth from well-nigh a million homes in Germany, from as many in France, from more than a million in Russia, from half a million Austrian homes." "And from nearly 100,000 British homes come the men who form the vanguard of the eventual imperial British legions that grew to more than 8.5 million and broke the German might." "And think of it... more than double the number of men who say goodbye and march to battle in August 1914 are doomed to die in this war." "7.5 million dead." "Mostly forgotten men." "The Kaiser inspects his troops." "Franz Joseph, the Austrian Emperor, inspects his troops." "The Tsar of Russia inspects his troops." "These three great Emperors, in the end themselves little better than forgotten men." "The French order of mobilisation arouses the people of Paris to frantic heights of patriotic fervour." "Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, whose fatherly manner earns him the name of "Papa"" "and endears him to the soldiers of France, inspires his whole nation with hope in the impending struggle." "A king who is to prove a true hero..." "Albert of Belgium and his brave little army." "The invaders are already in Belgium, whose gallant soldiers do their best against fearful odds." "Soldier Lejeune," "I am told you were among those brave Belgian troops that received the first impact of the invader." "Yes, sir." "There were 120,000 Germans and only 30,000 Belgians." "That was so around Liège." "There was only one way to stop the German advance, and King Albert, our beloved king, flooded the two provinces of Flanders." "But for the flooding of the Yser Valley and the action of the British monitors along the Belgian coast, which impedes the progress of the German Reich, the enemy might well sweep on as far as the Channel ports." "And the rest of European history would have been strangely different." "Captain Blackburn, we have in you one of the Old Contemptibles." "Out with the first batch, weren't you?" "Yes, Sir John." "The Old Contemptibles, who held the allied line against the German onset, were not at first quite 70,000 strong." "The whole of the expeditionary force could have been seated in the Wembley Stadium." "But in three months' time, when 224,000 men had gone to France, their casualties amounted to no fewer than 100,000." "Almost every second man a casualty, and more than 15,000 dead." "There is a lack of transport in these early days." "Old London buses are shipped to France to help Tommy quickly to the fighting front." "Surely the most pitiful of these early scenes is the flight of the Belgian people from their homes in the villages and towns." "Afoot, burdened with their little household treasures, by bullock wagon, any way, any how to escape the German terror." "The invaders are already in Belgium's beautiful capital while the anxious citizens are rushing the banks" "and bread queues are forming." "They're crashing onward through unhappy Belgium." "Having once flouted the verdict of the world by invading a peaceful, non-aggressive country to thrust at France, they are determined that nothing shall stay their onslaught on Paris." "So fire and sword is the order of the day for poor little Belgium and its brave people." "In Britain, "Your king and country need you"" "is the call to all fit men." "Volunteers offer in their thousands." "Ben Tillett, leader of workers, urges the workers to fight, while Lord Kitchener, made Secretary for War, is engaged upon the greatest task of his great career, the making of a mighty military machine out of a nation of peaceful home-lovers." "Here we see him with the Lord Mayor of London inspecting troops in the city." "And presently the whole of Great Britain is alive with marching men." "And in every square and open place they are drilling to form the new Kitchener armies." "Here we are again with the leaders of the invaded countries, the noble figure of King Albert towering above his French allies." "He still holds a tiny corner of his native land and there is no sign of defeat in his demeanour as he talks with Joffre," "who is here seen with one of his staff at the station of Compiègne in northern France awaiting the arrival of the British Minister of War," "Lord Kitchener." "Another fine figure of a man, who is paying a hurried visit to the French front." "The wearer of the ample overcoat is the distinguished French statesman Monsieur Millerand, at that time Minister of War." "Kitchener is inspecting representative units of the French colonial troops." "And together with Joffre and officers of the French High Command, he's here seen studying the ground from a communication trench." "Big events are now in train." "The German troops are moving up." "Through the pine woods and along the highways, marching, marching on