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http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/3115:audio-interview/
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http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/3123:interview-with-frances-daunt/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ishSpxfrWNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1YM30MLFNQ

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The war brought excitement and fear to Britain's children with masses of air-raid warnings, drills and food shortages that soon became a part of their everyday lives. Thus, they began to feel like they should "do their bit" towards the war effort and soon were right in the thick of it.
SWEETS
Since Britain imported all its sugar, people were encouraged to do without it and eating sweets was even seen as unpatriotic. Looking for an alternative to sugar, adults offered the dubious treats of chocolate biscuits made from a mix of flour, cocoa, butter, ground rice, sieved boiled potatoes, egg and treacle.
RATIONS AND ALLOTMENTS
Children were encouraged to cultivate their own vegetables at school and many would have had their own little corner of the school garden. During 1917 the government asked children to collect horse chestnuts for munition making and blackberries for jam for soldiers - for which they were paid 3d (just over 1p) per pound.

Children began to work on the land by helping to bring in the harvest or growing vegetables on allotments either at home or in school.

Because of food shortages and rations, children were often urged to help save food. The Win-The-War Cookery Book declared: "The child who saves bread is a soldier too." The main idea was not just to encourage children to eat less but to teach them that eating slowly was the best way to preserve their health and conserve food.
RECRUITS
With an increase in demand for recruits, boys, lying about their age, soon joined their fathers, uncles and elder brothers to fight for their country. At that time most people didn't have birth certificates so it was easy to lie about one's age.

However, after Private John Condon, aged 14, was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres, in May 1915 - when the Germans used poison gas for the first time - there was clearly a need to organise conscription better.

Therefore, National Registration was introduced in 1916 where adults were issued with identity cards. In this way the flood of underage soldiers was stopped.
SCHOOLS
Wartime conditions made the work of schools especially difficult.

Many male teachers had either volunteered or were called up for military service and as the war went on were soon replaced by women or retired men. Food sacrifices had to be made all across the country and in boarding schools too where all sugar in tea, cakes and jam was soon given up.

Many types of war work was done in schools. The girls knitted "comforts" - scarves, socks, balaclava helmets, etc - to send to the troops while some near military camps undertook the mending of uniforms. Others collected jam, chocolate, books and other comforts to be sent.

With the ever-present risk of air raids, drills were regularly held in schools. Pupils were taught to lie under their desk. The threat was real. On June 13, 1917, during the first daylight raid on London, a bomb fell on Upper North Street primary school in Poplar. It killed 18 children, most of them aged between four and six.
THE SCOUTS
Youth organisations played a great part in the war effort too and Boy Scouts provided patrols to guard the railways and watch the coasts as well as to sound the all-clear as trumpeters.

The Scouts also took on air-raid duties such as aircraft spotting and reporting as well as escorting people to air raid shelters. Each year on Empire Day (May 24) and at Christmas, schoolchildren would collect tobacco and comforts such as footballs, books or dart boards for soldiers and sailors, while Christmas parcels were sent out to the school's old boys or alumni serving in the forces.
PLAYTIME
Popular street games included the timeless hide-and-seek, It (and all its other variations such as bulldog and sticky toffee), skipping, hopscotch, football, cricket, running races, etc.

One popular game was, as ever, "War". Better-off children might have small uniforms and pop-guns but poorer youngsters crafted caps from newspapers, swords and guns from sticks and the military band was ingeniously made up of old biscuit-tin drums and penny whistles. The only problem was that nobody really wanted to play the Germans.
TOYS
Before the war Germany had been the world's most important producer of children's toys, exporting to the rest of Europe and the US. When war began, German goods were shunned, including old favourites such as the famous Steiff Bears.

British-made war-related toys were soon in the shops. Toy soldiers in red coats had long been popular, now they were dressed in khaki, and there were pull-along dreadnought battleships, field guns and howitzers, Maxim machine guns, armoured motor cars, horse-drawn Red Cross wagons and even complete field hospitals.
CLOTHES
By 1917 cloth shortages meant that patched clothes (once only seen on the poor) were now becoming increasingly worn by the middle classes. Standard cloth, which was given by the government for use in clothing for poorer classes, quickly gained a bad reputation.

After just a few washes the fabric became blanketed in little balls of fluff and the dye was notoriously poor as it often turned to a muted shade of dull purple no matter what colour it had started out.
HOLIDAYS
Resorts on the south and east coasts became the primary targets of sea raids so many people went further north, or to the west coast, for a seaside holiday.

Christmas, especially in the early years of the war, became a sober affair and food shortages meant sumptuous festive meals were out of the question.

Despite these hardships, for many children the best Christmas present came in the form of a week's Christmas leave for dad who would come back just in time for the "Wartime Christmas Pudding" - and finally there'd be something to celebrate.
Extract by AKARSHANA BHATT *To order Children In The First World War by Mike Brown (Amberley, £8.99) with free UK delivery call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310. Or send a cheque/ PO made payable to The Express Bookshop to Mike Brown Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.co.uk

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Children In The First World War: A look at how youngsters were so terribly affected

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The war brought excitement and fear to Britain's children with masses of air-raid warnings, drills and food shortages that soon became a part of their everyday lives. Thus, they began to feel like they should "do their bit" towards the war effort and soon were right in the thick of it.

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French school system: History, Arts, 3rd and 1st * Canadian grade level: Grades 9 to 12

Introduction

The First World War produced a profound change in the way writers and artists interpreted war. Their works gradually moved away from celebrating action on the battlefield to become denunciations of the violence, barbarity and devastation of war.

Writers had long extolled courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice in tales of epic heroism such as The Iliad, and war had been a subject that had inspired painters and sculptors of all eras. The frequency of war as a subject of art may also have been due to the fact that works were often commissioned to praise governments or prominent figures.

Also, until this time, save for the rare exception, artists, even if they lived at the time of the wars they described or depicted, did not fight in them until mass conscription was instituted. In the Great War, on the contrary, novelists and poets, painters and musicians were caught up in the universal mobilizations of 1914. Some also enlisted voluntarily, carried along by a wave of patriotic fervour. They also wrote about, painted and drew what they saw and experienced. Not only did they leave us an authentic record of the war in art and writing, but they also broke new ground artistically with adventurous new forms.

This file provides examples of works inspired by the First World War, by artists and writers who were actual combatants, who were sent as witnesses, or who focused on this theme after the war, sometimes many years later. Each in his or her own way, they tried to capture the incredible brutality of the fighting, the fear of dying and the pain of the women and children left behind to cope as best they could. They expressed their horror of war, but in certain cases they also showed a morbid fascination with this modern, total type of warfare.

Witness accounts and autobiographical narratives

The many well-known French writers who fought in the First World War included Guillaume Apollinaire, Alain-Fournier, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Kessel, Henri Barbusse, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Giraudoux, Raymond Dorgelès, Charles Péguy, Jean Giono, Roger Vercel, Louis Aragon and Romain Rolland. Of these, Blaise Cendrars lost an arm, Alain-Fournier and Charles Péguy were killed, and Apollinaire, injured at the front in 1915, succumbed to the Spanish influenza in 1918. American novelist Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver in Italy during the war; German writers Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque based their most famous works on their personal experiences in the Great War; English writers Harry Fellows and J.R.R. Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme, and poet Siegfried Sassoon was decorated for bravery; Belgian pacifist poet Émile Verhaeren and Austrian writer Stephen Zweig, who were deemed unfit for combat, wrote war propaganda.

These writers felt compelled to bear witness to the horrors of war. Those who had enlisted in the throes of patriotic exaltation expressed their disillusionment in the face of the absurdity and cruelty of the fighting. However, those who sought to publish witness accounts during the war were stymied by the censorship that blocked any writing that might have spread pacifist, anti-militaristic ideas. Some authors (Céline, Remarque, Giono and Hemingway) would have to wait several years after the war, when the threat of a new world conflict was looming, to be able to publish novels inspired by their experiences in the Great War. Authors who did manage to have their books published right after the war's end had limited success: Les Croix de Bois by Raymond Dorgelès, for example, narrowly missed winning the 1919 Prix Goncourt, reflecting a loss of interest in war stories. Moreover, the advent of Dada and the Surrealist movement contributed to the devaluation of these authentic accounts in the period between the wars.

Aside from the better-known literary figures, the combatants who chronicled their war experiences ranged from ordinary soldiers to high commanders such as Philippe Pétain and Erich von Falkenhayn.

Henri Barbusse, Le Feu, Journal d'une escouade, 1916
A volunteer in the French army in 1914 at age 41, Henri Barbusse wrote of his personal experience at the front and in the trenches from December 1914 to 1916. His account first appeared as a series in the daily newspaper L'Œuvre, beginning on August 3, 1916, and was published in its entirety by Flammarion at the end of November 1916, winning the Prix Goncourt for that year. A passage from this narrative inspired German artist Otto Dix in his 1934 painting Flanders, the last work he dedicated to the Great War. The English translation of the narrative is entitled Under Fire.

Roland Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois, 1919
Dorgelès's novel, published under a pseudonym, was inspired by his own experience in the war. He describes the daily lives of soldiers at the front and in the rear in a series of scenes that are not obviously interconnected. The wooden crosses of the title allude to the grave markers for fallen soldiers placed on the sides of roads used by the troops. The work was shortlisted for the 1919 Prix Goncourt (won by Marcel Proust for À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), won the Prix Femina, and was a bestseller in France. It was translated into English as Wooden Crosses.

Maurice Genevoix, Ceux de 14, 1949 (a collection of war accounts published between 1916 and 1921)
Lieutenant Maurice Genevoix was 24 when he was mobilized for combat. In Ceux de 14, a collection of five narratives, he describes the eight months he spent at the front, notably at Verdun. The reader is privy to the author's loss of idealistic patriotism and his growing demoralization in the face of the infantrymen's horrendous living conditions-the frigid temperatures, the mud, and the omnipresence of death. Wounded in 1915, he was invalided out of the combat zone.

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, 1920
The German author wrote this autobiographical narrative based on his war diaries and the photographs he took during his four years as a soldier in the Great War. At times, his lucid testimony seems oddly detached from the horrors of the war. Jünger was one of the writers who had trouble finding a publisher in a postwar society in which people had grown tired of reading this kind of account, which had appeared frequently during the conflict.

Joseph Kessel, L'équipage, 1923
A stretcher-bearer for a few months in 1914, Joseph Kessel joined the French air force at the end of 1916; this novel was inspired by his experience. The hero is Herbillon, a young man who leaves his family and the girl he loves to fight for his country. Kessel offers a rather idealized view of the war, which mainly serves as the background for a story of courage and brotherly solidarity in the face of death.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929
This novel, written in the first-person singular and based on personal experience, takes place in Italy during the First World War. It relates the tragic love story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross (as was Hemingway), and Catherine Barkley, a British war nurse.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929
Erich Maria Remarque's personal experience of the war was the basis of this pacifist novel that garnered worldwide success. The hero, a 19-year-old German youth named Paul Bäumer, is swayed by patriotic jingoism to enlist, but soon discovers the horrors of the front. The Nazis declared the book degenerate literature; it was publicly burned and was banned in Germany from 1933 until after the war.

Siegfried Sassoon, Memories of an Infantry Officer, 1930
This pacifist autobiographical narrative by the British poet and novelist, who was decorated for bravery in the war, tells the story of George Sherston's experiences in the trenches at the Battles of the Somme and Arras in 1916 and 1917. Invalided out, George decides to speak publicly against the war, but he is silenced when a medical board has him hospitalized as a victim of shell shock.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 1930-1943
Robert Musil fought in the First World War, mostly on the Italian front. Demobilized in 1916 after a diagnosis of depressive neurasthenia, he was interned in a Prague hospital, where he met Franz Kafka. Musil finished the war in the Austrian army press service. His notes from the period between 1915 and 1917 were the basis of the novel that literary critics consider his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932
Céline's first and best-known novel, Voyage to the End of the Night in English translation, is told in the first-person singular from the point of view of the main character, Ferdinand Bardamu. Its first chapters describe the hell of the First World War and the futile violence of trench warfare. The novel, which missed winning the Prix Goncourt by two votes but won the Prix Renaudot, was stylistically groundbreaking with its use of ellipses, onomatopoeia, and colloquial language, including slang. The author, who was wounded in the war and was traumatized by his experience, denounced all forms of heroism: according to Céline, the only reasonable option for resisting the madness of war is cowardice.

Roger Vercel, Capitaine Conan, 1934
Roger Vercel's novel (Captain Conan in English translation) was inspired by the author's First World War experience on the Eastern Front during the year that followed the Armistice of November 1918. In the novel, instead of being demobilized after the war, the members of an irregular French army unit under Capitaine Conan are sent to Romania on a support mission. The former commandos have difficulty adapting to civilian life and its laws. The narrator, Norbert, a colleague of the captain's during the war, is appointed to investigate and defend the soldiers at court martial hearings when they are accused of various crimes. When the captain himself becomes a suspect in a murder case, Norbert resigns from his new position of prosecutor to avoid having to help prepare the case against his comrade. The novel won the Prix Goncourt.

Jean Giono, "Recherche de la pureté," 1939
This autobiographical text was published as the foreword to Carnets de Moleskine by Lucien Jacques (Gallimard, 1939), and it clarified Jean Giono's pacifist stance in the postwar period. Giono was traumatized by his time at the front in the Great War, and, moreover, was incarcerated for two months for incitement to desert. This text was republished in 2013 in the collection Écrits pacifistes. Other writings in which Giono denounced the barbarity of war include the novel Le Grand Troupeau, published in 1931, and "Refus d'obéissance" (1934), which also appears in Écrits pacifistes.

Blaise Cendrars, La Main coupée, 1946
In August 1914, Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars enlisted in the French Foreign Legion as a volunteer. He fought at the Somme and participated in the great Champagne offensive. Seriously wounded in a German attack on September 28, 1915, Cendrars lost his right arm to amputation. In La Main coupée, he chronicled the year he spent at the front, condemning the ideologies that had triggered and exploited the violence. The episode of the amputation is described in the autobiographical short story "J'ai saigné," written in 1938 (Paris: Hatier, coll. "Classiques et Cie. Collège," 2012). Cendrars also assisted director Abel Gance during the shooting of the pacifist film J'accuse, in 1919.

Collections of soldiers' letters

Jean-Pierre Guéno, Paroles de poilus. Lettres et carnets du front, 1914-1918, 1993
From the back cover of the book:
"They were 17 or 25 years old. Their names were Gaston, Louis, René. They were grooms, bakers, peddlers, members of the bourgeoisie and the working class. Overnight, they became gunners, foot soldiers, stretcher-bearers. Travellers without baggage, they had to leave their wives and children, put on ill-fitting uniforms and hobnailed boots. Of the eight million mobilized between 1914 and 1918, more than two million young men would never see the church steeples of their hometowns again. More than four million suffered serious injuries. Eight thousand people responded to the Radio France appeal for the collection of the letters sent home by the poilus (French infantrymen), letters that had remained scattered until then. About a hundred of these letters appear here."

Poetry

The poppy is the recognized symbol of remembrance for war dead in Canada, the other countries of the British Commonwealth, and the United States. The flower owes its significance to the poem 'In Flanders Fields,' written by Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John McCrae, a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery, in the midst of the Second Battle of Ypres, Belgium, in May 1915. The poppy references in the first and last stanzas of the most widely read and oft-quoted poem of the war contributed to the flower's status as an emblem of remembrance and a symbol of new growth amidst the devastation of war.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre, 1918; Poèmes à Lou, 1947

French poet Guillaume Apollinaire enlisted in the French army as a volunteer in 1914. He suffered a head wound in combat in 1915, and finished the war in a weakened state. He succumbed to the Spanish influenza in 1918, after publishing Calligrammes, dedicated to a comrade fallen in battle in 1917. Among the more memorable of these "writing games" is "La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau" (The Bleeding-heart Dove and the Fountain). In 1914 he had met a woman named Lou, with whom he spent a week in Nîmes. The letters and poems Apollinaire sent to her daily between 1914 and 1916 make up the collection Poèmes à Lou, published in 1947, 30 years after his death.

Nikolai Gumilev, "The Worker," 1918

A Russian poet and critic, and the husband of poet Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev was a co-founder of the Poets' Guild. He enlisted as soon as war was declared and was twice decorated for bravery in 1915. During the Russian Revolution, he joined the Russian Expeditionary Force in France. Upon returning to Russia from Paris after the war, he was accused of anti-revolutionary activities and was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1921.

Theatre

Jean Giraudoux, La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, 1935
Wounded in combat in the First World War, writer and diplomat Jean Giraudoux became an ardent pacifist. In this play, he establishes a parallel between Europe in the 1930s, when people felt powerless to stem the tide of an oncoming war, and the situation in Antiquity, when no one wanted to believe Cassandra's prediction of the Trojan War. The play was first presented at Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris by Louis Jouvet and his company on November 22, 1935. It was translated into English as Tiger at the Gates.

Recent novels

Over the last 30 years, contemporary literature has taken up First World War themes as if to give voice to the last surviving combatants. The first-person singular is still favoured, but several narrators in these meticulously documented stories are witnesses who were overlooked by most of the writers who participated in the war?women and children, for example.

Jean Rouaud, Les Champs d'honneur, 1990
The author has chronicled his family history in five volumes. The first brings us back to the era of the First World War, in which two brothers, Émile and Joseph (Rouaud's great-uncles), were killed in 1916. More than a description of life in the trenches, Les Champs d'honneur evokes the emptiness and suffering created by the war. The novel won the Prix Goncourt. It has been translated into English as Fields of Glory.

Sébastien Japrisot, Un long dimanche de fiançailles, 1991
To escape the hell of trench warfare, five French soldiers inflict injuries upon themselves in the hope of obtaining medical leave. But their ruse is discovered and they are condemned by court martial to be shot as examples. Mathilde, the fiancée of Manech, one of the five soldiers, refuses to believe that he has been killed and starts a long investigation to find him. This historical detective novel received the Prix Interallié and was made into a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2004. The book has been translated into English as A Very Long Engagement.

Marc Dugain, La Chambre des officiers, 1998
This novella is a story of gueules cassées, meaning "shattered faces," a term used by the French in the First World War for soldiers who suffered disfiguring facial wounds. This is the fate of young lieutenant Adrien Fournier, who spends almost all of the war in a hospital with others who have similar injuries, being looked after by pioneering plastic surgeons and nurses. As his palate and jaw are gradually reconstructed, he must learn to accept his fate and face a return to society. A bestseller that won some 20 literary awards, the novella was made into a film by Marc Dupeyron in 2000, and has been translated into English as The Officers' Ward.

Laurent Gaudé, Cris, 2001
The first novel by Laurent Gaudé is a polyphonic narrative in which the First World War is brought into relief through the voices-the cries-of people at the front and in the rear. Jules, Marius, Boris, Ripoll, Rénier, Barboni and M'Bossolo are all given dramatic roles in cataclysmic war scenes, each reacting differently in the face of the horror and madness of combat. Translated into English as Battle of Will.

Literature for young people

For about a decade, the First World War has been the theme of many publications in young people's literature, principally historical novels, offering a new way for young people to learn about the events of this period.

For further discoveries:
The Canadian War Museum contains a reading list for young people on its site, under "Canada and the First World War," in the Education tab.

Graphic novels/Comic albums

The books of French children's author Benjamin Rabier had been the only comic-type publication dealing with the First World War until the beginning of the 21st century, when the war became the focus of several graphic novels (a literary genre that exploded in France in the last decades of the 20th century), including those of Jacques Tardi, who was inspired by his grandfather's life.

Jacques Tardi, It Was the War of the Trenches, 1993 (English version, Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2010)

Jacques Tardi, Jean-Pierre Verney, Putain de guerre, two volumes, 2008
Kris (Christophe Goret), Maël (Martin Leclerc), Notre mère la guerre, 4 volumes, Paris: Futuropolis, 2009-2014

Joe Sacco, The Great War. July 1, 1916, The First Day of the Battle of the Somme: An Illustrated Panorama, New York: W.W. Norton, 2013

Propaganda posters

Posters were essential throughout Europe and in North America for stirring up patriotic zeal: they urged young men to enlist, and above all exhorted civilians to contribute financially to the war effort by buying national war bonds. Also, through grotesque caricatures, they played on the fears of the population and provoked hostile feelings toward the enemy, as in this German poster depicting a French soldier whose grasping hands are reaching toward Alsace.

Paintings/Prints/Drawings

In approximately 1905, artists went far beyond the Impressionist heritage and, inspired by post-Impressionist painters like Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, broke away from established tenets in art. Forcefully rejecting the Academy and its principles of imitating reality, art movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and abstract art were veritable pictorial revolutions in which artists, responding to the innovations and inventions (aviation and cinema, among others) that were changing the world at the beginning of the 20th century, not only arrived at new ways of representing reality but also of conveying realities that lay beyond concrete appearances. These revolutionary art movements were international: between Paris and Moscow, Vienna and Berlin, London and Brussels, their adherents corresponded, debated, and influenced each other. The move toward abstraction united several of the tendencies of this period across borders.

The First World War cast a pall over this élan of creativity. Several avant-garde movements that had arisen before 1914, such as Cubism, had died out by the end of the war. Georges Braque, who left nary a sketch of the conflict, was wounded in 1915; André Derain fought as a gunner for four years of the war, leaving painting for photography during this time. Fernand Léger barely survived Verdun. Former Cubist or Fauve painters were recruited to create camouflage. Some French artists, like Robert Delaunay and François Picabia, left the country to avoid being enlisted as combatants. In Italy, after painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni and architect Antonio Sant'Elia were killed, Futurism was emptied of its substance. For most of the countries at war, moreover, there was no question of salons, exhibitions or debates on art.

Other artists who had been mobilized chose, on the other hand, to express their impressions of the war. How to represent a war that bore no resemblance to previous, more "noble" conflicts? The technological innovations of the first industrial war, but also the effacement of men by machines and the suffering they witnessed, led artists to seek new modes of expression. Artists of the European avant-garde?Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists?broke with the academic tradition of painting battles allegorically or realistically. Their aim was to create a pictorial language that could capture the admittedly modern, but fundamentally monstrous, reality that they faced.

In May 1915, Fernand Léger, who in La Partie de cartes depicted soldiers as dehumanized robots, wrote to a friend: "Still, it's a very odd war. (...) It's linear and dry like a geometry problem. A certain number of shells that hit a particular area of ground in a particular lapse of time; a determined number of men per metre, deploying in order at fixed times. All of this is set in motion mechanically. It's pure abstraction, purer than Cubist painting itself. I won't hide my sympathy for this way of doing things." (Fernand Léger, "Une Correspondance de guerre," Cahiers du musée national d'art moderne, Paris, 1990.)