Paris, a torrent of men that must be stopped." "Paris is in gravest danger." "The government has fled to Bordeaux." "Lieutenant Menzies," "I would like you to tell us something of those wonderful old Frenchmen beside whom you fought on the Marne Front." "There was many grandfathers amongst the territorials who were brought up in taxis from Paris and who were en liaison with us." "But unfortunately there were many of them left in the cemetery of Étrépilly." "They were great fighters, those old boys." "At last the German advance is stemmed." "The battle of the Marne is fought." "Here, in truth, between 6th and 13th September 1914," "Germany has already lost the war, but during four long years the slaughter and destruction must still go on." "It is far from quiet on the Western Front." "More destruction, more towns and villages, and still more towns and villages to be laid waste." "Artillery duels make havoc everywhere." "Untold miles of barbed wire spring up like devil's weed." "New kinds of frightfulness invented by the foe." "Liquid fire." "Gas." "Mr Healy," "I understand you were in that first horrible gas attack at Ypres in 1915." "Yes, and shall I ever forget it?" "The sight of those men coughing their lungs up and turning green and yellow was a sight that convinced me that gas was the most frightful weapon ever introduced." "Even the few that survived that attack will continue to suffer until the day they die." "And I also hear you were in the very first gas attack." "Yes, sir." "And there were no gas masks then." "We used our handkerchiefs dipped in..." "Well, ask ex-servicemen." "They'll know." "There goes a land mine and more shelling." "And a word now about the risks in taking these pictures." "Fuller, I understand you were attached to Signals on the Western Front." "Yes, that is so, sir." "And you must have had many opportunities for observing the cameramen at work when they were taking these daring pictures." "Yes, I've seen them crawling through the mud from shell hole to shell hole just to get amazing pictures like these." "And they took most of the risks that we took, though armed only with a camera." "These are German cameramen." "To them we owe many of the pictures we are seeing here for the first time." "In filming this scene, a cameraman is killed." "Watch and you will see how the scene ends abruptly when a shell explodes right in front of him." "He was photographing this bombing attack within 85 yards of the enemy trenches." "Although his camera was riddled with shrapnel, the film magazine was found to be intact." "When I was writing the deeds of the VC heroes years ago," "I find I used these words." ""The first of the two crosses with which the Leinster Regiment was honoured" ""was won by Lieutenant John Vincent Holland at Guillemont," ""who led his bombers through the British barrage" ""and cleared a large part of a village in front." ""He started out with 26 bombers" ""and came back with five after capturing 50 prisoners."" "Do these words refer to you?" "Guilty." "I have been wondering if by any chance your luck has been better than that of some celebrated VCs whose deeds I have also had to record and who, I fear, today are numbered also with the forgotten men." "The title of this picture suggests an eloquent answer to your question, for we too are numbered in the ranks of forgotten men." "And still the sullen guns go on, thudding terror into the hearts and souls of nations." "Guns of all sorts and sizes, and increasing in size as the war increases." "A momentary glimpse of these Germans, swift in action, and we come to the broken bodies of men and horses." "But death has still its solemnity and ceremony." "Behind the lines, Joffre and Poincaré hearten the warriors of France." "And particularly on the eastern sector of the front, there is much marching and counter-marching." "Men and machines going into action, food and munitions following their trails." "An endless stream of doomed humanity." "Pawns in the game of war." "Another fleeting glimpse of Kaiser and Crown Prince, both of them radiating optimism which, at the moment, may have been justified." "For here we have the All-Highest's military chief, Hindenburg, with his second-in-command, Ludendorff, planning." "What are they up to?" "It is, I suspect, how they will break through at Verdun and so deal a shattering blow at the French defences." "But here, around Verdun, at the mighty fort of Douaumont, one of the greatest epics of the war finds its battlefields." "It is here the historic cry goes up," ""They shall not pass."" "And in these terrific Verdun battles" "Fort Douaumont is lost..." "and won... and held again." "It's recaptured in October 1916, being one of the decisive episodes of the middle period of the war." "Once