British painter C.R.W. Nevinson and Italian futurist painter Gino Severini felt, as did Léger, that it was inappropriate to depict modern warfare in a traditional way. It was impossible to capture the image of shells exploding or guns firing their cannonades realistically: transcribing rather than imitating reality was in order. To express the dehumanizing process rooted in the extreme violence of this war, these painters used broken lines and eschewed detail to exaggerate forms and colours.

German Expressionist painters sought a style that could convey human anguish. The cry of despair that rings out from their paintings recalls the work of Edvard Munch, a precursor of this movement. Expressionist painting is characterized by nervous brush strokes and deformed shapes that provoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. German painter and printmaker Otto Dix dedicated much of his artistic career to the theme of the Great War and its effects on German society. His works were later categorized as "degenerate art" by the Nazis.

The war was also documented by official photographers, painters and illustrators such as François Flameng, many of whose sketches appeared in the Paris daily L'Illustration.

Starting in 1916, the British Expeditionary Forces in Europe included artists whose work was exhibited at the Imperial War Museums after the war. Besides C.R.W. Nevinson, they included William Orpen, John Singer Sargent, John Nash, and his brother, Paul, whose war scenes of Ypres were exhibited in London in 1918. Paul Nash's last weeks at the front were spent with the Canadians at Vimy Ridge. Wyndham Lewis, a British painter who founded the Vorticist group of artists, fought at Ypres and was appointed as an official war artist for both the Canadian and the British governments. The Senate room in Ottawa contains several paintings of the Great War, commissioned by Canada but mostly done by British artists. The Canadian War Museum collection contains the work of a number of Canadian artists who witnessed the Great War or its aftermath. A travelling exhibition, Canvas of War: Masterpieces from the Canadian War Museum, showed 72 of these works in various cities from 2000 to 2005; they can be seen on the Canadian War Museum website, in the Education tab. It was due to the influence of Lord Beaverbrook that the Canadian government sent selected painters to the battlefields as war artists. This particular subject is also dealt with in an article on the Canadian War Museum site. Two Group of Seven painters, A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley, were among these war artists, and they were strongly affected by witnessing the devastation. The bleak style of the war paintings done by Jackson carried over into his later work in the wilds of northern Ontario. Other eminent Canadian painters who were official war artists in this conflict were Maurice Cullen, Arthur Lismer and David Milne. On the home front, Henrietta Mabel May painted scenes of women working in Canadian munitions factories.

The following works are among many that were inspired by the Great War:

Eric Heckel, Zwei Verwundete, 1915, Folkwang Museum, Essen

Félix Vallotton, Les barbelés, 1916, Galerie Paul Vallotton, Lausanne

Oskar Kokoschka, The Isonzo Front, 1916, Musée Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland

George Grosz, Explosion, 1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Marcel Gromaire, La Guerre, 1925, Musée d'art moderne, Paris

Sculptures/Monuments

Sculptures and monuments relating to the war are essentially commemorative works. Monuments to the fallen proliferated after the end of the Great War. They can be found in almost all the villages, towns and cities of France and most of the other belligerent countries.

Eugène-Paul Benet, Le Poilu victorieux, 1920, cast-iron statue mounted on various monuments to the fallen (approximately 100 in France)

Walter Seymour Allward, Canadian National Vimy Memorial, 1935-1936, Nord-Pas de Calais, France

Constantin Brancusi, The Endless Column, 1937, Targu Jiu, Romania

Cinema

According to film historian Laurent Veray, films on the First World War fall into four distinct phases. Cinema played an important role during the conflict. It was the first time that war had been filmed; fictional and documentary films, as well as news reels, served propaganda purposes with their patriotic depictions glorifying the combatants' actions. One of these, The Battle of the Somme, a documentary made under the auspices of the British government, was shown in London in 1916. In the United States in 1918, Charlie Chaplin made a film called The Bond which urged the public to invest in Liberty Bonds. After the war, and especially in the 1930s, films generally represented the Great War from a pacifist perspective. The Second World War eclipsed the First as a subject in cinema productions for a while, but in the 1960s and '70s, the latter returned as a centre of attention in an even more transgressive and anti-militaristic manner, as a focus on the Great War in the context of decolonization was used to denounce other conflicts. Finally, in the 1990s, with war raging anew in Europe, notably in Sarajevo, there was new interest in the Great War in the cinema, where it was frequently represented as the point of departure of a European history that continues today.

Malins and McDowell, The Battle of the Somme, 1916
Considered the first full-length documentary on war, this British film was made by Geoffrey H. Malins and John B. MacDowell in 1916, at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916). The film was released in London only a few weeks after the first day of the offensive. It shows soldiers in action, alternating real events with re-enactments. The original objective in making the film was to boost morale on the home front and encourage enlistment, but the opposite reaction occurred when shocked audiences saw images of the violence of modern warfare. The film was screened in 30 movie houses in London; 20 million people saw it in the autumn of 1916. The Battle of the Somme was one of the films that met with the approval of Canadian censors, who even encouraged its distribution in Canada.

Lewis Milestone, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930 (adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque)

Raymond Bernard, Les Croix de bois, 1931 (adapted from the novel by Roland Dorgelès)

Stanley Kubrick, Paths of Glory, 1957 (adapted from the 1935 novel by Humphrey Cobb)
In this anti-war film, shot in black and white, Kubrick, like Bernard Tavernier with his adaptation of Roger Vercel's 1934 novel Capitaine Conan, focuses on the role played by officers who defended soldiers accused of cowardice during the First World War. In 1916, following a suicide attack, a French general wants to execute 100 soldiers, accusing them of having disobeyed his orders to advance with the others. Finally, only three soldiers, one chosen at random, will be judged in a court martial. The solders' commanding officer, Colonel Dax, futilely defends them and they are condemned to death "as an example to the others." The film was banned in France for almost 20 years after its release, as it was seen to "impugn the dignity of the French army."

Bertrand Tavernier, Capitaine Conan, 1996 (adapted from the novel by Roger Vercel)

François Dupeyron, La Chambre des officiers, 2000 (adapted from the novel by Marc Dugain)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Un long dimanche de fiançailles, 2004 (adapted from the novel by Sébastien Japrisot)

Paul Gross, The Battle of Passchendaele, 2007
"Set during the height of the First World War, Passchendaele tells the story of Sergeant Michael Dunne, a soldier who is brutally wounded in France and returns to Calgary emotionally and physically scarred. While in the military hospital, he meets Sarah, a mysterious and attractive nurse with whom he develops a passionate love. When Sarah's asthmatic younger brother David signs up to fight in Europe, Michael feels compelled to return to Europe to protect him. Michael and David, like thousands of Canadians, are sent to fight in the third battle of Ypres, a battle against impossible odds, commonly known as Passchendaele. It is a story of passion, courage and dedication, showing the heroism of those that fought in battle, and of the ones that loved them."

Music and song

Like artists and writers, many musicians and composers joined the war effort. German composer Arnold Schoenberg, father of the dodecaphonic method, and French composer Claude Debussy both enlisted for patriotic reasons. Composer Maurice Ravel also wanted to join the army, but was rejected due to his small stature. Some musicians played near the front lines to boost the soldiers' courage (for example, violinist Lucien Durosoir's organization of "Général Mangin's quartet"). Songs played an important role in the trenches: patriotic anthems, bawdy ditties and protest songs helped maintain the soldiers' morale and arouse their zeal for combat. Finally, the arrival of African-American soldiers on the continent introduced Europeans to a new musical genre: jazz. The Great War has been a lasting source of inspiration for the great French singer-songwriters of the 20th century.

Claude Debussy, "Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon," 1917
In February, 1917, Debussy composed this short piece whose title is a line from a poem by Charles Baudelaire.

Gustav Holst, Mars, Bringer of War, first of the seven movements of The Planets, composed in 1914 and first performed in 1918
This symphonic work full of hammering rhythms and dissonances extols the zeal and courage of combatants. A powerful, chaotic warriors' march, it has been used in films and has also influenced film music composers like John Williams ( Star Wars).

"La Chanson de Craonne," 1915
This protest song, seen as subversive and anti-military, was banned by the French army commanders.

Jacques Brel, "La Colombe," 1959
This pacifist song is against war in general, but was written during the French-Algerian war.

Barbara, "Le Verger en Lorraine," 1962 (lyrics by J. Poissonnier)

Maxime le Forestier, "Les lettres," 1975
This song was inspired by letters, found in an attic, written by a soldier at the front to his wife.
Michel Sardou, "Verdun," 1979

Bibliography / Webography

Brandon, Dr. Laura, "Canada's War Art. Dispatches: Backgrounders in Canadian Military History," article on the Canadian War Museum website.

Hamon, Françoise, and Dagen, Philippe (eds.), Histoire de l'art. Époque contemporaine. XIXe-XXe siècles, Paris: Flammarion, 1998 (latest edition, 2003).

Milkovitch-Rioux, Catherine, "L'influence de la Grande Guerre sur la littérature française contemporaine," in Robert Gagnon and Yves Gingras, proceedings of the colloquium "Le Canada et la France dans la Grande Guerre" (forthcoming in 2015).

Pascal, Sophie, "Représentations de la Grande Guerre: le regard des peintres contemporains et quel usage a été fait de leurs réalisations?," on the website of the exhibition La guerre 14-18 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

1914-1918 - La Grande Guerre à travers les arts, an interactive documentary by Adrien Minard, Pierre-Henri Gibert, Cellules.

"War Art Masterpieces on Display at the McCord Museum," McCord Museum (Montreal), 2003. On the McCord Museum website.

The National Inventory of Canadian Military Memorials (NICMM) page on the website of National Defence and the Canadian Forces.

"La couleur des larmes. Les peintres devant la Première Guerre mondiale" on the Mémorial de Caen website.

"Canadian Wartime Propaganda" tab on the Canadian War Museum website.

"The Remembrance Day Poppy & 'In Flanders Fields' Poem" under "The Poppy and the Poem 'In Flanders Fields'" tab of the Canadian War Museum website.

"Le spectacle La Grande Guerre des Musiciens" on the 14-18 Mission Centenaire website.

"Les affiches," on the galerie.verdun.fr website.

"Les monuments aux morts, des œuvres d'art au service du souvenir" in the Chemins de Mémoire website.

"Petite bibliothèque du Centenaire. Récits de guerre" on the 14-18 Mission Centenaire website.

"Canvas of War. Masterpieces of the Canadian War Museum. 1914-1918. 1939-1945," online exhibition on the Canadian War Museum website.

Website of l'Association Wilfred Owen France.

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The Arts and the First World War - Apocalypse 10 lives

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This file contains a text for teachers summarizing European and Canadian developments in the arts during the war. The three documents to be downloaded are: activities and worksheets to be done by students for the purpose of constituting a file on a history of art that centres on the theme of the First World War; the teacher's version of the above; and a document outlining the principal art movements at the beginning of the 20th century.

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This is a list of the best World War 1 movies ever made with pictures. The following WW1 films list can be sorted by cast, year, director, or more. The list of movies about World War 1 films includes American and foreign titles, and ranges from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "Lawrence of Arabia." This list also has WW1 movie titles you can click on for more information on the films. You can even rerank this World War 1 films list in order to start your own. This is one of many kinds of war movies.

The list might not have all the World War 1 movies, but they are considered the best.

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This is a list of the best World War 1 movies ever made with pictures. The following WW1 films list can be sorted by cast, year, director, or more. The list of movies about World War 1 films includes American and foreign titles, and ranges from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to &q...

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Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas (of 1914) lasted four and a half years. Ten million military personnel and almost 7 million civilians died. The Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern empires ended. The Russian Revolution started, with millions more killed over the next four to five years. Even the victorious nations in Europe faced dire financial conditions, broad disillusionment, and the loss of a generation because of the war.

Poetry changed as well. People's understanding of the war was partially shaped by poetry, and the patriotic poems of the first year of war, like Rupert Brooke's " The Soldier" and Alan Seeger's " I Have a Rendezvous with Death," gradually gave way to poems like Wilfred Owen's " Anthem for Doomed Youth."

The forms of poetry also changed during the war. While most war poems followed traditional and formal forms, it was in 1915 that Poetry Magazine published T.S. Eliot's " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," considered by many to have inaugurated the birth of modernism in poetry. It was perhaps no coincidence that Eliot was a transplanted American living in wartime London when he wrote the poem.

Because the last four years have marked the centennial of the war, an abundance of books about the war and the poetry of the war have been published. We've reviewed many of them here at Tweetspeak Poetry. Here are some of the best.

Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War by Jon Stallworthy summarizes the lives of 12 leading war poets in photographs, poems, and text. It's an engaging overview of the leading British poets of the war. Tim Kendall's The Poetry of World War I-An Anthology is exactly that, a well-rounded collection of the work of British poets. And Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918 by Brian Gardner is another fine compilation and anthology.

Looking to give some Scottish balance to the preponderance of English poets, writer Andrew Ferguson published Ghosts of War: A History of World War I in Poetry and Prose. The book tells the stories of the major battles, summarizing the history and using examples from poems and nonfiction accounts. The poet with the most poems reprinted in the volume is Ewart Alan Mackintosh (1893-1917), and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon provides the introduction.

Three books take World War I poetry, and the war itself, into a deeper understanding. Mary Egremont's Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew details the war as experienced by the men who wrote the poetry. The poetry most read by the soldiers themselves was A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman. And writer Peter Parker explores A Shropshire Lad in scholarly depth and research in Housman Country: Into the Heart of England.

One of the most acclaimed memoirs of the war, published a decade after the war's end, was Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, which includes not only a day-to-day account of his life at the Western Front but also all of the war poems he wrote. When it was published in 1928, the publisher believed it wouldn't be popular and printed only a limited number of copies. The book went through seven editions in its first year, and it has been called a masterpiece of the war memoir. Blunden pulls no punches; the brutality, horror, and stupidity of the war can be found in both the memoir and the poems.

While the British poets dominate the field of war poets, other countries' poets were equally active, just not as well known. Geert Buelens tells the stories of poetry in all the warring countries in Everything to Nothing: The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution, and the Transformation of Europe. Irishman Francis Ledwidge gained the approbation of his fellow citizens by fighting for the British in the war. The most famous poem of the war, " In Flanders Fields," was written by a Canadian. The second-most famous poem of the war, Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" (noted above), was written by an American who enlisted with the French Foreign Legion.

The war's centennial has inspired more than the publications of books. London's Imperial War Museum opened the permanent World War I Galleries, which cover everything from a diary of the German invasion of Belgium through the signing of the surrender treaty on Armistice Day-and provide the opportunity to visit a trench at the front (minus the mud and the lice). And the dramatic public art installation of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red from July through November of 2014 in the Tower of London moat may rank as one of the best war memorials of all time. Almost 900,000 ceramic poppies eventually were placed in the moat, one for each British and colonial casualty of the war. You can see pictures of the installation and even track where a lot of the poppies ended up (including one at my home in St. Louis).

World War I, called The Great War in its own time, was believed to be the war to end all wars. It was not to be. It brought convulsive change to much of the world. It was chronicled by poetry to a remarkable extent, and it changed poetry to an equally remarkable extent. Poetry has experienced no war like it, before or since.

Photo by Dominic Alves, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, and the newly published Dancing Prophet, and Poetry at Work.
Browse more book reviews
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How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)-to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
"I require all our incoming poetry students-in the MFA I direct-to buy and read this book."
-Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

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Poetry, World War I, and Armistice Day -

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Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas (of 1914) lasted four and a half years. Ten million military personnel and almost 7 million civilians died. The Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern empires ended.

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The first British official war artists' scheme was set up by the government in 1916. Although several female artists were approached either by the British War Memorials Committee or the Ministry of Information, none of them completed commissions for the official schemes.

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5 Inspirational Stories Of Women In The First World War

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From ambulance drivers to translators, women served Britain in a variety of ways during the First World War. Discover their stories now.

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The first British official war artists' scheme was set up by the government in 1916. Although several female artists were approached either by the British War Memorials Committee or the Ministry of Information, none of them completed commissions for the official schemes.

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5 Inspirational Stories Of Women In The First World War

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From ambulance drivers to translators, women served Britain in a variety of ways during the First World War. Discover their stories now.

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The traumatic experience of trench warfare led many writers to question not only the ideological justification of the war, but also the integrity of the social structure that enabled a conflict so violent and degrading to the participants to take place.

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Syllabus: The Effects of the First World War on English Literature

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The First World War broke out at a time when active military service was considered to be the duty of the aristocracy and upper middle-class in England. However, the so-called 'Great War' was different in both nature and in scale from previous

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Did Women really earned things from WWI ? 

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Did Women really earned things from WWI ? 

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Poet laureate writes sonnet for Danny Boyle's Armistice Day centenary events

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A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy, a sonnet in which the poet laureate mourns the "wound in Time" left by the first world war, will be read aloud on beaches on Armistice Day as part of a nationwide gesture of remembrance for next month's centenary.

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elles etaient en guerre par fabien breziat et huges na

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Marie Curie, Edith Wharton, Mata Hari, Rosa Luxemburg : à travers les parcours d'une dizaine de femmes d'exception, ce documentaire évoque le rôle de la gent féminine durant la Première Guerre mondiale. A travers leurs parcours croisés, c'est la voix de toutes les femmes plongées dans l'Europe déchirée de 14-18 qui ressurgit. Qu'elles aient été scientifiques, espionnes, militantes, syndicalistes ou institutrices, toutes ont joué un rôle capital hors des tranchées pour reprendre en main le quotidien. La comédienne Nathalie Baye prête sa voix à ce récit, qui retrace la Grande Guerre sous un angle inédit, à travers ces combats féminins et patriotiques.

" Quatre-vingt-quatorze minutes d'archives colorisées ! " claironne le dossier de presse de France 3. On n'y est pas tout à fait... Les photographies sont exploitées dans leur état originel (en noir et blanc) et certaines archives n'ont subi - par contrainte technique ou par choix des auteurs - aucun traitement. Et, à vrai dire, on s'en moque... N'en déplaise à la chaîne, qui a fait de la colorisation des archives son principal argument de communication, l'intérêt du film est ailleurs. Notamment dans son propos historique, adossé aux travaux de l'historienne Françoise Thébaud (1) , qui vont à l'encontre de la théorie selon laquelle la Première Guerre mondiale aurait constitué une sorte d'accélérateur à la condition féminine.

Le conflit, certes, fit entrer à l'usine nombre d'ouvrières - en particulier les fameuses " munitionnettes " de chez Citroën, à qui de formidables images rendent grâce - et poussa les paysannes à assurer elles-mêmes les semailles, les moissons, et leur propre subsistance. Mais, comme le rappelle le texte dit par Nathalie Baye, le retour à la vie civile des soldats s'accompagna d'un repli pour les femmes, sommées de reprendre, au sein du foyer et de la société, la place qu'elles y occupaient avant la " grande boucherie ". Des nations impliquées dans les hostilités, la France sera l'une des seules à ne pas accorder le droit de vote à ses citoyennes pendant l'entre-deux-guerres... - Emilie Gavoille

(1) Auteur des Femmes au temps de la guerre de 14 (éd. Payot).

Vidéos

Photos

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Marie Curie, Edith Wharton, Mata Hari, Rosa Luxemburg : à travers les parcours d'une dizaine de femmes d'exception, ce documentaire évoque le rôle de la gent féminine durant la Première Guerre mondiale. A travers leurs parcours croisés, c'est la voix de toutes les femmes plongées dans l'Europe déchirée de 14-18 qui ressurgit.

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This Woman Helped Deformed WWI Soldiers By Creating Incredibly Accurate Face Masks

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This Woman Helped Deformed WWI Soldiers By Creating Incredibly Accurate Face Masks

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KSC | Knowledge,Science,Culture Everyday .

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In 1917 This Woman Helped Deformed WWI Soldiers By Creating Incredibly Accurate Face Masks

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Voices of the First World War: Arrival Of The American Troops

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Episode 43: When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States of America adopted a policy of strict neutrality. They wanted to stay completely out of the conflict, but found this increasingly difficult due to Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

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The sacrifice of soldiers killed during World Wars One and Two is well-documented. But the efforts of munitions workers stained yellow by toxic chemicals is a story much less told. A campaign now hopes to honour the so-called Canary Girls, who risked life and limb to supply ammunition to the frontline.

In 1915, while men were fighting on the battlefields, thousands of women were answering the government's cry for help by joining the war effort.

In their droves they signed up to fill the gaps left by those called into service, taking jobs in transport, engineering, mills and factories to keep the country moving.

But while those who swapped domestic life for the assembly line were spared the trauma of the trenches, their jobs were nonetheless fraught with danger.

Munitions workers battling the "shell crisis" of 1915 were prime targets for enemy fire, with sites routinely flattened by enemy bombs.

Those who were spared such a fate were no less safe, facing daily peril by handling explosive chemicals that carried the risk of them contracting potentially fatal diseases.

And for some, the effects of their work were immediately visible; a lurid shade of yellow that stained their skin and hair and earned them a nickname - the Canary Girls.

"We were like a canary," said Nancy Evans, recalling her time at the Rotherwas factory in Herefordshire during World War Two.

"We were yellow, it penetrated your skin. Your hair turned blonde and on the top of the crown was the proper colour of your hair."

Though temporary, the affects of packing shells with trinitrotoluene - more commonly known as TNT - ran more than skin-deep.

According to Dr Helen McCartney, from King's College London, some workers gave birth to "bright yellow" babies.

Gladys Sangster, whose mother worked at National Filling Factory Number 9 near Banbury, Oxford, was one of them.

"I was born [during the war] and my skin was yellow," she told the BBC. "That's why we were called Canary Babies.

"Nearly every baby was born yellow. It gradually faded away. My mum told me you took it for granted, it happened and that was it."

As well as suffering the cosmetic consequences of working with TNT, workers risked amputation with every shell that passed through their hands.

Amy Dale, who is researching munitions factories for her PhD, said those at Royal Ordnance Filling factories (ROFs) risked losing fingers and hands, burns and blindness.

"In these factories, they would take the casing, fill it with powder, then put a detonator in the top and that had to be tapped down. If they tapped too hard, it would detonate," she said.

"It happened to one lady, who was pregnant at the time, and it blinded her and she lost both her hands.

"She saw the pregnancy through, but the only way she could identify the baby was with her lips, which still had feeling."

Explosions were a common occurrence, with fatal blasts reported at factories in Ashton-under-Lyne, Barnbow near Leeds, and Chilwell in Nottinghamshire.

Such were fears that a rogue spark caused by static might lead to an explosion that women were banned from wearing nylon and silk.