more, the camera takes us through scenes that are typical of the war on most sectors of the Western Front." "You will notice some of the men who are killed falling forward on their faces." "It is thus, though not always, that men shot in battle fall." "The war god, once enthroned, is insatiate and demands his daily sacrifices." "Still the reserves come pouring up." "The rising rate of slaughter calls for increased supplies." "French 75s in action, please... one of the most successful arms of the war." "They seem to fit the lighter temperament of the French fighters as the heavier guns did that of their enemies." "Here, in the very heart of war's horrors, the cameraman has registered the dreadful sight of a soldier in his last agonies, the others around him already still." "You, Sergeant Brigg, were attached, I believe, to the Royal Irish Regiment." "That's right, sir." "Our darkest hour was at Passchendaele." "We lost more men through drowning in the mud than we did by enemy shellfire." "I myself was buried in the mud and slime for three whole days." "Mud... mud..." "and then more mud." "Under conditions such as these the British were to lose no fewer than 60,000 lives in the terrible battle of Passchendaele." "Steel yourselves now to watch these soldiers meet their death while taking up ammunition to the troops." "One, mortally wounded, tries to carry on, but in vain." "From sector to sector the Kaiser still hurries to inspire his troops to further useless slaughter." "The panorama of battle." "Across this open country the troops are ordered to advance, but watch their tactics as the shells are falling." "There goes one." "And the men hasten towards the crater it makes, hoping it is a better hole, on the theory, perhaps, that where a shell once hits, it is not likely another will fall." "Chiefly French wounded now engage our attention, and we are again among the dead and dying." "Look at that broken body." "It had a head and brains and hopes and fears a little while ago." "Now one with the mud." "And now you will note how little time there is for ceremony in disposing of the dead when they must be huddled into a common grave." "The French officer has just removed that poor fellow's identification tags before the body is tipped in, while a comrade stands by and puffs his cigarette." "Fortunes of war." "To the many... death." "To the few... decorations." "Sergeant Kenny, you won your VC at Ypres so early as 23rd October 1914, didn't you?" "Yes, sir." "Ran 500 yards in face of German machine-gun fire and warned three companies that were being surrounded." "The records show you saved the lives of hundreds of men." "All in a day's work, sir." "You saw Sergeant Morrison win his military medal, didn't you?" "Yes, sir." "1916." "Wiped out a German gun crew single-handed." "Yes, sir." " Have you got anything to say, Morrison?" " Only this, sir." "Any people who start another war should go there and fight it themselves, sir." "It gives me a thrill to find you have brought the famous Pipes of Loos with you, Laidlaw." "I never go anywhere without them, sir." "With men falling all around us in the trenches at Loos on 20th September 1915, when Lieutenant Young yelled out," ""Laidlaw, for God's sake do something with your pipes,"" "I played them over the top and went right on to the first line of German trenches, on to the second line where I was bowled over." "Will you play us the tune with which you piped the boys over the top?" "Yes, sir." "Again the scene changes." "We are now with the Russians." "Poor soldiers of the Tsar, the worst-equipped of all who fought in the war." "Slaughtered at Tannenberg like rabbits." "There is heavy shelling on the left and the Russians advanced to be mown down by machine-gun fire." "The Cossacks in rapid charge." "That's more our idea of a Russian soldier." "But they count for very little against the heavy artillery of the Austrians." "Note the soldier fall mortally wounded on the left." "This time we observe the Austrians advancing uphill to the attack." "Back again in the Russian lines we see the gunners of the Tsar at work and admire the bravery of the men rescuing their comrade." "This Russian ought surely to get the Tsar's equivalent of the Victoria Cross." "You can see the men falling in the wire entanglement." "While one cannot refrain from admiring the fleeting beauty of a bursting shell, the human appeal of the next scene is undeniable." "Ask him what he thinks of war and he'll answer in the Russian equivalent of the American "lousy"." "Nothing is more common to the war than the house of worship turned into a hospital clearing station." "The allies have a new enemy in the Near East when Turkey joins with Germany." "And the streets of Constantinople present the