Nellie Bagley, whose first shift at Rotherwas in 1940 was on her 18th birthday, remembers having to strip down to her underwear to be inspected.

"You took everything off and you had just your bra and if it had a metal clip on the back you couldn't wear it... and no hair grips of course, because they would caused friction... explosions."

The women operated in a tense atmosphere, heavy with the weight of government fears that information could fall into the wrong hands.

Posters papered the walls bearing slogans such as "Keep Mum She's Not So Dumb" to deter talk among workers.

"They were everywhere, [the word] 'war' with a big ear on it and 'Gossip Costs Lives'," remembered Mrs Bagley.

"You were aware all the time of being watched."

But even in the darkest of moments, there remained a sense of workforce camaraderie.

"When we were on nights they used to say 'Come on Lou, get us started singing'," said Louisa Jacobs, 94.

"We would sing from night to the early hours of the morning. It kept us going because we didn't realise the danger we were working in."

Fellow Rotherwas worker, Amy Hicks, added: "We would be singing, even when the bombs fell."

And fall they did. In 1942, the Rotherwas factory was attacked by the Luftwaffe, which dropped a pair of 250kg bombs on the 300-acre site.

Nancy Billings, who was coming to the end of a night shift, survived the blast.

"It was about 6am and the girl next to me had said, 'I'm so tired I could sleep forever'. Then all of a sudden the siren went off.

"This plane came down so low you could see the big black cross on it and then the bomb dropped. It had a direct hit.

"There was [numerous] girls killed in there. It always comes to me about the girl working next to me, because she was one that didn't get out."

Of those who survived life in the factories, many were beset with health problems in later life.

Some reported bone disintegration, while others developed throat problems and dermatitis from TNT staining.

"The women suffered all sorts of illnesses and ailments from turning yellow, but turning yellow was probably the least of their problems," said Dr McCartney.

"They accepted all sort of terrible working conditions, they knew they were putting themselves in danger - TNT was yellow, they saw what was happening.

"But there's evidence that it was seen as a patriotic act... as them doing their bit for the war effort."

Others suffered more sinister illnesses - one of the most serious being a liver disease called toxic jaundice.

There were 400 cases of the disease during World War One - a quarter of which were fatal, said historian Anne Spurgeon.

"There was the yellow that was the staining of the skin, which while unpleasant, wasn't fatal or a serious disease.

"But there was this liver disease that was a different yellow.

"When they had repeated exposure to TNT, it attacked the liver. It was a poison and caused anaemia and jaundice."

In 1914, it was discovered TNT was poisonous and the following year, toxic jaundice became a notifiable disease.

Health and safety measures in factories were stepped up to limit exposure, such as providing protective clothing, but only so much could be done to eradicate the risks.

"[The government] wasn't ignoring it, they were trying to do something about it within the limits of their knowledge at the time," said Dr Spurgeon.

"But [TNT] was what had to go into the shells, so they had to use it."

About a million women worked at thousands of Ministry of Munitions sites during both world wars.

But the number of those killed or seriously injured in the line of duty is a mystery - something Ms Dale is trying to find out as part of her research.

"It was a really dangerous job, which I think is why so little is known about it," she said.

"Women weren't allowed anywhere near a gun, yet they were filling shells in factories.

"They were actively engaged in an act of war which I think made people uncomfortable."

A campaign led by BBC Hereford and Worcester hopes to see records of how many workers died released, as well as cement the place of munitions workers in war history.

The project has already been discussed at Prime Minister's Questions and there are plans to unveil a statue at the National Arboretum in Staffordshire.

But Ms Billings said she had always felt the sacrifices made by the so-called munitionettes should have been recognised.

"I do think [we] should've got a medal for what [we] did, I've always thought that. And we should've got a letter from the Queen.

"It was a very dangerous job and it affected [our] health."

For the relatives of those who worked at Rotherwas, which had 4,000 woman at its peak, recognition has been a long time coming.

"It was such a dangerous job," said Mrs Hicks's daughter, Jenny Swiffield. "It was as dangerous as going up and flying and dropping bombs.

"I'm [proud] and I think anyone would be if their parents had done something like that."

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The sacrifice of soldiers killed during World Wars One and Two is well-documented. But the efforts of munitions workers stained yellow by toxic chemicals is a story much less told. A campaign now hopes to honour the so-called Canary Girls, who risked life and limb to supply ammunition to the frontline.

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 Poem : Glory of Women, Siegfried Sassoon

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 Poem : Glory of Women, Siegfried Sassoon

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Les historiens en ont-ils terminé avec la Première Guerre mondiale?

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Les historiens en ont-ils terminé avec la Première Guerre mondiale?

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Le 11 novembre 1918, l'armistice est signé au petit matin. Il marque la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, la victoire des alliés et la défaite totale de l'Allemagne. Le conflit a débuté, il y a un siècle, et pourtant il reste des interrogations. Quel pays a déclenché le conflit ? Comment les soldats ont-il tenu des années dans les tranchées ? Le traité de Versailles est-il à l'origine de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale? Autant de points qui posent question.

- Jean-Michel Guieu, historien, maître de conférences à l'Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne et auteur du livre " Gagner la paix " aux éditions Seuil.

- Alexandre Lafon, docteur en Histoire contemporaine, directeur adjoint de la Mission du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale .

Rejoignez Le débat du jour sur et participez au débat en posant votre question dans les commentaires : la plus pertinente sera posée à nos invités en direct.

Sur le même sujet

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Débat du jour - Les historiens en ont-ils terminé avec la Première Guerre mondiale?

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Le 11 novembre 1918, l'armistice est signé au petit matin. Il marque la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, la victoire des alliés et la défaite totale de l'Allemagne. Le conflit a débuté, il y a un siècle, et pourtant il reste des interrogations. Quel pays a déclenché le conflit ?

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The Home Front in World War One: Impact on Children

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Syllabus: The Effects of the First World War on English Literature

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The First World War broke out at a time when active military service was considered to be the duty of the aristocracy and upper middle-class in England. However, the so-called 'Great War' was different in both nature and in scale from previous

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WWI anthology includes Robert Graves attack on 'scum' celebrating victory

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'Intensely bitter' draft of poem November 11th expresses horror at 'thoughtless and ignorant' crowds

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BBC - World War One: Documentaries - Media Centre

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BBC Documentaries marking the centenary of World War One.

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10 Ways Children Took Part In The First World War

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The First World War affected all of British society. Over 5.7 million men volunteered or were conscripted to fight. Millions of civilians helped the war effort by working in industry, agriculture or in jobs left open when men enlisted. But children also rallied to ‘do their bit’.

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All quiet on the western front by Lewis Milestone

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All Quiet on the Western Front Trailer 1979 film

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Emmanuel Macron has kicked off a seven-day tour of Northeastern France for the WWI armistice centenary commemorations. At the same time, the embattled French president will try to conquer back the French. Will it work?

On Sunday, a week before as many 80 heads of state meet in Paris on Armistice Day for the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War , the French president embarked on one of the longest national official tours made by a contemporary French leader that will take him to 16 towns and across former battlefields stretching from the Somme to Verdun.

Away from the international limelight, - whose tour has already been dubbed 'operation reconquer' by the French media - will also try to regain some popularity on the domestic front when he visits areas ravaged by deindustrialisation and unemployment.

"Each stop will be an opportunity to speak about the current concerns in those areas, which are trying to bounce back from de-industrialisation or major changes in agriculture," an aide to Macron told AFP last week.

But experts question whether or not this tour can make any difference.

After a post-election honeymoon, the French president's approval ratings are languishing at a dangerously low 20 percent. The former banker has failed to shake off his image as a president for the rich, reinforced by the accusation that the fiscal measures he introduced early on in his tenure only benefitted the wealthy.

And in recent months, he has been caught on camera making petulant and arrogant remarks when challenged by voters about, for example, unemployment. These videos rapidly went viral and sparked outrage.
'The trip is out-of-sync with the current climate'
"I am sceptical about this tour. The idea of the trip in itself is good, but it's currently a bit out-of-sync with the concerns of the public and zeitgeist," Jean Pétaux, a politics specialist at Sciences Po Bordeaux University, told FRANCE 24.

"We are living in a time of 24 hour news and the economic and political context means that what the French are most concerned with at the moment is the price of petrol. Petrol is a critical part of daily life and it crystallises a divided France - on the one side, there is rural France where vehicles are key, and on the other, there is a more urban France which uses public transport and doesn't understand the problem," Pétaux said.

Aside from the city of Strasbourg where the tour began on Monday and Paris where it culminates next Sunday, Macron will only be stopping in the small towns and communities plagued by the problems facing 'rural' France, far from the concerns of the country's urban population.

For example, the president will pass close to the Arcoval steelworks, which was once one of Europe's biggest, but has just filed for bankruptcy.
Macron is treading in difficult waters
He will also visit Charleville-Mézières, a town with spiralling unemployment and where the far-right won the first round of the presidential elections in 2016.

"Macron is aware that he will be in hostile territory," a source close to the president told Le Parisien. "But in the same way that France rebuilt itself after the war, the country can now rebuild itself again".

But with cameras filming his every move and the press waiting to pounce, 'operation reconquer' could end up backfiring, pundits believe.

"Perhaps Macron may succeed, and perhaps he can get closer to the communities problems and address unemployment, but it could be dangerous. Saving some jobs in one region could create frustration and jealousy in other areas. And the head of state rarely gets credit no matter what," Pétaux said.

Macron may struggle to control the impact and image of his tour on the domestic stage but on the international stage, the armistice commemorations are a major international event which will add to the French president's diplomatic clout.

The first armistice commemoration in Strasbourg, near the German border, saw a concert in the city's famed gothic cathedral, with the German president in attendance to celebrate the friendship between the two countries who were once enemies.

On Tuesday, Macron will honour the former colonial troops who fought alongside the French with Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in Reims, a city defended by the African soldiers.

He will be joined by the UK Prime Minister Theresa May at the World War I battlefield of the Somme on Friday and by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel the next day in the village of Rethondes, where the armistice was signed.

The pinnacle of the commemoration will be on Sunday when between approximately 80 world leaders will arrive in Paris marking a century to the day since the guns fell silent.
Macron will warn against the tide of populism
Their faces will be beamed around the world for the tribute which will take place at the 'Tomb of the Unknown Soldier' on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The leaders will then remain in the French capital to attend a three-day peace forum.

During his armistice 'marathon', Macron is also expected to make use of the colossal international exposure to warn against the tide of populism sweeping Europe, six months ahead of European Parliamentary elections.

The French president, who is a defender of multilateralism and is strongly pro-European has insisted that lessons must be learned from these commemorations to help to shed light on the current political climate.

"Europe faces the risk of being destroyed by the disease of nationalism and manipulated by foreign forces, and ultimately we lose our identity and sovereignty," he told . "I want to honour and learn the lessons of our history. This has been about celebration, remembrance and our future".

Date created : 2018-11-05

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Macron marks WWI armistice, while trying to win back French voters - France 24

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On Sunday, a week before as many 80 heads of state meet in Paris on Armistice Day for the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War , the French president embarked on one of the longest national official tours made by a contemporary French leader that will take him to 16 towns and across former battlefields stretching from the Somme to Verdun.

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Top 25 des meilleurs films sur la Première Guerre mondiale

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Découvrez également les Tops des : - Meilleurs films de guerre - Meilleurs films sur les guerres de religion - Meilleurs films sur la guerre de Sécession - Meilleurs...

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Black and White Photographs Showing Everyday Life of Soldiers and Civilians

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Black and White Photographs Showing Everyday Life of Soldiers and Civilians

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53 Fantastic Black and White Photographs Showing Everyday Life of Soldiers and Civilians during Worl

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Sustaining Total War - Women in World War One I THE GREAT WAR

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Le président américain Donald Trump s'est rendu dimanche après-midi au cimetière américain de Suresnes dans le nord-ouest de Paris, symbole de l'engagement des Etats-Unis dans la Première Guerre mondiale. Donald Trump s'est exprimé depuis ce cimetière, situé sur une petite colline dominant la capitale française, lors d'une brève cérémonie marquant le centenaire de la fin de la Première guerre mondiale. Il doit ensuite quitter la capitale française à bord d'Air Force One pour rejoindre Washington.
>>> Retrouvez d'autres contenus liés à la Grande Guerre sur le site dédié RTBF.BE/1418.
Le cimetière de Suresnes accueille les sépultures des 1.541 soldats américains tombés au cours de la Première Guerre mondiale, un conflit qui a fait au total 18 millions de morts.

Donald Trump a "rendu hommage" dimanche aux "courageux Américains qui ont donné leur dernier souffle" en combattant pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Le président américain a fait son discours sous la pluie, dans ce cimetière situé sur le versant est du Mont-Valérien, lieu de recueillement à flanc de colline dominant au loin la capitale française, avec ses centaines de croix blanches parfaitement alignées.

Peu avant son arrivée à Suresnes, Donald Trump a tweeté: " Une belle cérémonie aujourd'hui à Paris pour commémorer la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale. De nombreux dirigeants mondiaux ont fait le déplacement. Merci @EmmanuelMacron, Président de la France ! Je me rends au cimetière américain de Suresnes pour faire un discours sur nos grands héros !".

Beautiful ceremony today in Paris commemorating the end of World War One. Many World leaders in attendance. Thank you to @EmmanuelMacron, President of France! Now off to Suresnes American Cemetery to make speech in honor of our great heroes! Then back to the U.S.A.
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 11 novembre 2018

Une visite après une annulation

Cette visite à Suresnes prend un relief particulier au lendemain de l'annulation d'un autre déplacement que le locataire de la Maison Blanche devait effectuer dans le cimetière américain de Bois Belleau, à une centaine de kilomètres au nord-est de Paris. La Maison Blanche a mis en avant des contraintes logistiques liées au mauvais temps. Donald Trump devait voyager à bord de l'hélicoptère présidentiel Marine One.

Mais l'annulation de cette visite chargée en symboles a suscité des interrogations, voire de vives critiques, certains voyant une forme de désinvolture ou un manque de respect. Ben Rhodes, ancien proche conseiller de Barack Obama sur les affaires étrangères, s'est ainsi étonné qu'aucune option alternative n'ait été prévue.

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Centenaire de l'Armistice: Trump au cimetière américain de Suresnes, près de Paris

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Le président américain Donald Trump s'est rendu dimanche après-midi au cimetière américain de Suresnes dans le nord-ouest de Paris, symbole de l'engagement des Etats-Unis dans la Première Guerre mondiale. Donald Trump s'est exprimé depuis ce cimetière, situé sur une petite colline dominant la capitale française, lors d'une brève cérémonie marquant le centenaire de la fin de la Première guerre mondiale.

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During WWI (1914-1918), large numbers of women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war. New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in munitions factories. The high demand for weapons resulted in the munitions factories becoming the largest single employer of women during 1918. Though there was initial resistance to hiring women for what was seen as 'men's work', the introduction of conscription in 1916 made the need for women workers urgent. Around this time, the government began coordinating the employment of women through campaigns and recruitment drives.

This led to women working in areas of work that were formerly reserved for men, for example as railway guards and ticket collectors, buses and tram conductors, postal workers, police, firefighters and as bank 'tellers' and clerks. Some women also worked heavy or precision machinery in engineering, led cart horses on farms, and worked in the civil service and factories. However, they received lower wages for doing the same work, and thus began some of the earliest demands for equal pay.

By 1917 munitions factories, which primarily employed women workers, produced 80% of the weapons and shells used by the British Army (Airth-Kindree, 1987). Known as 'canaries' because they had to handle TNT (the chemical compound trinitrotoluene that is used as an explosive agent in munitions) which caused their skin to turn yellow, these women risked their lives working with poisonous substances without adequate protective clothing or the required safety measures. Around 400 women died from overexposure to TNT during WWI.

Women, wages and rights

Women's employment rates increased during WWI, from 23.6% of the working age population in 1914 to between 37.7% and 46.7% in 1918 (Braybon 1989, p.49). It is difficult to get exact estimates because domestic workers were excluded from these figures and many women moved from domestic service into the jobs created due to the war effort. The employment of married women increased sharply - accounting for nearly 40% of all women workers by 1918 (Braybon, 1989: p. 49).

But because women were paid less than men, there was a worry that employers would continue to employ women in these jobs even when the men returned from the war. This did not happen; either the women were sacked to make way for the returning soldiers or women remained working alongside men but at lower wage rates. But even before the end of the war, many women refused to accept lower pay for what in most cases was the same work as had been done previously by men. The women workers on London buses and trams went on strike in 1918 to demand the same increase in pay (war bonus) as men. The strike spread to other towns in the South East and to the London Underground. This was the first equal pay strike in the UK which was initiated, led and ultimately won by women.

Following these strikes, a Committee was set up by the War Cabinet in 1917 to examine the question of women's wages and released its final report after the war ended (Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, Cmd 135, 1919, p.2).

This report endorsed the principle of 'equal pay for equal work'. But their expectation was that due to their 'lesser strength and special health problems', women's 'output' would not be equal to that of men. Despite evidence that women had taken on what were considered men's jobs and performed them effectively during the war, this did not shift popular (and government) perception that women would be less productive than men. The unions received guarantees that where women had fully replaced skilled men they would be paid the same as the men - ie would receive equal pay. But it was made clear that these changes were for the duration of the war only and would be reversed when the war ended and the soldiers came back.

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During WWI (1914-18), large numbers of women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war. New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in ammunitions factories. Women were paid less than the men who they replaced, which led to the first successful campaigns for [no-lexicon]equal pay[/no-lexicon].

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BBC - History - World Wars: World War One Movies

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What was life and death like in the trenches? Explore six animated insights into the soldier's experience on the Western Front.

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Poem : Armistice Day, 1918, Robert Graves

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Poem : Armistice Day, 1918, Robert Graves

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Copier

Copié dans le presse-papier !

Première Guerre mondiale : Les troupes de l'infanterie américaine marchent au nord-ouest de Verdun (France) après leur entrée en guerre aux côtés des alliés européens en avril 1917. (UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP EDITORIAL / GETTY IMAGES)

Nous les Français, nous avons Madelon. Les Britanniques ont Tipperrary et les Américains ont Over There. Mais si Madelon et Tipperary sont des chansons d'avant-guerre devenues les symboles de la Première Guerre Mondiale dans les mémoires nationales, Over There a été écrit et composé le 7 avril 1917, le lendemain de l'entrée en guerre des États-Unis contre l'Allemagne, l'Autriche et leurs alliés.

C'est Georges Cohan qui est l'auteur et compositeur d' Over There, lui qui lance cette phrase géniale, " The Yanks are coming", qui sera le cri de guerre d'une nation volant au secours de ses alliés européens.
Dans le premier épisode de cette chronique ce week-end, vous entendez des extraits de :
Bill Murray, Over There, 1918

Gene Kelly, Grand Old Flag - Yankee Doodle Boy, 1947

Caruso, Over There, 1918

Al Jolson, Tell That To The Marines, 1918

Al Jolson, Hello Central Give Me No Man's Land, 1918

Van & Schenck, The Ragtime Volunteers Are Off To War, 1917

Van & Schenck, I Don't Want To Get Well, 1917

Bill Murray, Over There, 1918
Vous pouvez également suivre l'actualité de cette chronique Tout l'été dernier, en compagnie de Vincent Delerm, nous avons baguenaudé dans La Playlist amoureuse de la chanson Vous pouvez retrouver sur le site de France Info les quarante-deux épisodes de notre série de l'été dernier, consacrée à des rumeurs, on-dit et fausses réputations, Vous pouvez aussi retrouver les quarante-neuf épisodes de notre série de l'été consacrée à la chanson pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, La Fleur au fusil. Ça sonne faux. , exploration buissonnière du patrimoine populaire. Vous pouvez également prolonger les gourmandises de cette chronique d'été avec le Dictionnaire amoureux de la chanson française, coédité par Plon et France Info. sur Twitter.
Pour les professeurs, lycéens et collégiens, France Info et l'Éducation nationale ont créé ensemble un site où vous pouvez trouver une centaine de chroniques sur des chansons chargées d'histoire, Ces chansons qui font l'histoire.

Et vous pouvez aussi vous procurer le livre accompagnant cette série, lui aussi intitulé La Fleur au fusil.

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Ces chansons qui font l'actu. L'Amérique en guerre, "Over There"

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Nous les Français, nous avons Madelon. Les Britanniques ont Tipperrary et les Américains ont Over There. Mais si Madelon et Tipperary sont des chansons d'avant-guerre devenues les symboles de la Première Guerre Mondiale dans les mémoires nationales, Over There a été écrit et composé le 7 avril 1917, le lendemain de l'entrée en guerre des États-Unis contre l'Allemagne, l'Autriche et leurs alliés.

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As part of the University of Oxford's World War One Centenary programme, TORCH teamed up with Academic IT Services to launch a WW1 Research competition.

We welcomed proposals from students and early career researchers, from any discipline at the University, to present new perspectives on the War and its impact through either a blog post or short (audio/video) podcast. We also welcomed proposals from college, library and museum staff that tell a story of the University in WW1. We supported selected entries to develop their digital content which would then be featured on some of the University's global channels, including Oxford iTunesU and Podcasts.ox.ac.uk

The entries were judged by a panel of specialists on the First World War and public engagement, and the lucky winner has gained the exciting opportunity to network with experts at the upcoming 2016 International Society for First World War Studies conference.

We are delighted to announce the results below and share the excellent contributions submitted- free for you to use in your research or teaching:

1st place: 'Remembering before the End: Death and the Great War' - a podcast by Alice Kelly

Runner up: 'A Wordly War: Battle Experiences through the Eyes of African Cultures' - a podcast by Josephine Niala
Other notable entries: 'Mancunian Crusaders?' - a podcast by Daniel Smith
'Somerville Hospital: Then and Now'- a blog post by Anne Manuel and Sarah Hughes, Somerville College

'Weapons of Mass Persuasion: The First World War in Posters'- a blog post by Nina Kruglikova

'Decomposing: Debussy and the Trauma Process'- a blog post by Rebecca Henderson

Cite : New Perspectives on War Time Experience and Remembrance this Armistice Day (http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/?p=3993) by Sarah Wilkin (http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/author/swilkin/) licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/)

Reuse : Web link

This entry was posted in The Memory of War. Bookmark the permalink.

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New Perspectives on War Time Experience and Remembrance this Armistice Day

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As part of the University of Oxford's World War One Centenary programme, TORCH teamed up with Academic IT Services to launch a WW1 Research competition. We welcomed proposals from students and early career researchers, from any discipline at the University, to present new perspectives on the War and its impact through either a blog post or short (audio/video) podcast.