never-ending spectacle of soldiers on the march." "General Allenby, who's later to prove the hero of the war in the east and conqueror of the Turk." "But the allies have a new friend in the west when Italy joins forces with them." "Private Pellegrini..." "Corporal, if you please, just like Napoleon." "I stand corrected, Caporale Pellegrini." "21,000 of your comrades died at Ortigara on the Asiago Plateau." "Quite so." "Mussolini, I am told, was a private then." "No, he was also a corporal like me and Napoleon." "Well, again I stand corrected." "And in the thick of it." "He got the most dangerous jobs." "48 pieces of shrapnel were taken out of his body." "Most of them without anaesthetic." "I'd like you to tell your comrades here just what were the sacrifices made by Italy in the Great War." "The sacrifices of Italy were 652,000 killed, one million wounded," "450,000 of them disabled for life." "Not in Flanders mud, not in Palestine desert, but amid Alpine snows and ice" "Italy faces her enemies." "Every gun has to be manhandled up these forbidding heights." "No fewer than 600 men are tugging at this one." "The havoc of a bursting shell among these stony peaks hardly bears thinking of." "The most ghastly and inhuman facial wounds were suffered by Italians and Austrians alike." "Many Italians lingered in secret nursing homes with injuries too dreadful to be seen even by their relatives." "And yet how attractive these snowy firing galleries look." "Yes, and about as useful a protection as walls of tissue paper." "As one battle ends with the burial of tens of thousands and the maiming of twice as many, another and more colossal blow is planned." "But Tommy keeps on smiling and will have his little joke." "Once more, big guns in action." "Those guns that boomed through four long years of hideous suffering." "Those guns that blew away in four years the profits of 50 years of peace." "The wealth and happiness of nations to be buried in the mud and blood of no man's land." "No matter what new horrors of war are invented, battles are still won only when it comes to cold steel." "The fixed bayonet is the modern version of that most ancient weapon, the spear." "Swift death by bullet comes to the fourth man from the right, who we see here about to go over the top." "The dreaded cold steel that has got the enemy on the run in this glimpse of a spirited British bayonet attack." "Men carrying planks to use as improvised bridges over old trenches." "The third man across is hit and his body plunges forward into a ready-dug grave." "Havoc is now so commonplace that only when it offers a scene like this does it call for notice." "The old tower that crumbles under the explosive may have sheltered some artillery observers." "And if so, well..." "See these two soldiers dropping as the shell explodes?" "Two more of the 7.5 million doomed to die." "But the Red Reaper never tires of gathering in his harvest, and as fast as he cuts down the human crop, new crops of men and material are made ready for his further reaping until more than the total population of the whole of Greater London" "has been extinguished in death." "So can we wonder that the rate of slaughter makes such inroads in all belligerent populations?" "But boys of 17... look upon the pitiful young faces... are offered to the Moloch of war as they were in ancient Carthage." "What lives most in your memory of the Somme?" "We were going to raid the German trenches." "On arrival at our trenches we found that the whole of the ground was strewn with the dead." "You could pick up any part of a man's body." "The whole thing was horrible." "We have with us" "Sergeant Alan Nichols of the Durham Light Infantry." "An Old Contemptible, he received his first wounds in France in 1914." "And in September of 1916 he suffered the dreadful misfortune of losing both hands and his still more precious sight in a bombing affray during a period when he was Regimental Bombing Instructor." "16 and a half years I have spent lecturing up and down the country." "St Dunstan's found that I had a gift in that direction." "This fact has kept me going and desirous of still carrying on." "Well, I'm sure no one has a better right than you to tell the post-war generation why war should end, which I believe is the title of one of your many successful lectures." "It is, Sir John." "And I think the Armistice Day, which in itself revives and brings untold mental agony to hundreds of thousands every Armistice Day," "is sufficient to cause the end of war by the simple process of remembering." "We look next upon some typical landscapes of war where dawn, that once revealed beauty, now exposes only ruin, destruction, waste." "Tommy himself has no real hatred of the men he is fighting, and this