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"They can't deserve to be shot

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They Shall Not Grow Old review - an utterly breathtaking journey into the trenches

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Peter Jackson and team's painstaking restoration of first world war footage is a cinematic triumph that all but brings young British soldiers back to life

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World War I Anniversary: Five Historians, Two Questions

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World War I Anniversary: Five Historians, Two Questions

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To mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, RFE/RL Balkans Service correspondent Dragan Stavljanin polled a few leading historians of the period to ask about the causes of that tragic conflagration and about possible parallels between that time and the world a century later.
RFE/RL: A century after the outbreak of World War I, can we now answer the eternal question -- who was to blame? John Keiger is a professor of European history and international relations at the University of Cambridge:

It is not clear, even now, the extent to which the powers were, individually, responsible for war. I would suggest, though, that Germany and Austria-Hungary still remain -- they are the primary responsible powers. That remains the case today. Overall, in the end, it strikes me that what brings about the war in those last weeks of July and into early August is really a confused group of politicians who are overtaken by events. They are not always aware of what they are doing. They are not always aware of the consequences of their decisions. And, as a consequence of that, they are trapped occasionally into taking decisions which gently, gradually lead to the process of the outbreak of war.
Gerhard Hirschfeld is a professor of history at the University of Stuttgart and the author of numerous books, including "Germany In The First World War."

If you bring down a list of who was responsible, it would always start with the ultimatum sent by the Vienna government to the Serbs and -- this is very important -- accompanied by the blankoscheck [blank check] given by the German government, which said, "Look, you can do what you want. Settle this Serbian question once and for all." They expected a kind of war in the traditional, 19th-century style. What they got was a new type of war that was almost incomprehensible.
Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Koc University in Istanbul and author of "The Russian Origins of the First World War" and "July 1914: Countdown to War."

The goal of German and Austrian diplomats following the Sarajevo incident was to try to localize a conflict in the Balkans. Now, this may have been unrealistic, but the ideal scenario in both Berlin and Vienna was for Austria-Hungary to be able to confront Serbia without the other powers intervening. Russia's own policy or position, of course, was to continentalize the crisis and then the conflict. To make sure that France would get involved, and also Britain. To make sure that if it came to war, Britain and France would fight on their side. So, in this sense, turning it into a European and world conflagration was actually Russia's policy. That is not to say that Russia bears sole responsibility either. That is to say, it was the combination of the Austro-German response to Sarajevo and then the Russian response to the Austrian move against Serbia. This is what produced the Great War.
Annika Mombauer is a senior lecturer in history at the Open University in London and the author of numerous books and articles on World War I.

Many of the decision makers and, in fact, many ordinary Europeans did feel that war would eventually come. You have to think of another "-ism" -- social Darwinism, this belief that nations and peoples are subject to the same biological laws as animals and that they are going to either rise to the top or they are going to be eliminated in a vying for power. There is this sense that if you want to be a great power, you have to eventually fight a war against other powers and, obviously, win that war in order to keep your great power status. There were many decision makers who were quite keen for a war and you can find those people in all capital cities of the great powers. But you do seem to find a lot of them in Vienna and in Berlin. And you find statements such as "Oh, if only the war will come before I retire!'"
Joern Leonhard is a professor of history at the University of Freiburg and the author of numerous books, including "Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War."

I think it is wrong to talk about some sort of unique German war guilt, but we have to talk about different and very often interrelated responsibilities. The talk on German war guilt, which was very much influenced by the Versailles Treaty and the interwar period and the argument that Hitler's rise was only possible because of this war guilt....

I think this war-guilt discourse has a very moral implication and what we need now is some sort of true historical analysis. And if we do this analysis, I think we will see there are many different responsibilities. There was not only the German blankoscheck for Austria -- there was also a Russian blankoscheck for Serbia without which Serbia could not have responded to the ultimatum in the way it did. And there was also a kind of blankoscheck from France for Russia.
RFE/RL: There has been a lot of speculation that the situation around the world now -- say, in Ukraine or the dispute between China and Japan over islands and resources in the South China Sea -- and the situation in the summer of 1914. Do you see parallels and lessons that can be applied to the world today?
John Keiger: Yes, I'm afraid that, rather pessimistically, I do think that, particularly over Ukraine, but also perhaps over what is going on in the Far East, [where] there is a potential for things to go horribly wrong. One incident in which the pride of a nation becomes implicated -- like, for instance, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 -- that kind of incident, if it came today, say, the assassination of a major person in Ukraine that immediately brought into play the various external powers, then that could provoke a very serious incident. That does concern me. I don't think the United Nations would be able to do very much. It is very hard to know, but, for instance, if the Russian ambassador in Ukraine was assassinated, what would happen?

Gerhard Hirschfeld: I don't see parallels. History does not repeat itself. History is, in a way, dependent on certain factors and conditions that are different from what we used to have. There are no parallels between 1914 and 2014. Having said that, there is one element, however, that, I'm afraid, creates continuity and this is the human factor. People do not change. They have the same feelings, emotions, ambitions, strivings for power. So, when it comes to judging the personal factor, the ambitions of politicians, there I would say is an element of continuity. But the historical context changed dramatically. We didn't have a NATO in 1914, we didn't have an OSCE, an EU. We didn't have international organizations and alliances that are controlling elements of a crisis. You have the same emotions, but not the same conditions and historical structures as in the past.

Sean McMeekin: History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. I see the appeal of these analogies -- that China is Germany. But, of course, China could equally well be Russia in 1914. The Russian economy was growing at a rate of about 9 percent a year in 1914. In fact, in many ways, Russia on the eve of World War I was a far better analogy for China today. Supposedly, even if you believe the traditional historiography the whole problem is the growth of Russian power and that was what was actually destabilizing Europe -- not the growth of German power. So, sometimes even when we try to learn from history, we draw the wrong analogies and the wrong lessons.

Annika Mombauer: Historians and politicians have often looked back at July 1914 and other historical events in an effort to try and address current crises. I think what is interesting is often the July crisis has been invoked by the media and by politicians and historians with regard to the crisis in Ukraine. I don't know that we can learn any lessons, but if we can, I think they have been learned because there isn't a major European war raging at the moment. And I think that must be partly because we do learn from history and we do learn from past mistakes. But I don't think we can use a crisis in the past and apply it to a crisis now.

Joern Leonhard: We should be careful not to talk about direct analogies. If we look to the summer of 1914, we see factors that help us to better understand the situation at the moment. And the first thing I would mention is the politics of history. There is some sort of imperialism and fear of imperialism after the end of empires. If you look at the situation in Russia, this is a post-imperial state. If you look at the conflict zone from the Baltic states to southeast Europe to the Middle and Far East, it is in a way the shadow zones of the three former empires -- the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. And the breaking up of these empires is a legacy of World War I. And in a way you could argue that following World War I, there has been in many ways never been a stable state structure filling the gap that came up after the end of these empires.

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World War I Anniversary: Five Historians, Two Questions

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One hundred years after the beginning of World War I, historians are still wondering how it started. Meanwhile many of the rest of us wonder if the global situation today is as perilous as it was on the eve of that cataclysm.

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Historians restore World War I trenches in Belgium

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Historians restore World War I trenches in Belgium

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Historians restore World War I trenches in Belgium

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It was on 28 July 1914 - a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked a diplomatic crisis across Europe - that the opening shots of 'the war to end all wars' were fired, as Austria-Hungary prepared to invade Serbia. On the eve of Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 4 August, with German forces occupying neutral Belgium, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey is said to have remarked: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Four years later, the First World War had claimed almost 17 million lives.

From 2014 to 2018, the BFI marked the centenary of World War I with a massive programmes of key films, archive TV, rereleases and archival discoveries, including the re-release of Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932). This was the first adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's great novel, some 25 years before Charles Vidor's more famous version with Rock Hudson. Though lesser known, the earlier film has a significant edge, Borzage choosing to jettison the spare muscularity of Hemingway's prose in favour of his own swooningly romantic brand of sensual expressionism.

Gary Cooper (here at his best) is the American soldier drawn - first by lust, then by fate - to nurse Helen Hayes, a newly bereaved widow sucked into another doomed romance she has little power to resist. Borzage sculpts images and layers sequences with staggering virtuosity (aided by Charles Lang's exquisite photography), building to a transcendent climax of which even Carl Dreyer would have been proud. There may not, ultimately, be all that much of Hemingway which finally remains, but it's one of the finest films made about the generation that was lost to the war.

We've since released A Farewell to Arms on Blu-ray and it's also available to watch on BFI Player. Here are 10 more classics set during the dark years of World War I.

Shoulder Arms (1918)

Director Charles Chaplin

"I was worried about getting an idea for my second picture," wrote Charlie Chaplin in his autobiography. "Then the thought came to me: why not a comedy about the war? I told several friends of my intention, but they shook their heads. Said [Cecil B.] De Mille: 'It's dangerous at this time to make fun of the war.' Dangerous or not, the idea excited me."

Chaplin still had reservations about the finished film and came close to suppressing the whole venture. Of course it was a smash, its success perhaps going some way towards encouraging him to push even further with his supreme wartime satire The Great Dictator (1940) some two decades later.

Shoulder Arms' extended dream sequence sees the little tramp in heroic mode, saving France and the girl (Chaplin regular Edna Purviance) from the clutches of the Kaiser, who is captured and sent on his way with a boot up the arse by Charlot's 'Awkward Squad' private. Bringing back 13 enemy soldiers to the flooded trenches for an over-the-knee spanking, Charlie's superior asks how he captured so many. "I surrounded them," comes the little fella's timeless reply.

The Big Parade (1925)

The biggest financial success of the silent era, King Vidor's The Big Parade is an epic drawn from tiny moments. Its influence may be apparent in war movies as disparate as Mario Monicelli's La grande guerra (1959) and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), but its formal complexities and unhurried approach to structure still feel innovative and refreshing today.

It takes the best part of 90 minutes for us to get to the battlefield, Vidor establishing relationships and romance during the bucolic downtime of the soldiers' arrival in France. When the call to arms does come - "It had begun!" - a 10-minute sequence in which the lovers part proves a masterpiece of construction and heart-wrenching poignancy.

The first attack sequence - as the men march through a forest under enemy fire - is breathless in its unnerving simplicity. The stark border of charred trees that frames the approach to the battlefield is as evocative a gateway to hell as any seen since.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

It's difficult to dispute the sheer emotional power of Lewis Milestone's quintessential WWI picture, despite its unashamedly forceful anti-war sentiments. Based on Erich Maria Remarque's now classic 1929 novel, it charts the tragic fortunes of a group of idealistic young German school friends who are sent to fight in the trenches. Technically groundbreaking, All Quiet on the Western Front 's relentless commitment to depicting both the horror and monotony of front-line warfare has seen little of its force blunted in the eight decades since its release. Milestone's film was instantly acclaimed as a humanist classic and made history as the first film to win Academy Awards for both best picture and best director.

But it wasn't the only film released in 1930 to approach the Great War from a German perspective. Arriving in Stateside cinemas a mere six months later, G.W. Pabst's superior masterpiece - and first sound picture - Westfront 1918 (unfortunately unavailable for home viewing in the UK) proffers a vision of hell quite unlike any of its contemporaries: there are few films which foreground the everyday insanity of life in the trenches with such vital immediacy.

Hell's Angels (1930)

Director Howard Hughes

In winning the first ever best picture Oscar, William A. Wellman's Wings (1927) single-handedly kickstarted the craze for aviation spectacle in late 20s and early 30s cinema. The standard it set for airborne orchestration was far-reaching, director Tony Scott even referencing it as a research tool for Top Gun (1986) some 60 years later. But if there was one filmmaker whose infatuation with the picture scaled unprecedented heights of obsession, it was Howard Hughes.

The most expensive production of its era (a record it held for nigh-on 20 years), Hell's Angels' modus operandi was simple enough: to go one better than Wings. In fact, the breathtaking intensity of the Zeppelin sequence alone makes it hard to argue that Hughes missed his target. Sure, it's clear that his priorities don't lie on the ground (he farmed out directorial duties on dialogue scenes to James Whale), but there's more to Hell's Angels than the legendary production history appropriated by Martin Scorsese for The Aviator (2004). After more than 80 years, this independent blockbuster of epic ambition retains its ability to dazzle and awe.

The Lost Patrol (1934)

For all its vast expanses of scorched desert (Arizona, doubling for Mesopotamia), there's a claustrophobic intensity to the tightly-wound breakdowns of John Ford's The Lost Patrol. Victor McLaglen is the sergeant charged with leading his men out of the inferno after their commanding officer is taken out by a sniper. Seeking refuge in an oasis alternately dubbed the 'Garden of Eden' and the 'Devil's Backyard', the disparate bunch make their own appointments with death at the hands of an unseen enemy.

"I'm here amongst great soldiers, the kind you read about in Kipling... They're so modest, they don't even see the glory in it," says a young recruit. Ford sees little glory either in the madness and distrust that quickly descends on the hemmed-in troop, only the irony in the empty gestures exemplified by McLaglen's maniacal final assault, and the slow-march to his maker made by Boris Karloff 's zealous Sanders - stripped to rags, holding a makeshift crucifix aloft.

The Road to Glory (1936)

Director Howard Hawks

Its schmaltzy denouement aside, Howard Hawks's The Road to Glory certainly improves upon his earlier WWI collaboration with writer William Faulkner, Today We Live (1933), even if it doesn't quite stand up to the director's superior (and frustratingly unavailable) wartime aviation picture, The Dawn Patrol (1930). Shot by Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland, it's one of Hawks 's darker ventures, his authorial idiosyncrasies still present (piano scene, check), if not always as cohesively embedded as in his best films.

Recalling Tiger Shark (1932) in the dynamics of its central love triangle, The Road to Glory leavens the sombre mood with doses of humour, but it's a series of strikingly bleak images which sticks in the mind: a screaming soldier - caught in barbed-wire and surrounded by the corpses of his would-be rescuers - is put out of his misery; a squadron leaving their post atop a German mine look over their shoulders at the plume of smoke from the detonation they've escaped, at the expense of those left behind. There's a nervousness to the humour and romance here - among all Hawks' men of action, these are more aware than most of the looming shadow of death.

La Grande Illusion (1937)

Not only the supreme anti-war statement, but also a permanent fixture in the upper echelons of greatest films of all time lists, Jean Renoir 's 1937 masterpiece was not without its detractors. Ok, said detractors may have principally consisted of members of the Nazi Party - given Goebbels' instructions that all prints of this 'Cinematic Public Enemy Number One' be destroyed - but it was also banned by French authorities after the outbreak of the Second World War for fear of its negative influence on fighting morale.

Renoir was one of the great humanists of the screen, and La Grande Illusion serves as a manifesto for dignity in the context of pervasive inhumanity - no wonder Goebbels hated it. It's an atypical war film when compared with the rest on this list, its PoW camp setting away from the front line providing a microcosm of social and ideological diversity. La Grande Illusion deals in nobility, both in terms of a crumbling social order and the codes of human decency on war's level playing-field - the grandest illusion being that it's the former, rather than the latter, that's worth fighting for.

Paths of Glory (1957)

Director Stanley Kubrick

While Stanley Kubrick would later go on to satirise the machinations of the war machine much more transparently with the bitingly farcical Dr. Strangelove (1964), his trademarked cynicism is no less penetrating in the earlier Paths of Glory, even as it plays out in a distinctly minor key. If, along with Spartacus (1960), it initially comes across as the director's most straightforward star vehicle, a closer inspection reveals it to be a subversion of just that.

Kirk Douglas is the officer charged with selecting three men from his battalion to be tried for cowardice after failing to attack a vital enemy position. While the kangaroo court which follows allows for Douglas's impassioned plea against the "mockery of all human justice," his Pyrrhic victory over one hubristic superior amounts to little more than sabre-rattling in the face of Adolphe Menjou 's slick puppeteer. Kubrick's famous tracking shots and mastery of the battlefield sculpt indelible images, but it's his pitch-black humour and the film's withering final line that ultimately cut to the bone.

La grande guerra (1959)

Director Mario Monicelli

Winner of the Golden Lion at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, where a new restoration was screened back in 2009 (a year before director Mario Monicelli 's suicide at the age of 95), La grande guerra is a masterpiece of WWI cinema ripe for wider rediscovery. Controversial - and consequently cut - on release for its cynical take on the notion of patriotism, Monicelli's astutely judged blend of comedy and tragedy follows two good-for-nothings in their attempts to shirk any and all responsibility at the Austrian Front.

What begins with odd-couple badinage soon takes on a darker hue, before the ruthless emotional wallop of its finale. Monicelli may be painting in elegantly sweeping takes across a broad canvas (the battle scenes are extraordinary), but it's his attention to detail - from the officers' hollow efforts at boosting morale to the colour given to even the smallest supporting player - that brings La grande guerra so vividly to life.

King and Country (1964)

Director Joseph Losey

The most chillingly bleak of all the films on this list, American ex-pat Joseph Losey's King and Country tells of the fallout from a young private's ( Tom Courtenay) attempts to walk home to London from the Western Front. Was he suffering from shell-shock or simply a deserter? Dirk Bogarde is the officer tasked with pleading his case to the trench tribunal, to save him from being shot for cowardice.

"A man can only take so much. So much blood, so much filth, so much dying," Bogarde tells the court, as Losey textures his cramped frames with rot and putrescence, the trenches a cesspit harbouring vermin and death. A fog of despair hangs over questions of duty and class raised by the young man's case. The fade between the skeletal remains of a dead soldier and Courtenay on his bunk in the opening moments suggests a foregone conclusion, but even the pervasive air of decay and disorder that follows does little to prepare one for the effect of the botched execution with which this harrowing film ends.

Your suggestions

1. Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927)

2. Oh! What a Lovely War (Richard Attenborough, 1969)

3. Les Croix de bois (Raymond Bernard, 1932)

4. Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981)

5. J'accuse (Abel Gance, 1919)

6. A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004)

7. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

8. The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939)

9. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

10. The Dawn Patrol (Howard Hawks, 1930)

A 1927 aviation epic soared into pole position when we asked you on Facebook and Twitter what we'd missed from our list. William A. Wellman's recently restored film Wings won the first ever Oscar for best picture and is the story of two love rivals from an American small town who are billeted together as airmen in the war in Europe. Several of you thought Wings deserved a place ahead of Hell's Angels, the film it inspired.

Richard Attenborough's musical WWI satire Oh, What a Lovely War! also proved popular, along with a number of titles that are sadly difficult to see in the UK at the moment (thus off limits to our list), including Howard Hawks's The Dawn Patrol, Raymond Bernard's Les Croix de bois and Abel Gance's epic 1919 battlefield drama J'accuse.

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It was on 28 July 1914 - a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked a diplomatic crisis across Europe - that the opening shots of 'the war to end all wars' were fired, as Austria-Hungary prepared to invade Serbia.

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Simon Heffer: First World War, the battle of the historians

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Simon Heffer: First World War, the battle of the historians

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There is a significant difference between writing the history of a subject some of whose sources are still living and breathing, and that of a subject whose sources are only documentary. In the past decade or two the First World War has undergone a transition from one to the other. A few centenarians can remember soldiers marching through the streets on the way to the front, or home in parades to mark what proved to be a hollow victory. Otherwise, the written word in memorandums, letters, diaries, despatches and memoirs forms the basis of our understanding of the period, together with extensive recordings made of old soldiers, sailors and airmen from the 1950s onwards.

That treasure trove of eyewitness accounts - what earlier generations routinely heard while sitting on the knee of their fathers and grandfathers - has enormous value: but old men forget. History is riddled with examples of memory warping reality; we know it from our own experience. Also, the old men, heroes though many of them were, saw only their own microcosm of war. The value of their experience is not to be diminished by the fact that the bigger picture, inevitably, escaped them. The contemporaneous record, if it exists, may well be superior, provided we have the judgement to see when for propagandistic reasons it has been doctored or distorted, or censored. While the last Tommies were still alive a natural deference to their experience shone through much of the writing about the period. Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.

In looking at the British historiography of the First World War one starts with writing that is absolutely contemporaneous, and ends with that from this first era beyond living memory. Aside from history written as history there is also history written as literature - Sassoon, Graves, Blunden and so on. One also becomes conscious of the compartments into which the story of the war must be placed. Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story, and the few who have tried usually have failed.

First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914. One also requires a knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama: Austria-Hungary and its tensions with Serbia before and after the annexation of Bosnia; the question of Belgian neutrality; the history of the rivalry between King Edward VII and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II, which helped create sufficient distrust in the kaiser of the British that it coloured his feelings towards this country after Edward had died and his far less provocative son George V succeeded to the throne; the feelings in France since the war with Prussia of 1870-71; and the growing chaos in Russia and its relations with states in eastern Europe.

Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europe. Here the documentary evidence takes on a new importance, following the chain of events from politician to general to the man in the trench. One must understand the democratic pressures on politicians - in those countries with a reasonable semblance of democracy - to advance the interests of their country through warfare: understanding why, for instance, such a deluge of young men joined Kitchener's army in the first three months of the war, and the cultural pressure not simply on them to do so, but on the government to make the most of their service.

Third - and this is neglected by too many historians of the war in a way it seldom is of the war against Hitler - there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself. In Britain a prime minister was deposed and a coalition formed that would, in effect, kill one of its component parts in the years immediately after the war. A few Zeppelin raids did not constitute the Blitzkrieg that so disrupted the life of civilians during the Second World War, and Germany occupied relatively little foreign territory compared to its subjugation of Europe in 1940-44; but the profound effect
the war had on the lives of people away from the front is also a neglected subject.

In Britain the effect of 19,000 men dying in one day - 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme - is beyond our computation today, when the death of a platoon of soldiers in Helmand quite rightly gains national recognition and prompts deep reflection. It is the job of the historian to try to convey that titanic sense of loss, over those first few days of July 1916, as telegrams arrived in homes all over Britain informing parents, wives and children of the fate of men who would never come back. It is as yet inadequately done, perhaps because of the stiff upper lip that pervaded the 20th century, or perhaps because of sheer inability to comprehend the scale of the disaster.

II

The historiography of the war began when the war did. On the most basic level there was a running commentary in the press. Further up the scale of debate and analysis, Oxford University Press quickly published Why We Are At War - the authors given as "Members of the Oxford University Faculty of Modern History". The book is subtitled Great Britain's Case, and the historians outline the background to the events of July 1914. Their account of the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg and the development of alliances between the main powers since 1871, and their examination of the policies of individual nations, were the leaping-off point for subsequent generations that examined the concatenation of events culminating in the declarations of war. The book went through several editions in the first few months of the conflict as governments made available correspondence and documents that presented each nation's justification for its course of action - Britain's Blue Book, the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Grey Book.

The respective justifications told only part of the story, for to tell it all would have caused discomfort for all concerned. The necessary incompleteness and deliberate distortion at least provided scope for the historians of the next century to try to piece together every aspect of the story; which eventually, more or less, one or two did. But Why We Are At War, however time has compromised it as a source, is a valuable document for what it says about the feelings of the people in the autumn of 1914. It is unequivocal in its support for the line of the British government and the righteousness of the fight; there is none of the nuance that would come into other, later accounts.

A number of popular histories appeared in the years after the Armistice, not least Winston Churchill's The World Crisis, published in five volumes between 1923 and 1931. For much of this time Churchill was chancellor of the Exchequer, but his political life was still overshadowed by his failure as First Lord of the Admiralty and the debacle of the Dardanelles. Churchill wrote the book because of his romantic attachment to writing the history of his own nation; because he needed the money; but above all because he felt he had to justify his conduct in 1914-15, and later in the war when he returned to front-line politics from the front line itself. The history of the First World War would ever be as much a political history as a military one.

Churchill knew what he was doing; he described the work as "not history, but a contribution to history". More valuable, in terms of its surprising objectivity, were the two volumes of Lloyd George's War Memoirs, written with the benefit of greater distance in the early 1930s. Of the general histories still read today the first truly rigorous one that probed more deeply was Captain Basil Liddell Hart's. He was a veteran of the Somme; his The Real War was published in 1930 and is still in print today under the title History of the First World War. Having experienced the rigours of war (Liddell Hart was shell-shocked, gassed and wounded, and saw much of his regiment wiped out in July 1916), he strove to pursue more profound truths rather than simply retail events. One, based on his own experience, was that frontal assault achieves nothing apart from hefty casualties. So influential was this view that Liddell Hart ended up advising the government at the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the 1920s there was a slew of memoirs by soldiers and sailors, as well as by other politicians. Regimental histories, also popular at the time, tended to give accurate, but dry, accounts of military activity. Of the general histories written by those without an axe to grind, one of the more entertaining and insightful is Charles à Court Repington's two-volume The First World War, published in 1920. In more ways than one it has all the immediacy of journalism, and not just because of the near-instant way in which it was written. Repington, an Old Etonian and a member of the Wiltshire squirearchy, had once had a glittering military career. However, while posted to Egypt in the early 1900s he'd had an affair with a government official's wife, and had then broken the promise he had given to a senior officer to keep away from her. He was forced to resign his commission; a lieutenant colonel in 1904, he could well have been a general when war came. Instead, he was the war correspondent of the Times; and by 1914 so many of Repington's contemporaries were senior officers that he had privileged access not just to information, but to the Western Front itself.

Repington's two volumes are a history of the conflict told through the medium of a memoir, compiled as a journal. They are a compelling read, not least because he also had superb political contacts: indeed, when his work was published, so many of them found their private conversations had been retailed for the entertainment of the reading public that he suddenly found himself short of friends. The books are packed with instant observations of the war, both on the home front and occasionally in France, and are not academic history by any means. They see the story from one viewpoint only, which is Repington's: but they are vivid, atmospheric, honest and dramatic. Wars are fought in cabinet rooms as well as on battlefields, and Repington's eyewitness accounts of both make his book an essential source today. He was also the man who first used the term "the First World War", in September 1918: not so much to coin a phrase to describe a conflict involving international empires and, since the previous year, America, but to warn that there might one day be a second one.

III

The modern school of First World War history has its origins in the 1960s, at around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. It is from this time onwards that popular history - that is, books written with the intention of being read by an intelligent general public, rather than just a small circle of elevated academics - begins to evolve to its present sophisticated state, and standards of scholarship rise considerably. Put crudely, history moves from having hardly any critical apparatus to being supplemented by pages of footnotes and bibliographies. Ironically, however, the new vogue for popular history of the First World War began with a book that displays none of these qualities - Alan Clark's The Donkeys, published in 1961.

The book is an attack on the quality of generalship, notably an assault on Sir Douglas Haig. Although praised on publication for its readability and wit, it was also roundly condemned by serious historians for its lack of rigour, and the hostility against it has increased over the years. Clark had been an apostle of Liddell Hart, whose own methods he did not follow. This is not least because Clark, who had earlier attributed the phrase from which the book takes its title - "lions led by donkeys" - to a member of the German high command, eventually confessed he had made it up. Haig's diaries are often quoted, but selectively. The book is a clever piece of propaganda and manipulation of (usually) the truth, and its revisionism created an entirely new view of the war and how it was fought. It is, however, a view that more reputable historians have sought to correct for the past half-century.

The late Professor Richard Holmes (whose books The Little Field Marshal, on Sir John French, and Tommy, describing the life of the private soldier, are models of serious research and objective writing) accused Clark of having brought "a streak of sheer deception" into the historiography of the period. Sir Michael Howard called it "worthless" as history because of its "slovenly scholarship". Unlike later historians, Clark did not attempt to explore whether there might be two sides to the story of apparently weak British generalship.

The BBC's landmark documentary series of 1964, entitled The Great War, stimulated great interest in the subject, not least because of the realisation that the generation that survived it was beginning to die. The series filmed numerous veterans and prompted a vogue for oral history; the Imperial War Museum undertook an enormous, and hugely valuable, project. For the rest of that generation's life oral history was given more emphasis than documentary records, the focus on it becoming more intense as the numbers with first-hand recollection of the events declined. The half-centenary also prompted a further wave of books. In America, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August had appeared in 1962. George Malcolm Thomson covered similar ground in his highly acclaimed The Twelve Days, published in 1964, a detailed account of the diplomatic activity between 24 July and 4 August 1914.

But the 1960s also brought the beginning of a far bolder interpretation of the war and its causes. A J P Taylor, the highest-profile historian of the time, published in 1969 War by Timetable, which argued that the mobilisation timetables of all the great powers - whose generals had prided themselves on being able to mobilise faster than their potential enemies - led to an inevitable drift towards a war no one actually wanted. This notion that the First World War was not a deliberate plot by Germany to expand its power was highly controversial, and led to the birth of the two rival schools of thought that have dominated the study of the war in recent years: one that says Germany was hell-bent on world domination, the other that says the war happened by accident.

Three years later the first volume of Correlli Barnett's Pride and Fall tetralogy, The Collapse of British Power, although only in passing about the First World War, contained some telling insights about it - such as how many of the men who fought the war had, for the first time in their lives, proper food, clothes, boots and their own bed to sleep in.

In 1998 two serious British historians of different generations published authoritative histories of the conflict. Sir John Keegan's The First World War was based almost entirely on secondary sources, but written with a measured expertise that made it the perfect entry-level guide to the fighting, taking into account almost all of the scholarship since 1914. Professor Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War was a different beast; a more political book, making greater use of primary sources, and offering a more controversial judgement: that the kaiser had not wanted war, and Britain's security did not rely on Germany's defeat.

The next great landmark of British war studies - and in one respect the most frustrating - was the first volume of Sir Hew Strachan's The First World War, published in 2001. It is frustrating because this titanic volume (it is nearly 1,200 pages long and covers all theatres of the conflict) takes the story in Europe little beyond the opening phase of the war. But it concentrates on more than just the military angle, looking at the supply of munitions, the colonial questions and the means of financing the conflict. Sir Hew promises two more volumes, neither of which, sadly, is yet in sight. When finished, they will be what the war has always needed - a definitive, comprehensive and international history based on exhaustive and rigorous scholarship. For now, the centenary of the conflict approaches and the war still awaits the complete history it deserves.

IV

The anniversary has prompted not just more publications, but also a renewed argument about the necessity of fighting such a horrendous conflict. To generate publicity for their recently published populist works, Sir Max Hastings and Jeremy Paxman between them reopened the argument over whether the war had been necessary: and Sir Max and Ferguson had a two-part television battle about it, an unfair fight, given that Ferguson is a serious scholar who fits his conclusions to the evidence.

In a magisterial review in the Times Literary Supplement last autumn of Sir Max's and two other books - Professor Margaret MacMillan's bizarrely titled but widely acclaimed The War That Ended Peace and Brigadier Allan Mallinson's 1914: Fight the Good Fight - William Philpott, professor of the history of warfare in the world-renowned war studies department at King's College London, drew some distinctions between rigorous and populist history, and pointed to how high the standards now are, not least following Sir Hew's entry into the field. Philpott assessed the value that
MacMillan, as a scholar of international diplomacy, brings to the complex series of events that caused the war, and praised Mallinson's dissection of military questions with his "trained soldierly eye". Sir Max's work, by contrast, Philpott dismissed as "broad-brush and judgemental", something for which, a century after the events, there is no need if only a writer will look carefully at the wealth of documentary evidence available to him, and assess it free from received wisdom.

In taking our history more seriously, and demanding from historians evidence that prevents the presentation of fact from being recast as simple assertion, we have moved on from the Arthur Bryant school that still sets the model for populist history. The trouble with broad-brush is that it misses detail and the other side of a question, and sometimes commits worse sins - Philpott said Sir Max's confident descriptions of battle came "often at the expense of explaining it clearly and accurately", perhaps because of the author's reliance on what the professor waspishly, but with an appropriate choice of metaphor, called "his own army of research assistants". He condemned Sir Max for taking little notice of the detailed scholarship on the subject that has transformed and deepened perceptions of the war in the past 50 years. And he hinted at a weakness of basing judgements on accounts of those who were there: they did not see the bigger picture.

Of all the recent works of history, one stands far above all others, and should be regarded as an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to understand why the war happened: Christopher Clark's Sleepwalkers, published in 2012. Professor Clark is a German specialist, but also steeped in the international politics of the period before the Great War. He recently, and memorably, dismissed Sir Max by saying that "he is not a historian. He is a man who writes about the past" - a suitable essay subject for a degree examination if ever there was one.

Although he covers much of the same ground as MacMillan, whose scholarship is hardly meagre, Clark appears to have looked far more deeply and widely in archives than she has. Without an army of research assistants, but relying on a grasp of the main languages involved and a serious study of foreign archives, Clark gets to the heart of the two principal questions: why Gavrilo Princip felt moved to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife when they went to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and why the ensuing quarrel could not be contained to one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. After much inquiry, presentation of evidence and discussion, he reaches a judgement: that the kaiser didn't want war, and that a war occurred was largely down to the bellicosity, incompetence and weaknesses of others.

As the historiography of the Great War enters its second century I suspect that Clark's view will gain more adherents, not least as a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of this abominable conflict becomes more possible now that those who remember it are dead. We might even finally discover that the Germany of 1914 was nothing like the wicked and evil Nazi state we had to fight in 1939, and, unlike that later conflict, that nothing about the motivations behind it was simply black or white.

Simon Heffer writes for the Daily Mail. His latest book is "High Minds: the Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain" (Random House, £30)

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Simon Heffer: First World War, the battle of the historians

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There is a significant difference between writing the history of a subject some of whose sources are still living and breathing, and that of a subject whose sources are only documentary. In the past decade or two the First World War has undergone a transition from one to the other.

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Before World War One began, men were thought of as the 'breadwinners', bringing in the weekly wage. The jobs they did were often tiring and required a lot of strength.

Women worked hard too, but their jobs were often done in their own or someone else's home. Only about 30% of the workforce was female and the majority of unmarried, working women were servants.

Working class women also took in paid 'piece work' at home, as they had for generations. Carrying out piece work meant that women were paid depending on how much they produced. They undertook tasks such as washing, ironing, sewing, lace-making and assembling toys or boxes. Women also worked hard as housewives, taking care of their families and homes. Women carried out many jobs in the countryside, supporting men on farms by milking cows and helping with the harvest. They also often kept chickens and sometimes geese.

Jobs outside the home

Women teachers

In 1911 there were over 187,000 female teachers.

Many employers refused to let married women work for them, so single and widowed women were more likely to have a job outside the home. Women worked in a variety of roles but their jobs were less manual than those carried out by men. Some women worked as school teachers or as governesses, teaching children at home. Well-off families would employ a nursemaid to care for their babies, a nanny to look after children and a governess to teach them until the boys went away to boarding school. Girls usually continued to be educated at home in these types of families.

Women workers

Some women worked as nurses before the war and a very small number worked as doctors. Many more women began to train and work in medicine and education during the war.

In the early 1900s, there was a rise in the number of women taking jobs in offices. Their duties were mainly limited to small administrative tasks. Other women worked in cotton factories where some of the roles involved labour-intensive work. Women prepared the cotton fibre for spinning and worked on weaving machines. The larger machines were thought to be too heavy for women to operate and were mostly worked by men.

Dramatic changes

Life for women changed dramatically during the war because so many men were away fighting. Many women took paid jobs outside the home for the first time. By 1918 there were five million women working in Britain. The money they earned contributed to the family's budget and earning money made working women more independent. Many enjoyed the companionship of working in a factory, office or shop rather than doing 'piece work' at home.

With men away at war, many women ran their homes alone. They cared for children and older relatives, managed money and often had a job as well. Shopping during wartime was hard with food and coal shortages and higher prices. The average food bill for a family of four rose from less than £1 a week in 1914 to over £2 in 1918.

Women's pay was lower than men's, even when they were doing the same work. However many working women were better off than they had been in the past. Women who took jobs in munitions factories, for example, were better paid than they had been in their previous jobs sewing clothes or cleaning houses.

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Before World War One began, men were thought of as the 'breadwinners', bringing in the weekly wage. The jobs they did were often tiring and required a lot of strength. Women worked hard too, but their jobs were often done in their own or someone else's home.

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Between 1914 and 1918, over 650,000 Canadians served at home and overseas, including with both Canadian and British land, air, and naval forces. Along the Western Front in Belgium and France, Canadian soldiers distinguished themselves in numerous battles, including Second Ypres (1915), Vimy Ridge (1917), and Passchendaele (1917). In the last Hundred Days of the war, Canadian "shock troops" played a major role in breaking through the enemy's trench defences. Canadians also contributed greatly to the production and supply of war materials and foodstuffs to the Allies. The "Great War" was a major benchmark in Canada's national development.

For more information on Canada and the First World War, visit The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Image Gallery

View thousands of images of wartime artefacts in the searchable Memory Project Image Gallery.

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The First World War - Veteran Stories - The Memory Project

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Between 1914 and 1918, over 650,000 Canadians served at home and overseas, including with both Canadian and British land, air, and naval forces. Along the Western Front in Belgium and France, Canadian soldiers distinguished themselves in numerous battles, including Second Ypres (1915), Vimy Ridge (1917), and Passchendaele (1917).

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Here Are 9 Great WWI Movies In Honor of the War's 100th Anniversary

1. "A Very Long Engagement" (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004)

For every soldier, there is a half-empty bed at home. This is the foundation of the lyrical French film "A Very Long Engagement," starring Audrey Tautou as a country girl whose fiancé has left home for the war effort. Intimate in scope while thematically powerful, "A Very Long Engagement" is perhaps the pinnacle of the work of director of photography Bruno Delbonnel, who most recently shot "Inside Llewyn Davis." His unique style is a step less quirky than his work in "Amelie," but deliberate in a way that very much contributes to the progression of the story.

2. "All Quiet on the Western Front" (dir. Lewis Milestone,1930)

Based on the canonic novel by Erich Maria Remarque, this influential anti-war film chronicles the disillusionment of a group of young patriotic recruits amidst the horrific reality of combat. In many respects, the film was ahead of its time; the grisly imagery, honest performances, and unrelenting cinematography eviscerate romantic notions of war long before the protest films of the '70s became a mainstay of war counterculture.

3. "Gallipoli" (dir. Peter Weir, 1981)

Often forgotten in the midst of Anglo-American self-importance are the Australians. They serve as the subject of Peter Weir's epic account of the war in modern-day Turkey. Starring a young Mel Gibson and Marc Lee, "Gallipoli" is a coming-of-age war film which gently and progressively demonstrates the loss of innocence for Aussie soldiers at war. Heavy in themes of Australian identity such as larrikinism and the maturation of the nation as a global entity, "Gallipoli" sacrifices bits of historical accuracy to tell an unflinchingly humanistic story; it was well-received for it.

4. "Lawrence of Arabia" (dir. David Lean, 1962)

Like "Citizen Kane" before it, "Lawrence of Arabia" is about a reporter trying to understand the life of a momentous figure. But unlike that 1941 protagonist, T.E. Lawrence actually lived, a British officer in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns in the First World War. With an inescapable sense of grandeur in every frame, "Lawrence of Arabia" takes the quest to uncover the internal motivations of its hero one step further still. "Who are you!?" he is shouted at by a local, and he seems to struggle for an answer, making this not simply a well-done biographical picture, but an investigation into one of the war's most enigmatic figures.

This stunningly shot portrait of rural American life over the first third of the 20th century not only showcases a young Brad Pitt's talents as a character actor, but is also able to observe the full scope of The Great War, from dinner table debate to a poignant funeral. "Don't talk at me like I've never seen a war," says the family's patriarch, played by Anthony Hopkins. The truth is, as his sons find out, he or the rest of the world has never seen a war quite like this one.

6. "Paths of Glory" (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

Not his first or last entry into the war film arena, "Paths of Glory" is Stanley Kubrick's greatest achievement within the genre, inserting Kirk Douglas's officer as well as the audience deep into the psychological and physical horrors of war. This anti-war effort is hailed as Kubrick's first masterwork, directly preceding "Spartacus," "Lolita" and "Dr. Strangelove." It was a timely anti-war film for the Vietnam generation, and it immortalized Douglas as his generation's premiere action star.

7. "The White Ribbon" (Das weiße Band, dir. Michael Haneke, 2009)

Michael Haneke's stark black and white masterpiece investigates the incipience of evil by zeroing in on a small German village at the dawn of WWI. The village residents, armed with a self-righteous allegiance to societal and religious custom, perpetrate various crimes with a horrifying lack of empathy. The weak suffer at the hands of the strong as a drama of survival of the fittest plays out in nightmarish detail: incest, rape, murder, and gross negligence are among the obscenities the village residents witness, condone, and commit with utter nonchalance (and, at times, with sinister pleasure). With "The White Ribbon," Haneke endeavors to explore a simple yet resonant question: What incites the human capacity for evil? The latent evil that permeates the "The White Ribbon" suggests that it's inherent in humanity; the village is a hotbed of war mentality, presaging a not-too-far future in which good and evil will become indistinguishable.

8. "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (dir. Ken Loach, 2007)

Ken Loach's tragic story of two brothers torn apart by the virtues of war is the highest-grossing Irish independent film ever made. The plot focuses on the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War - conflicts that derived from WWI - as it illuminates the human drama that engorges war. The lush Irish countryside pitted against the grim reality of the choices made in wartime make for a heart-wrenching portrait of lives literally and figuratively ripped apart at the seams by conflict.

9. "Wings" (dir. William A. Wellman, 1927)

"Wings" is the most famous silent film about WWI ever made. In a time when Hollywood was generally unconcerned with realism, it's interesting that Paramount Pictures hired director William A. Wellman because he was the only established director who had WWI combat pilot experience. It was a decision well made: the film is revered for its realistic and technically sophisticated air combat sequences. "Wings" went on to win the first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture. It upended cinematic and social conventions by not only being the only silent film to win an Academy Award that year, but also for being one of the first films to feature nudity and a scene of two men kissing.

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Here Are 9 Great WWI Movies In Honor of the War's 100th Anniversary

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Here Are 9 Great WWI Movies In Honor of the War's 100th Anniversary For every soldier, there is a half-empty bed at home. This is the foundation of the lyrical French film "A Very Long Engagement," starring Audrey Tautou as a country girl whose fiancé has left home for the war effort.

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Audio Document 2

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Britain, US, France
Europe

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poets, film makers, musicians

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VOICES FROM WWI

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Armistice centenary: Testimonies on why it's important to remember World War I

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At a rain-soaked and chilly observance of Armistice Day at the Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris on Sunday, President Trump praised the "American and French patriots" of World War I, in a speech that sharply contrasted with the political tone of an earlier address by French President Emmanuel Macron.

Joined by senior military officials, members of Congress, and dozens of other world leaders, Trump began by introducing several veterans and noting that it was Veterans' Day in America.

"Exactly 100 years ago today, on November 11, 1918, World War I came to an end," Trump said. "Thank God."

He urged Americans to remember the tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the "grizzly horrors" of the war, including the "legendary Marines" known as the "Devil Dogs" buried in the graves surrounding him.

"Devil Dogs -- John Kelly knows that name very well, right John?" Trump said, looking toward his chief of staff, who served as a general in the Marine Corps.

Trump also presented a flag to American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) head Maj. Gen. William M. Matz, Jr., "as a symbol of our nation's gratitude" to the agency for "memorializing our fallen heroes."

Just minutes earlier, Macron had endorsed globalism in remarks that seemed targeted directly at other European leaders and Trump, who has proudly described himself as a nationalist who embraces an "America First" approach.

"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism," Macron said. "Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism."
WATCH: TRUMP EMBRACES 'NATIONALIST' LABEL, SAYS GLOBALISM HURTS U.S. ON TRADE, IMMIGRATION
He added: "In saying 'Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,' you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.

"I know there are old demons which are coming back to the surface," Macron continued. " They are ready to wreak chaos and death. History sometimes threatens to take its sinister course once again."

British Prime Minister Theresa May, another target of Macron's remarks amid the dividing European Union and Brexit, was not in attendance on Sunday.

May, who visited France last week to commemorate the end of World War I, opted to attend a separate war memorial service in London. Thousands of people marched to central London's Cenotaph war monument, where members of the royal family and other top British officials had placed wreaths.

Chinese President Xi also was not at Sunday's ceremonies.

There were signs earlier in the weekend that the relationship between Macron and Trump has become frayed. On Saturday at the Élysée Palace, Trump seemed ill at-ease near Macron, who at one point patted Trump on the thigh without reciprocation.

At rallies and speeches throughout the year, Trump has said the U.S. -- by encouraging goods and services to be made domestically, insisting that European allies contribute more funding to their own national defense, and blocking illegal immigration -- can achieve greater prosperity.
WATCH: TRUMP TELLS NATO THE U.S. ISN'T THE WORLD'S PIGGY BANK
He has also sharply disputed arguments from Democrats that his support of nationalism emboldens white nationalists, saying those insinuations are themselves "racist" mischaracterizations of the concept of nationalism in international relationss.

Meanwhile, according to multiple reports, French police detained three female members of the feminist activist group Femen for what they called "sexual exhibition" during the day's events.

One topless woman intercepted Trump's motorcade on the Champs-Elysees avenue, strutting onto the road and yelling "fake peacemaker" as the president's heavily-armored limousine and Secret Service SUVs passed quickly.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he didn't speak at length with Trump at the Paris events because they wanted to avoid interrupting the planned ceremonies, the Russian state-backed television network RT reported, but the two leaders plan to meet at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina later in the month.