German prisoner can have Tommy's last fag." "That was Tommy's way." "The French are both humorous and practical in removing the trouser buttons of their German captives." "The prisoners can only run away with a dreadful loss of dignity." "And Germans value dignity more than humour." "In the war, mutual hate was shown more by non-combatants than by the men who faced each other in the trenches." "But 20 years after, when racial passions have died down," "I hope we may welcome here, in Lieutenant Kuschke, one of Germany's forgotten men." "You were, I believe, one of those who received the famous Iron Cross." "Yes, that's true." "Tell me, what troubled you most during the war?" "The shortage of food with our families at home." "That affected me much more than my own shortage in the field, and that was pretty bad." "A peep behind the scenes in Germany." "Food supplies are running low." "Bread tickets are the order of the day." "The Kaiser and Hindenburg have more reason for anxiety now than ever." "Thanks to the sea blockade," "Germany's metal supply has also fallen to danger point, and the people offer domestic articles of any sort of metal that can be melted and used for making shells." "Flight Lieutenant Keane, you served in the Royal Flying Corps." "Perhaps you will tell us something about the war in the air." "When you say that, my mind flashes back to our warrior aces." "McCudden, Ball, Mannock and Bishop, all VCs." "Their fearless courage inspired the Royal Flying Corps." "Who in your opinion was the greatest German air fighter?" "Baron von Richthofen, Sir John." "He was shot down in our lines, wasn't he?" "Yes, and when he was found his dead hand was still on the trigger of his gun." "He was buried at Bertangles by the Royal Flying Corps with full military honours." "He deserved a hero's burial." "Now to see something of the war in the air." "How fascinating to watch the graceful flight of these bombs." "How horrible to know what destruction they can spread when they come to earth." "Lightning may never strike twice in the same place but evidently bombs can, for here we see no fewer than three that find the same mark in swift succession." "A very terrifying sort of attack is this, known as "ground strafing", a low-flying plane spraying machine-gun bullets on the troops." "Here we have a very remarkable record of an aeroplane caught in a flat spin." "Nothing that the pilot can do will save him from disaster." "As weapons of attack increase in destructive power, new weapons and methods of defence must be devised." "Little patches in the sky that look like cotton wool when they unfold are really bursts of shrapnel, puffs of flying death." "There is Baron Richthofen, the celebrated German air fighter." "He is taking off his helmet." "That's his hand pointing out the bullet holes in his aeroplane." "And with his flying circus he is getting ready for another adventure." "The ever-present danger to the airman in war is that in the event of accident to his machine he may be the first victim of his own bombs, as you see here." "Another of our former enemies is here in friendliness," "Lieutenant Rippe." "You saw service in the German army, didn't you?" "I did." "Observation balloon squadron." " Ever shot down?" " Yes." "My balloon caught fire." "Although I escaped with a parachute, the heat from the balloon burned me very badly." "Few jobs in the war were more dangerous than artillery spotting from an observation balloon, which could easily be set on fire by enemy aircraft and the only escape from which was by means of parachute." "At first, neither side attempted to shoot the helpless airmen, but as the war grew more fierce, orders were given to shoot down both balloon and observer." "The giant Zeppelin, for a time the terror of the skies." "A terror that flew by night and did great havoc in the 51 Zeppelin raids over England." "But the main use of these titanic aircraft to the enemy was to terrorise the civil population, in which they succeeded for a time, though in the end the Zep was no match for our fearless young pilots." "With their swift-rising British planes they could pour a stream of incendiary bullets into the vast hulk of the Zeppelin and send it crashing in flames to the earth." "The work of the British Legion is concerned mainly with forgotten men, and who has done more for that fine work than Major Brunel Cohen?" "I don't want you to think that I belong to the "peace at any price" brigade." "At no gathering of forgotten men is such a protest needed, because among forgotten men" "Major Cohen, who served and suffered and achieved, is one of the unforgotten." "We ex-servicemen know only too well what war is." "We can easily imagine what the next one will be like." "Aeroplanes know no