Putin and Trump arrived separately at Sunday's events in separate motorocades, unlike several other world leaders who rode together. White House officials cited security considerations for Trump's travel arrangements.

Putin separately backed a plan by Macron to form a European army to "strengthen the multipolar nature of the world," according to RT.

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Trump, speaking at Armistice Day event outside Paris, honors fallen soldiers

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At a rain-soaked and chilly observance of Armistice Day at the Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris on Sunday, President Trump praised the "American and French patriots" of World War I, in a speech that sharply contrasted with the political tone of an earlier address by French President Emmanuel Macron.

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Remembrance Day: How Germans remember the World Wars

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Remembrance Day: How Germans remember the World Wars

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Can people in today's Germany mourn their dead without whitewashing their country's past?

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Commémorations du centenaire de l'armistice: les temps forts

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Commémorations du centenaire de l'armistice: les temps forts

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A événement exceptionnel, dispositif exceptionnel. Paris a attiré les regards du monde entier ce dimanche, en accueillant plusieurs dizaines de dirigeants pour les commémorations du centenaire de l'armistice. Découvrez ou revivez les principales séquences de cette cérémonie.

Près de 70 chefs d'Etat et de gouvernement présents

Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Poutine, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Justin Trudeau ou encore Mohammed VI, pour ne citer qu'eux, ont fait le déplacement jusqu'en France pour participer aux commémorations du centenaire du 11-Novembre.

Tous à part Donald Trump, Vladimir Poutine et Sergio Mattarella, ont été accueillis à l'Elysée à partir de 9 heures. Ils ont été reçus par Emmanuel et Brigitte Macron par ordre protocolaire inversé, c'est Angela Merkel qui a ainsi été reçue la dernière.

Ils sont ensuite tous montés dans des cars pour être escortés à quelques dizaines de mètres de l'Arc de Triomphe. En descendant des véhicules, ils ont effectué une marche groupée jusqu'à la canopée, située au pied du monument parisien, qui les a abrités pendant toute la cérémonie, alors que la pluie s'est invitée à l'événement.

Donald Trump et Vladimir Poutine se sont rendus par leurs propres moyens directement à l'Arc de Triomphe, sans même participer à la marche avec leurs homologues, pour des raisons de sécurité. Le président italien, Sergio Mattarella, a dû faire de même, mais pour une autre raison: son avion a atterri avec du retard, ce qui ne lui a pas permis de faire un saut à l'Elysée comme prévu.

C'est la première fois depuis le 11 janvier 2015 et la "marche républicaine" en réaction aux attentats de Charlie Hebdo et de l'Hyper Cacher, qu'autant de dirigeants étaient réunis à Paris.

Fait rarissime, trois Femen sont parvenues à forcer la sécurité pour s'approcher du convoi de Donald Trump lors de sa descente des Champs-Elysées. Deux militantes seins nus sur lesquels étaient inscrits "Hypocrisy parad" et "Gangsta party" ont sauté par-dessus les barrières de sécurité au moment où la voiture du président américain passait devant le public, peu avant 11 heures.

Une troisième militante positionnée un peu plus haut sur l'avenue a fait de même. Elles ont toutes été interpellées, puis placées en garde à vue pour exhibition sexuelle.

Exactement comme le 11 novembre 1918, les cloches des églises ont retenti à 11 heures à travers la France. Cette initiative annonçait cent ans plus tôt, jour pour jour, la fin des combats. Les cloches ont sonné pendant 11 minutes.

Des lycéens dans la peau d'anciens soldats

C'était l'un des passages les plus émouvants de cette matinée. Huit lycéens d'une école de Seine-Saint-Denis se sont succédé pour lire des récits de soldats qui ont vécu la Première Guerre mondiale. Des témoignages de ces anciens combattants, dont les derniers survivants ont disparu il y a une dizaine d'années, rédigés le jour de l'armistice.

Ils ont ensuite été rejoints par d'autres jeunes de plusieurs pays différents, qui ont lu dans leur langue d'origine, tantôt en anglais, en chinois ou encore en allemand, des témoignages similaires.

La cérémonie a été rythmée de séquences musicales fortes. Le célèbre violoncelliste Yo-Yo Ma a interprété la Sarabande de la Suite n°5 pour violoncelle en do mineur de Jean-Sébastien Bach, avant la lecture des lycéens. La chanteuse béninoise Angélique Kidjo a ensuite chanté en hommage aux troupes coloniales.

En clôture, le Boléro de Ravel a été interprété par l'orchestre des jeunes de l'Union européenne. Un moment fort, le compositeur ayant lui-même participé à la guerre avant d'être démobilisé en mars 1917.

Le discours d'Emmanuel Macron pour la paix

Le président français a tenu un discours de près de 20 minutes, lors duquel il a rappelé à ses homologues présents l'importance de préserver la paix dans le monde. Il les a exhortés au "combat pour la paix", en refusant "le repli, la violence et la domination". "Additionnons nos espoirs au lieu d'opposer nos peurs", a-t-il lancé.

Il a aussi critiqué le nationalisme, dont s'est revendiqué plusieurs fois ces dernières semaines Donald Trump, qui écoutait le président français aux côtés de près de 70 autres chefs d'Etat ou de gouvernement. "Le patriotisme est l'exact contraire du nationalisme. Le nationalisme en est sa trahison", a-t-il ajouté.

En fin de cérémonie, Emmanuel Macron a ravivé la flamme du soldat inconnu avec les lycéens qui venaient de lire les récits d'anciens soldats. Puis une minute de silence a été observée, avant que les dignitaires ne regagnent l'Elysée pour déjeuner.

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Commémorations du centenaire de l'armistice: les temps forts

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A événement exceptionnel, dispositif exceptionnel. Paris a attiré les regards du monde entier ce dimanche, en accueillant plusieurs dizaines de dirigeants pour les commémorations du centenaire de l'armistice. Découvrez ou revivez les principales séquences de cette cérémonie.

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Armistice Day: Macron urges world leaders to reject nationalism

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Armistice Day: Macron urges world leaders to reject nationalism

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Commemorations are under way around the globe to mark the centenary of the Armistice that ended World War One.

In Australia, a ceremony was held at the National War Memorial in Canberra, while in Adelaide an aircraft dropped thousands of red paper poppies.

In New Zealand, a gun salute took place in the capital, Wellington.

The main European ceremony will be held in Paris, with US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin among those set to attend.

Meanwhile in the UK, a series of special events are being held to mark the end of the 1914-18 conflict.

For the first time, members of the public chosen by ballot will pay their respects at the national memorial in Whitehall, central London.

The events begin in the south

During his speech in Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke of the importance of remembrance, saying people need "to learn from the past so that we can better navigate the changing currents of our own times, for our own children, and for the next generations".

Australian and New Zealand forces sustained huge loss of life in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign.

Britain gives thanks to war dead

In pictures: Poppies ahead of Armistice Day

Britain's oldest person shares Armistice memories

In New Zealand, the traditional two minutes of silence at 11:00 were followed by a 100-gun salute on the Wellington waterfront, while church bells rang across the country. Cars and ships blared their horns and emergency services sounded their sirens.

"The carillon and roaring chorus has recaptured the wave of spontaneous jubilation and hope which swept New Zealand when news of the Armistice broke," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told crowds at the National War Memorial in Wellington.

World leaders meet in Paris

The focus will switch to Europe later on Sunday, where about 70 world leaders are gathering in Paris for remembrance events.

French President Emmanuel Macron will lead the main event of the centenary - a sombre commemoration at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a memorial to France's fallen under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Sunday afternoon will see Mr Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend a peace conference - the Paris Peace Forum - with leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On Saturday, Mr Macron and Mrs Merkel visited the town of Compiègne in northern France. They signed a book of remembrance in a railway carriage identical to the one in which the 1918 Armistice was sealed.

President Trump, however, caused controversy by cancelling a trip to a cemetery for the war dead because of bad weather.

A group of around 50 activist organisations plan to hold a demonstration in Paris later on Sunday in protest against the US leader's visit.

The Armistice 100 years on

Long read: The forgotten female soldier on the forgotten frontline

Video: War footage brought alive in colour

Interactive: What would you have done between 1914 and 1918?

Living history: Why 'indecent' Armistice Day parties ended

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Armistice Day events held around the world

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Commemorations are under way around the globe to mark the centenary of the Armistice that ended World War One. In Australia, a ceremony was held at the National War Memorial in Canberra, while in Adelaide an aircraft dropped thousands of red paper poppies. In New Zealand, a gun salute took place in the capital, Wellington.

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La clairière de Rethondes (nord), où Emmanuel Macron et Angela Merkel commémoreront ensemble samedi la signature de l'armistice avec l'Allemagne en 1918, avait été choisie par le généralissime des armées alliées Ferdinand Foch pour abriter les négociations en raison de son calme et de son isolement.

Le 4 novembre 1918, le ministre d'État Mathias Erzberger et le diplomate Alfred von Oberndorff sont dépêchés comme négociateurs par le gouvernement allemand pour demander l'armistice.

Le 8 au petit matin, leur train s'arrête près de celui de Ferdinand Foch, stationné dans la discrète clairière de la forêt de Compiègne, où deux voies en épi sont aménagées pour l'artillerie lourde sur voie ferrée.

Le maréchal français les accueille sans poignée de main protocolaire.

- "Voulez-vous l'armistice?" -

A 9H00, les protagonistes s'attablent dans le wagon-restaurant du commandant en chef des forces alliés, équipé d'un groupe électrogène et de moyens de communication.

A la délégation qui demande quelles sont les "propositions" des puissances alliées pour arriver à un armistice, l'énergique maréchal répond: "Je n'ai pas de propositions à faire. Voulez-vous l'armistice? Dans ce cas, dites-le!"

Les Allemands acquiescent. Ils écoutent les conditions arrêtées par les Alliés, proches d'une capitulation, qui mentionnent l'occupation de la rive gauche du Rhin. Foch fixe un ultimatum au 11 novembre.

Dans la nuit du 10 au 11, les plénipotentiaires allemands discutent chacun des 34 articles de la convention d'armistice lue, puis traduite. A 5H20, le lundi 11 novembre, l'armistice est signé pour prendre effet à 11H00.

- 70.000 visiteurs par an -

La clairière circulaire de Rethondes est située au bout d'une "Allée triomphale" inaugurée en 1922, que remontent les présidents français lors des cérémonies commémoratives.

Une statue monumentale du maréchal Foch, installée en 1937, surplombe la "Dalle sacrée" posée au centre de la clairière où l'on peut lire: "Ici le 11 novembre 1918, succomba le criminel orgueil de l'Empire allemand vaincu par les peuples libres qu'il prétendait asservir".

De part et d'autre affleurent une partie des deux voies de chemins de fer et les deux monuments matérialisant l'emplacement des wagons du maréchal Foch et des plénipotentiaires allemands.

Le "wagon de l'armistice", où Adolf Hitler avait également fait signer l'armistice du 22 juin 1940, a été emporté par les Allemands et utilisé à des fins de propagande, avant d'être détruit en avril 1945.

Une réplique du wagon a été reconstituée et installée depuis 1962 dans un bâtiment-musée qui attire 70.000 visiteurs par an.

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La clairière de Rethondes (nord), où Emmanuel Macron et Angela Merkel commémoreront ensemble samedi la signature de l'armistice avec l'Allemagne en 1918, avait été choisie par le généralissime des armées alliées Ferdinand Foch pour abriter les négociations en raison de son calme et de son isolement.

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Remember those who gave their lives in the two world wars and all who have died in combat since, with Remembrance events across London.

Armistice Day events

Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day or sometimes Poppy Day,is commemorated every year on 11 November.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare during the First World War. In many parts of the world, people observe a two-minute silence at 11am every 11 November, to remember those who lost their lives during the First World War as well as in more recent conflicts.

From 2014 to 2018, this day takes on added significance as it marks the centenary of the First World War.

A special Silence in the Square event usually takes place every year on 11 November in Trafalgar Square.

Remembrance Sunday events

Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday in November, the Sunday nearest to 11 November. Various concerts, church services and commemorative events take place across London on this day to remember the men and women who gave their lives in combat.

Every year on Remembrance Sunday, a service and parade takes place at the Cenotaph in Whitehall which is attended by the Queen, as well as politicians and military representatives. The parade and commemorations in London may result in road closures. For the latest travel news, see the Transport for London website.

Look out for special commemorative events at the Imperial War Museum London, where you can also find out more about the wars and their impact through the museum's extensive collection and exhibitions year-round.

For more information on Remembrance, Remembrance events or to make a donation, visit the British Legion website.

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Remember those who gave their lives in the two world wars and all who have died in combat since, with Remembrance events across London. Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day or sometimes Poppy Day,is commemorated every year on 11 November.

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Events in Britain and around Europe are planned on Sunday 11 November to commemorate 100 years since the end of the First World War.

On this day in 1918, world leaders signed the Armistice ending the war and its four years of bloody conflict.

In Britain, the Queen and other members of the Royal Family will join thousands at the Cenotaph to remember the fallen of all conflicts.

Here is how Armistice Day will be marked around the world:

London

At 11am, church bells will ring across the country at the same time as a national remembrance service at the Cenotaph in London.

Prince Charles is due to lead the nation's tributes by laying a wreath on behalf of his mother for the second year in a row.

An equerry will lay a wreath on behalf of the Duke of Edinburgh.

The Queen will watch the Whitehall service from the balcony of the nearby Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

For the first time, a German leader will lay a wreath at the Cenotaph - with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier performing the duty on behalf of his nation in an historic act of reconciliation between the two countries.

Big Ben will strike at 11am to mark the hour the Armistice was signed.

Prime Minister Theresa May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn are also due to attend.

At 12.30pm, after the wreath laying and the traditional Royal British Legion's Veterans Parade, bells will begin to ring out across the country and internationally.

The People's Procession of 10,000 people will them march past the Cenotaph.

Flames will light up the moat around the Tower of London at 5pm.

The day will conclude with a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey from 6pm.

France

The Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysees in Paris will stage the biggest event.

It will be attended by up to 70 world leaders including US President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin.

The ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Champs-Elysees avenue will commence from 11am.

It is set to feature warnings about the modern-day danger of nationalism.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will give the opening address alongside the Paris Peace Forum which will take place following the memorial service.

France President Emmanuel Macron will be seated between his wife and Mrs Merkel.

Elsewhere in France there will be a 10.30am ceremony at the Australian National Memorial, in Villers-Bretonneux, Somme.

A parade at the Thiepval Memorial to the missing in the Somme will take place at 10.40pm and a ceremony at Newfoundland Memorial Park will commence from 11am.

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Armistice Day: How the centenary of the end of WWI is being marked

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Events in Britain and around Europe are planned on Sunday 11 November to commemorate 100 years since the end of the First World War. On this day in 1918, world leaders signed the Armistice ending the war and its four years of bloody conflict.

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Discours d'Emmanuel Macron pour le 11 novembre 2018

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Discours d'Emmanuel Macron pour le 11 novembre 2018

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REPLAY - Allocution d'Emmanuel MACRON lors de la commémoration à l'Arc de Triomphe

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Des lycéens partage les lettres des poilus

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Des lycéens partage les lettres des poilus

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Lecture par des lycéens de textes écrits le 11 novembre 1918 - Centenaire de l'Armistice de 1918

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Commémoration  de la fin de la Guerre meurtrie 

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Commémoration  de la fin de la Guerre meurtrie 

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Analyse du discours d'Emmanuel Macron - Centenaire de l'Armistice de 1918

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Lyon célèbre la fin de la Grande Guerre 

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Lyon célèbre la fin de la Grande Guerre 

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Il y a tout juste cent ans, le 11 novembre 1918, le premier conflit mondial prenait fin avec la signature de un armistice entre les belligérants. Près de 30 000 monuments aux morts seront érigés dans les années qui suivent en mémoire des combattants de la Grande Guerre, ces "Poilus" morts dans les tranchées et sur le front.

Pour honorer les victimes de la Première Guerre Mondiale et célébrer le centenaire de l'armistice, une cérémonie officielle a lieu ce dimanche 11 novembre à partir de 10h sur la place Bellecour. Parmi les personnalités officielles : Gérard Collomb, le maire de Lyon, Pascal Mailhos, le nouveau préfet du Rhône mais aussi de Philippe Loiacono, le Gouverneur militaire de Lyon.

Ambiance place Bellecour, un siècle après la fin de la Grande Guerre, certains sont venus en costumes d'époque.
L'hommage débute par une prise d'armes, avant un défilé militaire d'un quart d'heure. Les troupes participant à la prise d'armes sont aux ordres du Colonel Luc Rosier, chef de corps du Groupement de Recrutement et de Sélection (GRS) de Lyon. Une minute de silence sera ensuite respectée à 11h, comme partout en France. La Musique de l'Artillerie de Lyon accompagne cette célébration de la paix, avec parmi ses musiciens l'un des clairons historiques du 11 novembre 1918.

La cérémonie s'achève par des chorales d'enfants, des parades de drapeaux et par un lâcher de ballons et de colombes, après le dépôt de gerbes au Sanctuaire de la Résistance et de la Déportation.
Les répétitions des jeunes choristes ont débuté tôt ce dimanche matin...

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11 novembre : Lyon célèbre le centenaire de l'armistice de la Grande Guerre

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La ville de Lyon célèbre le centenaire de l'Armistice de la première Guerre Mondiale ce dimanche 11 novembre 2018. Il y a tout juste un siècle les armes se taisaient et les combats cessaient après plusieurs années de conflits et des millions de victimes.

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https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/en-direct-suivez-les-commemorations-du-centenaire-de-l-armistice-du-11-novembre/

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Audio Document 3

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Remembrance Sunday - Dogs of World War 1 (WW1)

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An American gun crew during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France in 1918. Credit Credit United States Army Signal Corps

During World War I, millions died, empires crumbled, nations were formed and maps were redrawn in ways that reverberate mightily a century later.

An American gun crew during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France in 1918. Credit Credit United States Army Signal Corps

LONDON - Seconds before an armistice formally ended World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, Pvt. Henry Nicholas Gunther, an American soldier from Baltimore, mounted a final, one-man charge against a German machine-gun nest in northeastern France.

The German gunners, The Baltimore Sun reported many years later, had tried to wave him away, but he ran on, only to perish in a burst of heavy automatic fire - the last soldier of any nationality to die in the conflict - at 10.59 a.m. local time. One minute later, under the terms of an armistice signed about six hours earlier, the so-called Great War, the "war to end all wars," was over, and the world was an altered place.

The casualties since the conflict's first engagements in 1914 ran into many millions, both military and civilian. The very nature of warfare had changed irrevocably. Empires crumbled, new nations arose and the world's maps were redrawn in ways that reverberate mightily a century later. With men away at the front lines, women assumed roles in the work force back home that hastened their emancipation and changed social ways forever.

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The war's unfolding had been punctuated by related events that would become markers in history: the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916; the Russian Revolution a year later; the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which together drew the parameters of the modern Middle East and foreshadowed the creation of Israel. In 1917, the United States entered the war with a decisive deployment of soldiers that was a first step toward taking on the status of a superpower.
[Explore our 2014 collection of stories marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, including maps, interactives and archive pieces.]
Against those overarching events, Private Gunther's charge might seem no more than a postscript. Yet his "sad, senseless end," as The Baltimore Sun put it, endures as an emblem of the courage and folly of a war that formally ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. It is a reminder, too, of a different age of gallantry and pain, before human experience was compressed into a pixelated fragment, a fleeting distillate transacted on social media.

A century on, a question remains: Will, or should, this commemoration of Veterans Day - or Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, as the date is also known - be the last on this scale? Should the world continue to pause in silence to honor the sacrifice and bravery of those who fought it on the ground - "lions led by donkeys," according to a phrase used to scorn the bumbling British officer class drawn from the upper crust?

Some argue that commemorations have become no more than lip service. But the warnings against collective amnesia go back a long way. Even in 1915, long before the armistice, one of the most quoted poems of the war, by the Canadian military doctor Lt. Col. John McCrae, imagined fallen soldiers warning the survivors: "If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields."

In today's world of shifting international alignments, uneasy alliances and growing nationalism, World War I offers a reminder of how easily and unexpectedly an obscure spark can ignite a conflagration. In 2011, for instance, when the self-immolation of a fruit vendor in Tunisia helped start the Arab Spring, who would have imagined that, seven years later, his action could have built into crises that have spread across the region and rekindled rivalries reminiscent of the Cold War?

The 1914-18 war has found other curious, possibly inadvertent, echoes. At a campaign rally in Montana on Nov. 3, President Trump spoke about his efforts to prevent Central Americans from crossing the border into the United States, lauding what he called "all that beautiful barbed wire going up today."

"Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight," he mused.

Barbed wire, which was invented in the 19th century, was long used to fence off cattle ranges in the American West. It figured, too, in the architecture of human incarceration. But in World War I, mile upon mile of coiled barbed wire wove through the blasted terrain of trench warfare to create entanglements that impeded foot soldiers and exposed them to withering fire and bombardment.

In 1918, in a poem titled "Exposure," Wilfred Owen evoked the delusional nightmares of soldiers crouched in trenches, awaiting combat as a wintry wind howled over the battlefield. He, too, spoke of barbed wire, though not in terms of beauty. "Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, / Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles." Owen died seven days before the Nov. 11 armistice stilled the guns.
[See pictures and read about how photographers braved the front lines to document the mass slaughter.]
The start of World War I is generally traced to events in Sarajevo, then a part of Austria-Hungary, on June 28, 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian nationalist, fired a handgun and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg throne, and his wife, Sophie. The event caused a chain reaction that propelled alliances, ambitions and insecurities into a global conflict driven by technological advance - poison gas and battle tanks on land, combat planes in the skies, warships above the waves, and submarines below them.

A flurry of declarations of war and secret pacts in August 1914 drew the broad battle lines between, on one side, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and their allies; and, on the other, Britain, France, Japan, Russia and their supporters. Over time, the fighting spread to faraway imperial outposts, including China, the Middle East and Africa. Often, the focus was on the stalemated battles of attrition that produced horrific casualties in Europe. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in northern France on July 1, 1916, for instance, around 20,000 British soldiers died and some 40,000 others were wounded - casualties that set a gruesome benchmark in the annals of slaughter.

Campaigns on other fronts yielded some of the most humiliating defeats in British military history, such as the campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula, in what is Turkey today, that began in 1915; and a siege that started later that year in Kut, south of Baghdad, in what is now Iraq.

According to the British historian Hew Strachan, by 1916, the old Napoleonic notion of wars ending with a decisive battle had given way to campaigns that "ended with a whimper, not a bang" and "proved more indecisive than decisive."

When the Russian Revolution ended Moscow's appetite for the war, Germany sensed victory. But then the United States entered the fray, with the first of its soldiers landing in France in June 1917. By 1918, big offensives on the Western Front had turned the tide. But not without punishing losses.

At the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in northeastern France, the largest American military graveyard in Europe, 14,246 white headstones mark the burial places of United States First Army soldiers who perished in the final, 47-day campaign that ended with the armistice.

It is worth noting that one of those headstones is that of Cpl. Freddie Stowers, the first black American to be awarded the Medal of Honor for his role in World War I as a member of a racially segregated unit. ( It was awarded posthumously in 1991, more than 70 years after he was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire on Sept. 28, 1918.)

In light of America's present-day passions over immigration, it is also worth observing that nearly a quarter of the draftees in 1918 were immigrants, the result of an influx that had transformed America's demography into a "melting pot" of lineages - British, German, Hispanic, Italian, Slav - according to Geoffrey Wawro, a professor of history and director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

Private Gunther was himself descended from German immigrants. His motives for his - literally - last-minute charge were unclear. According to some accounts, he had brooded over a demotion from sergeant after military censors intercepted a letter deemed to be critical of the conduct of the war. He "became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow soldiers," The Baltimore Sun reported. In one way, he may have succeeded: posthumously, his sergeant's rank was restored, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

The armistice was signed in a railroad car in the Compiègne Forest, north of Paris. It paved the way for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which imposed such onerous terms on the defeated Germany that it is often cited as a reason for Hitler's Nazi ideology finding so much resonance. It was no coincidence that, when France fell to a vengeful Germany in 1940, Hitler chose the same railroad car, in the same location, for his French adversaries to accept their capitulation - as German commanders had done in 1918.

Produced by Mona Boshnaq.

Produced by Mona Boshnaq and Gaia Tripoli.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Scars of the Great War Reverberate Today. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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The Courage and Folly of a War That Left Indelible Scars

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During World War I, millions died, empires crumbled, nations were formed and maps were redrawn in ways that reverberate mightily a century later. An American gun crew during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France in 1918. Credit Credit United States Army Signal Corps LONDON - Seconds before an armistice formally ended World War I on Nov.

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Past Tense

As crowds gathered in New York, Paris and London, photographers captured the public's jubilant mood.

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"Men and women of all classes of society joining in uproarious demonstrations, cheering, singing and flag waving in the Place de la Concorde, Paris." Dec. 12, 1918. Credit Credit Émile Barrière/Photo Press Service

The Great War was over. One hundred years ago - just before 3 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 - The New York Times received the first bulletin of the Armistice, which had been signed aboard a rail car in a small village in Northern France. A searchlight on the tower of the Times building, previously used to announce election results, gleamed rays across the city until daylight broke.

After more than four years of fighting, 8.5 million soldiers had been killed, including more than 100,000 Americans, and 7 million civilians were dead. In that time, modern warfare was born, and the trenches of Western Europe became a charnel house.

As news spread of the war's end, people gathered in parks, streets and town squares, overwhelmed with jubilation on what is now officially celebrated as Armistice Day. In pictures from New York, Paris and London, The Times chronicled the ecstatic celebrations. (The dramatic images ran mostly in the Mid-Week Pictorial, a picture-driven publication started by The Times in 1914, in part to bring readers images of the war. The original captions are quoted with each photo here, along with the date of publication.)

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"It was a mystery to all where they came from," the paper wrote of the gatherings in Manhattan. "Many came out of the subway, others came out of the restaurants, cigar stores, and other places that remain open all night. This throng was increased by drivers who left their milk wagons, their newspaper wagons, by men on their way to work, by taxicab chauffeurs, by streetcar conductors, and by many other folk who had heard the tooting of sirens in their neighborhoods and who arose from their beds to find out just what was the latest event of a day that will be marked forever in history."

The war had changed the world irrevocably, and these images depict just a small number of the people impacted. No matter their standing in society or role in the war, on Armistice Day they were all celebrating peace.

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In Photos Unpublished for 100 Years, the Joy of War's End on Armistice Day

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Past Tense As crowds gathered in New York, Paris and London, photographers captured the public's jubilant mood. The Great War was over. One hundred years ago - just before 3 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 - The New York Times received the first bulletin of the Armistice, which had been signed aboard a rail car in a small village in Northern France.

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Europe

© François Nascimbeni, AFP | A portrait of Augustin Trébuchon.

Text by Stéphanie TROUILLARD

Latest update : 2018-11-06

On November 11, 1918, Augustin Trébuchon fell in a hail of German fire minutes before the armistice. He was the last French soldier killed on home soil in World War I. Trébuchon's story inspired "Augustin", a new novel in French by Alexandre Duyck.

It was around 10:50am, on November 11, a century ago. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire splinters the air at Vrigne-Meuse, in the French Ardennes. "Augustin collapses," journalist Alexandre Duyck writes. "With 10 minutes to go after more than 1,560 days of fighting, Augustin would miss the rejoicing, the armistice, the singing of the Marseillaise, the embraces, the joy of the victors, the hero's welcome in [his native] Lozère."

With his first novel, soberly entitled "Augustin", Duyck lends new life to one "Poilu" - as France's WWI infantrymen are affectionately known -- a century after his death. Trébuchon is officially the last soldier to die in combat on French soil, just moments before the guns fell silent to end the Great War.

Duyck first learned of Trébuchon's tragic fate on the 90th anniversary of the armistice. "I had done a reportage in the village where he died and where he was buried in the Ardennes," the special correspondent explains. "I kept the documentation, which I don't usually do. I always kept Augustin in mind. I must have been particularly moved by his death. He was killed last, at the last moment for an absurd purpose."

A private in the 415th infantry regiment, Trébuchon, 40, had fought the entire war. The shepherd from the mountainous Lozère department in southern France had volunteered to join the fight in 1914 when he could have been exempted on the grounds that he had a family to support. At Verdun and the Chemin des Dames, he would witness some of the war's worst battles. With the end of hostilities just moments away, Trébuchon, a dispatch rider, was given one last mission: To deliver a message to his captain's position near the railway line, two kilometres from the command post. But Trébuchon was cut down before he could accomplish it.

"Imagine this shepherd going off to war at 36! He is told it will only last a few months and he winds up staying on until the very end, only to die in the last quarter of an hour," remarks Duyck. In a sort of supreme proof of the absurdity of it all, Trébuchon's tomb in the military section of the Vrigne-Meuse cemetery -- and indeed those of his unfortunate comrades who died on the same day -- all bear the date of November 10, 1918. Military authorities backdated their deaths. It was out of the question for a soldier to die on the day of the Armistice.

© Mémoire des Hommes

Duyck chose to tell Trébuchon's story in the first person. He walked a mile in Trébuchon's boots, intimately inhabiting the spirit of a shepherd who won fame against his will, in death. "I wanted him to represent the universal figure of the 1914 peasant soldier, a profile that made up the majority of the infantry. Many people tell me that he reminds them of their great-grandfathers or great-great-uncles," the novelist says.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
Trébuchon himself left no written traces. Only a photo and some military archival material, including his enrollment card, remain. Without a larger trove of documents, Duyck had to imagine Trébuchon's sentiments and fictionalise his life. "He finds himself involved in a story that completely overwhelms him and amid a violence unknown to him, but he holds on," says Duyck. "He is an antihero, very brave, very humble and very modest. He is emblematic of the soldiers who are caught up in this war that lasts for such a long time, but who obeyed to the end because that was their mission."

As France commemorates the centenary of Trébuchon's death, some say it isn't clear that he was really the last "poilu" to fall in battle. There is indeed no eyewitness account of his death, estimated between 10:45 and 10:55 on that fateful morning. A Breton man, Auguste Joseph Renault, was also killed before the clock struck eleven, at 10:58am, but on Belgian soil, in the sector of Robechies. Other French soldiers, still mobilised on the Eastern Front, died in the months that followed. Others succumbed to their wartime wounds well after the Armistice.

But for Duyck, such morbid rankings are beside the point. "In a sense, everyone has their own last-killed. To me, Augustin's death is a symbol, not a claim to glory. I don't think he would have found pride in it post mortem," says the novelist. "The hell of the trenches has been told many times: Life in the mud, among the rats, the disgusting food and the lack of privacy. But through this book, I especially wanted to lay bare a more personal voice among the millions of soldiers."

Date created : 2018-11-06

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Armistice 1918 centenary: Augustin Trébuchon, France's last fallen soldier - France 24

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On November 11, 1918, Augustin Trébuchon fell in a hail of German fire minutes before the armistice. He was the last French soldier killed on home soil in World War I. Trébuchon's story inspired "Augustin", a new novel in French by Alexandre Duyck.

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Europe

© Collection La Contemporaine | The crowd celebrating the armistice on the Grands Boulevards, in Paris, on November 11, 1918.

Text by Stéphanie TROUILLARD

Latest update : 2018-11-10

At 11am on November 11, 1918 the armistice came into effect. At the frontline or further away from the conflict, the reactions were different. While some celebrated victory, most were simply relieved. And many quietly mourned their dead.
'A really profound calm'
"The four-and-a-half year nightmare is over. It is the armistice. Incredibly, the end of this bloodbath went almost unnoticed among us. We were so used to fighting the war that it seemed like it would never end," says Xavier Chaïla, a cavalryman of the 8th armoured regiment. On November 11 1918, Chaïla feels no joy. When the guns fall silent, the soldier feels only relief.

"The nightmare." This expression appears again and again in the letters and testimonies gathered by historian Rémy Cazals for his latest book "La fin du cauchemar" ("The End of the Nightmare"). "This word symbolises the horror, but also the idea that, for people of the time, these four years of war brutally interrupted normal life. They saw it as a bad dream," explains the emeritus professor at Jean-Jaurès University in Toulouse.

There are many images of celebration, soldiers embracing and frenzied emotional moments from November 11, 1918. But, at the front, silence prevails, as shown by these testimonies from letters and personal notebooks.
'We are not experiencing any joy'
"You're asking me about celebrations for the armistice? Well, think again! It may have produced demonstrations of delirious joy at the higher level, but here with us (and, I think, throughout the army) the news was greeted with a really profound calm," says Elie Barthaburu, a second lieutenant in the 17th Alpine Hunters Battalion. "Why aren't we laughing? We aren't singing? We aren't kissing? We aren't jumping for joy? We aren't about to explode with delight? It's peace! Peace, for God's sake! And yet somehow we remain inert. Are we dead inside?" asks Camille Rouvière of the 411th Infantry Regiment.

Many of these men simply cannot believe that the guns have finally fallen silent. In the trenches, disbelief reigns. "What they felt was surprise rather than joy. Was it possibly over? Could this news be true? They were dazed, stunned... it was almost impossible to imagine," says Captain Gérard Chaumette of the 115th Infantry Regiment.

After four years of exhausting fighting, it is hard for them to imagine that the war is finally over. "In August 1914 they had signed up for a very short war. And then three more years went by... Many soldiers used the expression: 'we are going to fight a 100-year war'. They believed it would never end," says Cazals.

"How can we explode with joy when so many friends have fallen on the field of honour? The time has come for pausing and remembering," said Moïse Hébrard of the 70th infantry regiment. "The bugles are sounding; we know there is an armistice. But our first reaction is to think of our dead comrades, their families, all those affected by these losses, and we cannot yet feel joy. It is impossible to stop thinking of all of the comrades, the ones we knew and the ones we didn't, who will never return home."

Away from the frontline, emotions are very different. In the French capital, people gather to celebrate as soon as the armistice is announced.

"I was in Paris that afternoon. The excitement in the air was almost delirious. I am convinced that we have never seen -- and never will see again -- such a public outpouring of emotion. The streets were swarming with people, the houses were filled from the cellar to the attics with people at the windows," says Sergeant Major Pierre Bellet.

In the country, it was also a time for celebration. In Carcassonne, Marie Saint-Mans remembers feeling intoxicated by the general sense of joy: "Friends and strangers alike held each other in their arms, singing patriotic songs, and we moved about the city like a huge linked chain."

But many civilians were also thinking about their dead. The mayor of Mende, Emile Joly, who lost his son Paul, doesn't hide his sadness: "Today, our sense of regret is increased and our despair exasperated. The victory that France is celebrating right now was brought about by the work and sacrifice of our dearly departed. All the laurels, which we use to cover their graves, are powerless to temper the bitterness of our tears."

Cazals also pays tribute to the forgotten men on November 11, to prisoners of war in Germany and to those who continue to fight. On the Eastern front, soldiers will continue fighting in southern Russia against the Bolsheviks for several months. They feel excluded from the armistice celebrations.

"All day long, I remember thinking that France is celebrating and we should all be having a good time. But our only entertainment was looking at the landscape and feeding our poor sick animals," laments Etienne Reverdy on July 14, 1919. Reverdy was a member of the 3rd Spahis sent to Odessa.
This piece has been adapted from the original in French.
By giving the French the opportunity to relive their experiences through these testimonies, Cazals presents an intimate portrait of how they felt when the armistice was announced. He shows us how it was experienced differently by soldiers and their families. And, whether it produced pain or joy, November 11 remains a milestone for everyone.

"It was a long time ago. I was just 14 years old, at the time. But the powerful moments from that day will never fade from my memory," sums up Marie Saint-Amans.

Date created : 2018-11-10

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The 1918 Armistice: 'The end of the nightmare' for the French - France 24

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Europe Text by Stéphanie TROUILLARD Latest update : 2018-11-10 'A really profound calm' "The four-and-a-half year nightmare is over. It is the armistice. Incredibly, the end of this bloodbath went almost unnoticed among us. We were so used to fighting the war that it seemed like it would never end," says Xavier Chaïla, a cavalryman of the 8th armoured regiment.

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Big Ben will sound on Remembrance Sunday to mark the centenary of the Armistice.

The bell will chime despite the clock tower being covered in scaffolding for conservation works.

The 13.7 tonne bell, which hangs in the Elizabeth Tower in Westminster, will sound 11 times at 11am on Sunday for the traditional two minutes of remembrance, the Government has said.

It will strike a further 11 times at 12.30 with bells across the UK and worldwide as part of a programme of events to mark the end of the First World War 100 years ago.

London's iconic bell, Big Ben, did not ring throughout the war but finally chimed again on Armistice Day amid an outpouring of relief.

It will ring out at 11am on Remembrance Sunday, marking the moment the war ended.

This will be followed by the international bellringing at 12.30pm which is a joint campaign organised by the British and German governments.

As part of the initiative, 1,400 new bellringers have been recruited to honour the 1,400 who lost their lives during the war.

Bells will ring out from churches and cathedrals in cities, towns and villages across the country and around the world.

It is designed to not just symbolise the end of the First World War, but also as a conclusion to four years of centenary commemorations.

The 159-year-old clock tower is currently undergoing renovation work, meaning the famous bells have been silent since August 2017 after being disconnected from the clock mechanism.

The bells were reconnected briefly to ring in the new year in 2018, but the entire clock mechanism has since been removed for repair and maintenance works.

A bespoke electric mechanism has been built to power the 200kg striking hammer in order to ensure the Great Bell can mark Remembrance Sunday and New Year's Eve.

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Big Ben will sound again on Remembrance Sunday

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Big Ben will sound on Remembrance Sunday to mark the centenary of the Armistice. The bell will chime despite the clock tower being covered in scaffolding for conservation works. The 13.7 tonne bell, which hangs in the Elizabeth Tower in Westminster, will sound 11 times at 11am on Sunday for the traditional two minutes of remembrance, the Government has said.

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"Il y a 100 ans, L'ouest-Eclair annonçait la fin de la Grande-Guerre" - L'édition historique, Ouest France

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"Il y a 100 ans, L'ouest-Eclair annonçait la fin de la Grande-Guerre" - L'édition historique, Ouest France

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Here is an article published in the newspaper Ouest-Éclair, he is in French but he speaks about the armistice 1918 britanics.

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Alors qu'Emmanuel Macron célèbre le centenaire de l'armistice de 1918, Paris Match a retrouvé ses bisaïeuls qui ont fait cette guerre.

Un village comme mille autres. Des maisons en brique derrière des murs de pierre cabossés. Le long de la route, une petite rivière a creusé un sillon qui ressemble à un coteau. Nous sommes à Authie dans la Somme. Ce sol, entre Amiens et Arras, est à lui seul un concentré d'histoire de France. Les sarcophages mérovingiens attestent de la présence des rois francs. Le château féodal a vu passer les guerres de religion. Au XIXe siècle, le choléra a tué un habitant sur dix. Surtout, en août 1914, depuis leurs fenêtres, les gens d'ici ont vu passer les uhlans, les lanciers allemands aux trousses de l'armée française en recul jusqu'à la Marne.
Lire aussi :11 novembre 1918 - 2018, tous enfants de poilus
En septembre 1914, ils ont vu les mêmes, poursuivis par les pantalons rouges de l'armée de Joffre. Puis tous se sont arrêtés là. Sur cette terre de Somme. Ils y ont inventé les tranchées. Cela a duré quatre ans. A Authie, où la cavalerie britannique installa ses chevaux, des maisons furent réquisitionnées, le château fut transformé en hôpital, la grange en salle d'attente, l'écurie en morgue, et une voie de chemin de fer fut montée de toutes pièces pour acheminer des canons sur le front, à 7 kilomètres de là... En 1916, les Anglais ont tenté de percer. En vain. En 1918, les Allemands ont réussi... avant de rebrousser chemin. Un homme a traversé ces années de fer et cette longue histoire. Il s'appelait Henri Macron. C'était l'arrière-grand-père d'Emmanuel Macron. C'est d'ici que vient le huitième président de la Ve République.

Tous ont connu le front, tous en sont revenus

Ce Macron-là décède en 1964. Un 13 août. L'actuel président ne l'a jamais connu. Pas plus qu'il n'a connu ses autres arrière-grands-pères. Au total, trois poilus français et probablement un tommy anglais, un certain George William Robertson, dont on ne sait rien, si ce n'est qu'il a épousé en 1919, à Abbeville, une arrière-grand-mère d'Emmanuel Macron, avant d'en divorcer neuf ans plus tard. Quels autres Anglais que des soldats, en 1919, venaient épouser des Françaises en baie de Somme? Tous ont donc connu le front. Tous en sont revenus. Il n'est pas interdit, dans la grande loterie de la guerre, d'avoir de la chance. En politique aussi. Comme des fils invisibles qui façonnent les familles, quels liens unissent ces soldats à leur arrière-petit-fils qui préside aujourd'hui au destin de la France?

Emmanuel Macron, devant la statue de Clemenceau, le 11 novembre 2017. © FRANCOIS GUILLOT / AFP / POOL

Henri Macron, né à Authie le 4 mars 1894, a 20 ans quand la guerre éclate. Il mesure 1,64 mètre, a les cheveux châtains et les yeux bleus. Il sait non seulement lire, écrire et compter, mais il a le brevet d'aptitude pour entrer au lycée. Agent des Ponts et Chaussées, il est affecté dans une unité d'intendance. Il y restera jusqu'en février 1916. Le front a besoin de soldats. Le voilà au 42e régiment d'artillerie qui rentre de Verdun. Direction la Somme justement et les grandes offensives alliées en préparation. Henri Macron cantonne à Lamotte-en-Santerre. A 33 kilomètres de chez lui. "Le régiment y restera cinq mois, jour pour jour, sans un seul moment de répit", mentionne le journal des marches et opérations. En 1917, il est à Craonne, sur l'aile droite de l'offensive du Chemin des Dames. En 1918, il retourne à Verdun pour la troisième fois. Puis le revoilà dans la Somme à l'heure de la dernière grande offensive allemande. "Pour tous, résistance jusqu'au corps-à-corps. C'est l'heure du sacrifice pour essayer d'enrayer la progression de l'ennemi vers Paris ", avertit le chef de corps. On est en juin 1918. "Le régiment a fait, au cours de la campagne, l'admiration des grandes unités qui l'ont employé", dit le journal. Henri Macron sera décoré de la croix de guerre avec étoile de bronze: "Très bon sous-officier, au front depuis le début 1915, s'est toujours acquitté de façon parfaite des missions qui lui furent confiées. Depuis la reprise de la guerre de mouvement, a assuré avec entrain le service de liaison et a donné toute satisfaction ", mentionne sa citation.

La guerre passée, le 2e classe devenu maréchal des logis est rentré à Authie(400 habitants) dont il fut maire de 1953 à son décès en 1964. "Il habitait une belle maison, se souvient Honoré Froideval, l'actuel édile. Une fois par semaine, j'accompagnais ma tante aveugle qui rendait visite à cet homme un peu rigide qui travaillait à la SNCF. J'avais 10 ans à sa mort, mais j'ai continué de venir; sa veuve était gentille et j'y regardais la télévision - une rareté à l'époque."

Le deuxième arrière-grand-père poilu, premier de la branche maternelle, s'appelle Fabien Noguès. Né en 1886 à Bagnères-de-Bigorre dans les Hautes- Pyrénées, ce charpentier sachant "lire, écrire et compter " est affecté au 15e régiment de dragons de Libourne. Il y tra- verse la guerre à l'arrière des tranchées, dans l'attente d'une percée. En Champagne, en Artois, au Chemin des Dames. Il est en ligne dans la Somme en 1916. Ce n'est qu'en 1918, avec la reprise de la guerre de mouvement, que le 15e régiment de dragons connaît des pertes significatives (39 morts en deux jours) mais homéopathiques à côté des saignées de l'infanterie. Fabien Noguès rentre chez lui sans citation ni médaille, mais intact. Au front, il a dû croiser Ernest Arribet, le troisième arrière-grand-père, originaire de Mifaget dans les actuelles Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Un village à 17 kilomètres de Bordères, où est né et vit François Bayrou dont les grands-pères ont fait "14".