boundaries." "Every civilian will be in the firing line." "Women and children will be killed, wounded and mutilated." "Whole cities will be devastated." "Whole populations will be wiped out." "Anarchism will reign throughout a world ruined by famine and disease." "There can be no winners, and all mankind will be the losers." "If these pictures that you have seen and that you are going to see bring home to you the horrors of the last war, let your imagination run riot, for I cannot exaggerate the horrors of the next." "I would urge you therefore, unless you are definitely attacked, not to let your children go through what we went through." "The British people have been taught to look upon their navy as the bulwark of their security." "And in the hour of trial, it does not fail them." "King George himself, our sailor king, whom we see here visiting the fleet, has vividly described it in his historic proclamation as "Britain's sure shield"." "Ships of the German fleet passing through the Kiel Canal, which was widened as part of the great German war plan and completed only two months before Germany declared war." "In the Kaiser's navy, the British fleet, with which we are back again, had no unworthy foe to fight." "And it is a remarkable fact that in the long years of the war, the two navies at their full strength met but once, at the Great Battle of Jutland, the most tremendous naval encounter in all history." "In the naval war we witness the clash of vast machines manipulated by relatively small crews, whereas on land we have seen vast numbers of men used as machines." "The British losses, even in the Great Battle of Jutland, some 6,000 killed, would be accounted a light casualty list in any big battle on the Western Front." "We've got an old navy man in you, Stubbs." "Yes, I served on the Mentor as a gun layer." "You must have seen many a good ship go down in the naval war." "I saw the Blücher go down." "It was a sight I shall never forget." "I suppose you did your share in helping to save the drowning German sailors?" "Boats were lowered and we rescued a good few, and we would have liked to have rescued very many more, but the Zeppelins came over and we had to leave them." "This is the Blücher only a few minutes before she disappears." "Watch the frantic efforts of her crew scrambling over her ponderous hull as she rolls over, throwing them into the sea." "Hundreds of these men would certainly have been saved but for their fellow countrymen in the Zeppelin overhead which, as we have heard, by its attack drove off the British ships standing by to rescue." "A German submarine." "We are now about to see for the first time in any authentic war film what happened during Germany's submarine campaign of frightfulness." "Her submarines crept out of her ports and infested the trade routes along the European coast and well into the Mediterranean." "They showed no mercy." "They attacked and destroyed hundreds of merchant vessels." "They respected no flag." "And in the end this policy of ruthless destruction, having embittered the whole world, brought no relief to Germany." "The amazing pictures you're witnessing were taken by German cameramen from submarines and exhibited to German audiences as evidences of the destruction their submarines were effecting on the supplies of the allied nations." "There goes the Italian steamer Stromboli, another of the U-35's many victims." "Captive Britons taking an airing on the tiny deck of their floating prison." "Back at her base a flag flies at the mast of a U-35 for every ship she has sunk." "British sailors showed endless resource and invention in countering the U-boat menace." "And eventually success crowned their effort." "Depth charges." "Camouflage." "Q-ships." "Apparently harmless merchant men with hidden guns beneath their hatches." "The smokescreen." "Convoys." "The crowning achievement and the crowning error of the German submarine war was the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7th 1915 with the loss of 1,100 lives." "An action that stunned the conscience of the world." "America joins the allies." "Though late to enter the war, her military effort was remarkable." "Like Britain, she had to set about the task of creating an army of a gigantic scale demanded by modern warfare." "And this she did with fine enthusiasm." "The mere knowledge of America's preparations and immense resources were a decisive factor in the eventual victory of the allies." "They call this the "Doughboy's pullman"." "But years before, many thousands of Tommies had gone up to the fighting zone in similar luxury." "Coloured American troops on the march." "This recalls the old negro ditty "Razors Will Be Flying In The Air"." "The First American Army is preparing for its historic attack on Saint-Mihiel." "The Americans in the trenches." "Their safe transport across the Atlantic was one of the many triumphs of the British navy and British shipping." "Bedroom." "Sitting room." "And bath." "Scenes from the opening of their Saint-Mihiel attack." "According to the adage, necessity is the mother of invention, but I suggest that war is the stepmother." "We have already seen many of the new ideas brought into being by the necessities of this war, but in the tanks we have the one supreme invention of military genius produced in the whole four years of the conflict." "And the tanks are an exclusive product of British brains." "One of the German historians of the war, in commenting upon the first appearance of the tanks in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, wrote," ""The arrival of the tanks on the scene had a most shattering effect on the men." ""They felt powerless against these monsters." ""It was more the demoralising effect than their practical usefulness" ""that distinguished them."" "To quote the German again," ""The tank terror was more of a phantom than a real danger."" "See them crawling like giant crocodiles over the mud of that embankment." "Actually, they were by no means proof against shellfire, as a later scene will show." "Their thin steel sides were dented even by bullets." "And not a few of the men who manipulated them inside were injured by steel splinters that flew from the walls when bullets hit the outside." "On November 20th 1917, no fewer than 381 tanks, followed by infantry, rolled on to Cambrai." "What the Americans call a "lucky break"." "Beer left behind by retreating Germans." "War's lighter side." "These concert parties did invaluable work in maintaining cheerful spirits." "Transports assembling." "Perhaps for the last ride." "And more troops." "Not many of them veterans, for the ranks of youth are now being heavily drawn upon, since we are in the last year, the last months of the war." "This will strike a chord in the memory of every old soldier." "That blessed moment of respite before renewed action." "Now the artillery, putting up a heavy barrage to cover the advance of infantry." "The barrage increases." "Here the guns are wheel to wheel." "Nature is shorn of her beauty, the nations of their manhood." "Here it would now seem that although the Germans put up a magnificent resistance, the initiative is with the allies." "And nothing looks like stopping their advance." "In these later days of the war, and even when the issues seem no longer in doubt, there is no let-up in the hostilities, no lessening of the risks run by the opposing armies." "So swift is our advance that at times the infantry are forced to wait for our own barrage to lift." "And in this last phase, when stalemate gives place to action, we catch glimpses again of the more exciting scenes of open warfare." "Observe the heads of the men popping up in that trench." "Only a small mound of earth intervenes between them and death." "Here it is zero hour, but perhaps over the top for the last time." "Youth is paying its toll." "Many of these soldiers are mere boys." "Gas still in use, but less effective now, since all the troops have long since become familiar with gas masks." "It can never be used again with any surprise." "It would now appear that the Germans are retreating, and soon they are falling back along all the Western Front." "The bayonet you see is still the most efficient of the many and varied instruments of war." "The retreat of the Germans quickens." "And German prisoners, employed by the British, carrying in the wounded, enemy and allied alike." "In these last days of wildest excitement, huge captures of Germans are made." "Here they are in prison camps, glad, perhaps, their fighting days are done." "And everywhere the wounded." "Weren't you attached to the Graves Registration Unit, Miss Whitton?" "I was." "And every day saw many of our brave men laid to their last resting place." "And in 1918, when the Germans broke through, there were so many killed that we women had to help bury them, although it was against the regulations." "When the war is all but ended, there are still many thousands being killed and wounded." "There are still many dead to bury, many more to join those ghostly legions of forgotten men." "And in fancy, we can see them still, for shadows we are and shadows we pursue." "And in the noble lines of Colonel McCrae, who soon after died fighting, we almost seem to hear what they are saying." ""We are the dead." ""Short days ago we lived," ""felt dawn," ""saw sunset glow," ""loved and were loved," ""and now we lie in Flanders fields."" "♪ Beneath the shadow of Thy throne" "♪ Thy saints have dwelt secure" "♪ Sufficient is Thine arm alone... ♪"