Sa grand-mère chérie lui a fait découvrir Maurice Genevoix

La fiche matricule d'Ernest Arribet, arrière-grand-père du chef de l'Etat. © DR

Ernest Arribet est garçon de chai quand la guerre éclate, il a 25 ans, mesure 1,77 mètre et sait "lire, écrire et compter". Réformé en 1911, au terme de son service militaire, pour cause de tuberculose, il est déclaré apte le jour de Noël 1914. Au feu, les bras manquent. Comme Fabien Noguès, il est affecté au 15e régiment de dragons, puis détaché six mois plus tard à l'atelier de construction de Tarbes, une usine de canons.Y fabrique-t-il une des pièces utilisées par Henri Macron au 42e régiment d'artillerie? Un travail pénible mais loin de la mitraille. Et près de sa belle. Leur fille, Germaine, la grand-mère chérie d'Emmanuel Macron, est née à Tarbes en octobre 1916. Son père n'y est déjà plus; il a quitté la ville en mai, transféré dans une unité de cavalerie. Cantonné dans la Somme, lui aussi doit "exploiter une percée" qui ne se produira jamais. Germaine, qu'Emmanuel Macron appelait "Manette" - "la seule enfant de la famille à poursuivre ses études au-delà du brevet", écrit-il dans son livre "Révolution" - lui donnera l'amour de la lecture et lui fera découvrir Maurice Genevoix, l'écrivain des tranchées. Des études qui lui permettraient d'enseigner à Nevers, "emmenant avec elle sa mère qui était ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui une "femme battue" et qu'elle ne quitterait plus jusqu'à la fin", écrit-il encore. "Manette" est décédée en 2013. Et avec elle le dernier lien direct avec la Grande Guerre.

En 2017, le candidat Macron avait lancé lors d'un meeting à Arras : "A quelques kilomètres d'ici, ma famille, pour moitié, est enterrée à Authie, dans une vallée triste que je n'ai visitée que pour les enterrements [...]. Cette vallée, je la connais très bien; ces paysages aux confins de la Somme, j'en connais les charmes, la tristesse et les souffrances. Ce pays, ce pays où nous sommes, il a connu toutes les guerres de l'Europe." Ce pays, c'est le sien, il y est né. Et avant ces lignes dans Paris Match, Macron était sans savoir que ses arrière-grands-pères y avaient combattu et s'y sont probablement croisés. Autour d'Authie, ce village de la communauté de communes du Pays du Coquelicot. La ligne de front de ses quatre branches familiales.
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Paris Match a retrouvé les Poilus d'Emmanuel Macron

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Alors qu'Emmanuel Macron célèbre le centenaire de l'armistice de 1918, Paris Match a retrouvé ses bisaïeuls qui ont fait cette guerre. Un village comme mille autres. Des maisons en brique derrière des murs de pierre cabossés. Le long de la route, une petite rivière a creusé un sillon qui ressemble à un coteau.

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World War One. Interactive and Personal.

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Armistice Day. An interactive personalised journey through World War One

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Votre Magazine B2B Retrouvez toute l'actu entrepreneuriale au travers de nos différents articles. Rédigé par une équipe de passionné, le blog centenaire.org apporte l'information sur internet Découvrir Une rédaction sur des sujets tendance Des conseils business et des solutions concrètes aux entreprises. Finance Bien choisir ses partenaires et ses allés pour faire grandir son ...

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World War One: Why 'indecent' Armistice Day parties ended

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World War One: Why 'indecent' Armistice Day parties ended

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L'armistice de 1918 est un traité qui occupe une grande place dans l'histoire.

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L'armistice de 1918 est un traité qui occupe une grande place dans l'histoire.

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11 NOVEMBRE - Emmanuel Macron a confirmé une commémoration des maréchaux de la Grande Guerre aux Invalides pour célébrer le centenaire de l'armistice. Pour apaiser la polémique, l'Elysée a précisé que le maréchal Pétain ne serait pas célébré. Programme du jour férié du 11 novembre 2018.

[Mis à jour le 8 novembre 2018 à 12h14] Qu'y-a-t-il au programme du jour férié du 11 novembre 2018, date du centenaire de l'armistice du 11 novembre 1918 ? Le centenaire sera célébré en grande pompe par l'Elysée à Paris. S'il n'organise pas de défilé militaire pour rendre hommage aux Maréchaux de la Grande Guerre, le président de la République Emmanuel Macron a fait savoir mercredi dernier qu'il jugeait "légitime" une cérémonie organisée aux Invalides samedi 10 novembre prochain, afin de rendre hommage à ces maréchaux "qui ont conduit l'armée à la victoire", sans préciser si le dirigeant du gouvernement collaborationniste de Vichy, le maréchal Pétain, serait commémoré.

Le maréchal Pétain a été "pendant la Première guerre mondiale un grand soldat" même s'il a "conduit des choix funestes", a déclaré le chef de l'Etat mercredi, des propos proches de ceux de Chirac et De Gaulle. Mais pas de polémique en vue, Benjamin Griveaux, porte-parole du Gouvernement, a tenu à préciser sur les réseaux sociaux, suite aux propos d'Emmanuel Macron, que seuls "les maréchaux dont l'honneur n'a pas été entaché, ceux-là, et ceux-là seuls, recevront l'hommage de la République : Ferdinand Foch, Joseph Joffre, Hubert Lyautey, Louis Franchet d'Esperey, Emile Fayolle, Michel Maunoury. Pas Philippe Pétain, qui a été frappé d'indignité nationale pour avoir collaboré avec la barbarie nazie de façon odieuse et criminelle." Ces maréchaux inhumés aux Invalides sont des généraux qui ont reçu la plus haute distinction militaire entre 1916 et 1923, pour leurs actions pendant la première guerre mondiale. Relancé sur le sujet qui aurait pu faire polémique, Emmanuel Macron s'est justifié en expliquant qu'il "ne pardonn[ait] rien" des actes de Philippe Pétain mais qu'il "ne gomm[ait] rien" de l'Histoire de France."

Ce jeudi 8 novembre, le président de la République poursuit son "itinérance mémorielle" dans les Hauts-de-France. Il se rend à e 11 novembre, le chef de l'Etat finira par rendre hommage au Maubeuges,tombée aux mains des Allemands en septembre 1914, puis à Feignies. Vendredi 9 novembre, il sera à Lens puis à la Nécropole Nationale de Notre Dame de Lorette pour rendre hommage à près de 600 000 soldats. La journée se terminera par un passage à Albert et Péronne. Au total, son "itinérance mémorielle" regroupe 11 départements et 17 villes de France. A la fin du périple, le 10 novembre, Emmanuel Macron se rend à Rethondes dans la clairière où se trouvait le wagon dans lequel a été signée l'armistice, accompagné de la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel. "Il s'agit d'aller à la rencontre de nos ancêtres les poilus, de renouer avec des racines que nous risquons de perdre (...) et de saluer l'extraordinaire capacité du peuple français, qui ne se dément jamais, à reconstruire et à repartir après une guerre", a commenté l'Elysée au Figaro. L soldat inconnu sous l'arc de triomphe de Paris, en présence d'une centaine de dirigeants.

Découvrez, dans notre dossier ci-dessous, le programme de l'Elysée le 11 novembre heure par heure, mais aussi celui de la mairie de Paris qui s'étend sur plusieurs jours.

Plus de 60 chefs d'Etat, dont Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump (qui souhaitait à la base organiser un défilé militaire à Washington), Vladimir Poutine et Angela Merkel, seront à Paris le 11 novembre 2018 pour célébrer le centenaire de l'armistice. A 10 heures, "plus de cent chefs d'Etat, de gouvernement et de dignitaires, au nom du souvenir et de la construction de la paix" seront réunis à l'Arc de Triomphe de Paris pour une lecture de la liste des noms et âges des soldats décédés dans l'exercice de leur mission dans les 12 derniers mois.

Après un déjeuner au Château de Versailles avec les conjoints, les dirigeants seront conviés à un Forum de la Paix, ouvert symboliquement par la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel. A 15h30, la chancelière allemande tiendra un discours d'ouverture et laissera ensuite la parole au secrétaire général de l'Onu Antonio Guterres.

Le 11 novembre 2018, dans tout l'Hexagone, de nombreux hommages aux "poilus" morts pour la France auront lieu auprès des quelques 30 000 monuments aux morts édifiés dans les villes et villages français. A 11 heures précises le 11 novembre 2018, des cloches commémoratives sonneront dans chaque village de France. Paris met en place, jusqu'à la fin de l'année 2018, des événements pour commémorer l'armistice du 11 novembre 1918.

Un programme riche en événements est prévu sur la capitale jusqu'à la fin de l'année 2018 avec notamment un hommage aux 95 000 Parisiens morts pour la paix de la France au cimetière du Père Lachaise. Cérémonies, visites guidées, conférences, colloques et lectures musicales, voici ci-dessous les temps forts au programme de la commémoration du centenaire du 11 novembre à Paris :

Du lundi 5 au vendredi 30 novembre : exposition "Fusillé pour l'Exemple", qui retrace la mémoire des soldats fusillés pour l'exemple, mise en œuvre par la Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et l'association Arts, Découvertes et Citoyenneté. Adresse : Mairie du 2e arrondissement.Entrée libre et gratuite de 8h30 à 17h, nocturne le jeudi jusqu'à 19h30.

régiment d'infanterie. La cérémonie se tiendra autour de sa tombe au cimetière du Père-Lachaise, avec au programme, une lecture de ses poèmes par des élèves parisiens. Jeudi 8 novembre de 10h30 à 11h30 : commémoration du centenaire de la mort de l'écrivain Guillaume Apollinaire , également engagé dès 1915 sur le Front en Champagne en tant que sous-lieutenant du 96e Adresse : cimetière du Père-Lachaise, 71 rue des Rondeaux, 75020 Paris.

Jeudi 8 novembre de 18h30 à 20h : concert "Am Zukunft - Aux Lendemains" avec les participations du Chœur de l'Armée française, du Chœur de l'Ensemble Sequenza, et du Chœur de Chambre du Québec. Adresse : Salle des fêtes de l'Hôtel de Ville, 3, rue de Lobau, 75001 Paris. Entrée gratuite sur inscription obligatoire.

Vendredi 9 novembre à 11 heures : inauguration de la plaque en mémoire des 46 victimes de l'explosion de la fabrique de grenades de l'ingénieur mécanicien Louis Billant, qui eut lieu le 20 octobre 1915. Adresse : 168 rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris.

Vendredi 9 novembre de 11h à 12h : cérémonie en mémoire des victimes de l'explosion de 1915. Adresse : Ancien emplacement de l'usine Billant, 163 rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris.

Du vendredi 9 au dimanche 11 novembre : 95 000 primevères bleues recouvrent le parvis de l'Hôtel de Ville en hommage aux 95 000 "poilus" parisiens.

Samedi 10 novembre à 18 heures : inauguration par Anne Hidalgo d'un parterre de 94 415 primevères aux couleurs du drapeau français sur le parvis de l'Hôtel de Ville, en mémoire des Parisiens disparus dans le conflit.

Dimanche 11 novembre à 11 heures : le président de la République française Emmanuel Macron prendra la parole sous l'Arc de Triomphe à Paris en présence de 60 chefs d'Etat.

Dimanche 11 novembre à 17 heures : inauguration du Monument dédié aux 94 415 morts parisiens de la Première Guerre mondiale, sur le mur d'enceinte du cimetière du Père Lachaise. Adresse : Entrée principale du Père Lachaise - Boulevard de Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris.

Dimanche 18 novembre de 16h à 17h : concert de la victoire et de la paix avec les participations du Chœur Mélomen et du Rainbow Symphony Orchestra. Adresse : Auditorium du Petit Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris. Entrée gratuite sur inscription obligatoire.

Jusqu'au dimanche 25 novembre de 14h à 16h : visite guidée "Apollinaire et Montparnasse avant la guerre" organisée en partenariat avec le comité des centenaires de Calligrammes et de la mort d'Apollinaire. Elle parcoure le Montparnasse de la Belle Époque, maintes fois célébré par le poète. Adresse : 2 rue Victor Considérant, 75014 Paris. Visite gratuite sur inscription obligatoire.

Jusqu'au vendredi 30 novembre de 1h à 23h : exposition "Les Calligrammes du centenaire" organisée avec le comité des centenaires de Calligrammes et de la mort d'Apollinaire. Elle présente une dizaine de calligrammes issus du recueil de poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire, en lien avec Paris et la Grande Guerre. Adresse : Grilles du square Laurent Prache, 75006 Paris. Visite gratuite sur inscription obligatoire.

Jusqu'au dimanche 2 décembre de 14h à 16h : visite guidée "Le Montmartre d'Apollinaire" organisée en partenariat avec le comité des centenaires de Calligrammes et de la mort d'Apollinaire. Elle parcoure le 18e arrondissement dans les pas des figures amies d'Apollinaire, sans oublier certains lieux emblématiques fréquentés par le poète. Adresse : Larmarck-Caulaincourt, 75018 Paris. Visite gratuite sur inscription obligatoire.

Jusqu'au 15 décembre de 1h à 23h : exposition de photographies "Objets de Poilus" réalisée par Philippe Abergel. Elle présente ces objets centenaires sous un format polaroïd. Adresse : sur la façade de la Caserne Napoleon, 4 Rue de lobau, 75004 Paris.

Jusqu'au 15 décembre de 1h à 23h : exposition "Le camp retranché de Paris : Stratégique forêt" organisée en partenariat avec l'Office National des Forêts. Elle retrace l'histoire et le rôle des forêts franciliennes dans la stratégie militaire de défense de Paris pendant la Grande Guerre. Adresse : sur les grilles de l'Hôtel de Ville, Rue de Rivoli, 75004 Paris.

Jusqu'au 15 décembre de 1h à 23h : exposition "Portraits de l'étranger" organisée en partenariat avec l'association Génériques. Elle revient sur la contribution des étrangers à l'effort de guerre, sur la rencontre entre les différentes populations et leur représentation dans l'imaginaire collectif. Adresse : Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale, 4 5 bis avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle, 75012 Paris.

Jusqu'au 22 janvier 2019 : Exposition "L'Armistice, 11 novembre 1918. Un document, une histoire". Le texte original de la convention d'armistice est exposé au public avec ses multiples annexes. Adresse : Château de Vincennes, Avenue de Paris, 94300 Vincennes.

> Découvrez tous les événements au programme du centenaire de l'armistice à Paris.

Le 11 novembre, qui acte la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, appelée aussi "Grande Guerre", laisse derrière lui 9,7 millions de morts dont 1,4 millions de Français. A l'occasion des commémorations, les passionnés d'histoire pourront se rendre sur les sites emblématiques de la Grande Guerre de 1914-18. Partez sur les traces des Poilus à travers la Somme, la Lorraine ou la Champagne :

Les grands sites qui ont marqué l'histoire de 14-18 en France

L'armistice de 1918 est un traité qui occupe une grande place dans l'histoire. Que s'est-il passé le 11 novembre 1918 ? Après l'échec des offensives allemandes de juin et juillet 1918 durant la Grande Guerre, les Américains et Britanniques débutent une offensive au mois d'août 1918 qui fait définitivement reculer les forces allemandes. Au terme de deux mois de résistance de l'Etat-Major allemand, le texte de l'armistice est négociée et actée dans le "Wagon de l'Armistice" le 11 novembre 1918, à 5h15 du matin. Il s'agit du wagon de commandement du Maréchal Foch près du quartier général allié, non loin de la gare de Rethondes dans l'Oise. A 11 heures du matin le 11 novembre 1918, l'armistice prend effet sur le front.

En signant le fameux traité à Rethondes, le 11 novembre 1918, les forces alliées et l'Allemagne ont mis officiellement fin à leur conflit en posant plusieurs conditions. Toujours le 11 novembre, Charles Ier, alors empereur d'Autriche, a finalement renoncé au trône - sa dynastie des Habsbourg avait régné plus de 600 ans. Depuis 100 ans, même chez les plus jeunes, le jour du 11 novembre symbolise le dénouement de la Grande Guerre.

Le rendez-vous du 11 novembre comporte de de nombreuses anecdotes, et son histoire reste méconnue ou oubliée par de nombreux anciens écoliers. Que disait le traité de Versailles ? Quelles ont été les conditions de l'armistice 1918 ? En savoir plus dans notre dossier consacré à l'armistice 1918.

Le choix de la date du 11 novembre n'est pas un hasard : il s'agit d'un choix "français" puisque cette date tombe pile sur celle de la fête traditionnelle du saint patron des Francs, St-Martin. Le canon s'est donc tû à la onzième heure du onzième jour du onzième mois de l'année 1918 sur le front au Nord-Est de l'Hexagone... et par conséquent dans toute l'Europe. Les soldats sortent alors des tranchées sans crainte mais les festivités sont forcément endeuillées. À partir de 11 heures du matin le 11 novembre 1918, volées de cloches et sonneries de clairon annoncent la fin des combats sur le front occidental. Ils retentissent après quatre ans de guerre qui ont laissé une France exsangue et 1 500 000 victimes, jeunes pour la plupart. Au total, la Grande Guerre a fait plus de 8 millions de morts et de blessés. À 16 heures, au Palais Bourbon, Clémenceau lit les conditions d'armistice. Il salue également Alsace et Lorraine tout en rendant hommage à la Nation.

La foule des parisiens manifeste sa joie sur les Grands Boulevards à Paris, le 11 Novembre 1918, à l'annonce de la signature de l'armistice. © STR / AFP

En 1919, le projet de l'hommage à un soldat inconnu mort à la Première guerre, symbole anonyme de tous les "Poilus", est adopté par les députés français. L'année suivante, le soldat inconnu qui doit être transféré à Paris est désigné par un autre soldat à Verdun, par le dépôt sur un des cercueils d'un bouquet de fleurs. Dans la foulée, en 1920, le Parlement vote la loi suivante à l'unanimité :

"Article 1er : Les honneurs du Panthéon seront rendus aux restes d'un des soldats non identifiés morts au champ d'honneur au cours de la guerre 1914-1918. [...]
Article 2 : [...] Les restes du Soldat inconnu seront inhumés sous l'Arc de Triomphe." Cela sera fait le 28 janvier 1921.

Le 24 novembre 1922, le Parlement déclare le 11 novembre "fête nationale" avec la dénomination de "Jour du Souvenir". Dès lors, le 11 novembre devient un jour férié. Le 11 novembre de l'année suivante, suite à l'idée émise par plusieurs artistes, une "Flamme du Souvenir" est allumée par le ministre de la Guerre André Maginot. Flamme sacrée qu'un "Comité de la Flamme" a depuis la tâche de raviver tous les jours au crépuscule. Elle ne s'est jamais éteinte, même pendant l'Occupation.

Pour la maintenir en vie, une cérémonie très stricte du "ravivage de la flamme" est observée au quotidien depuis 92 ans, toujours la même. Elle a lieu tous les soirs à 18h30. Les Associations sont conduites, en défilé, jusque sous l'Arc de triomphe, avec les porteurs de gerbes en tête puis les portes-drapeaux. Drapeau de "La flamme", clairon et tambour de la Garde républicaine sont disposés aux abords de la Dalle sacrée. La sonnerie de la Flamme retentit ; la flamme est ravivée ; les gerbes déposées. Ensuite, la sonnerie "Aux Morts" résonne, les drapeaux s'abaissent et une minute de silence est suivie. On signe le Livre d'Or, on se salue puis tous se retrouvent enfin au pied de la tombe, pour écouter les musiciens jouer "Honneur au soldat inconnu".

La "flamme du souvenir" qui ne s'éteint jamais, à Paris, sur la tombe du soldat inconnu enterré sous l'Arc de triomphe. © Wikimedia Commons.

En France, la commémoration de l'armistice - autrement dit de la fin d'une Grande Guerre qui devait être la "Der des Ders" - prendra par la suite une place importante dans la vie nationale, avec des gerbes déposées chaque année, à quelques jours de la Toussaint, fait du hasard, au pied des monuments aux morts de chaque commune ce jour de la "Fête du Souvenir". Des plaques commémoratives sont également installées dans les lieux publics.

Le dernier poilu français, Lazare Ponticelli, est mort en 2008. Le 11 novembre 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy, alors président de la République, décide de rendre également hommage à 13 militaires français morts en Afghanistan, autrement dit aux "derniers soldats en date morts pour la France". À l'image du Memorial Day américain. Trente-six ans plus tôt, en 1975, le président de la République Valéry Giscard d'Estaing avait déjà proposé le regroupement d'un hommage de tous les morts de toutes les guerres le 11 novembre, sans succès. En 2012, le président de la République François Hollande honore la mémoire de l'ensemble des soldats français décédés en opération sans distinction de guerre (il porte bien sûr le traditionnel Bleuet de France à la boutonnière) et respecte le rituel habituel : dépôt d'une gerbe tricolore au pied de la statue de Georges Clémenceau (symbole de la victoire de la Grande Guerre) ; Champs-Élysées remontés escorté par la Garde républicaine ; passage des troupes en revue sur la place Charles-de-Gaulle puis recueillement sur la tombe du soldat inconnu surplombée de l'Arc de triomphe. Néanmoins, un sentiment diffus de "trop de commémoration tue la commémoration" est né en France depuis la fin du XXe siècle, couplé avec la disparition des témoins directs de la Première guerre... reléguée aux pages des manuels d'Histoire.

Une gerbe de fleurs est déposée sur la tombe du soldat inconnu le 11 novembre 2014. © FRANCOIS MORI / POOL / AFP

Saint-Martin est saint patron de la France. La tradition chrétienne veut que "Quand Clovis attribua sa victoire de 507 à la protection de Saint-Martin et Saint-Hilaire, Saint-Martin devint alors le saint patron des Francs. Les Mérovingiens furent imités ensuite par les Carolingiens et plus tard par les Capétiens qui se déclarèrent "abbés laïcs de St Martin de Tours".

Egalement appelé Jour du Souvenir, le 315e jour de l'année (316e en cas d' année bissextile comme cela a été le cas en 2016) peut entraîner un "pont" du mois de novembre, weekend prolongé à la clé pour les salariés comme pour les travailleurs indépendants. En 2018, le jour férié du 11 novembre n'en sera pas vraiment un puisqu'il tombera un dimanche. L'année d'après, le 11 novembre aura en revanche lieu un lundi.

Les photos censurées de la Grande Guerre

Article le plus lu - Harcèlement : la vidéo déchirante d'un enfant › Voir les actualités

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11 novembre 2018 : non, il n'y aura pas d'hommage à Pétain au centenaire

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11 NOVEMBRE - Emmanuel Macron a confirmé une commémoration des maréchaux de la Grande Guerre aux Invalides pour célébrer le centenaire de l'armistice. Pour apaiser la polémique, l'Elysée a précisé que le maréchal Pétain ne serait pas célébré. Programme du jour férié du 11 novembre 2018.

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Centenaire de l'Armistice : sur les traces des soldats français

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Centenaire de l'Armistice : sur les traces des soldats français

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Centenaire de l'Armistice : sur les traces des soldats français

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Paris célèbre le centenaire de l'Armistice

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Paris célèbre le centenaire de l'Armistice

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Le 11 novembre 1918, la signature de l'Armistice acte la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale et la défaite des Allemands. Pour célébrer ce centenaire et " rendre hommage à nos poilus ", un programme ponctué d'événements qui s'adressent autant aux passionnés qu'aux curieux et aux rêveurs, se déroulera à Paris jusqu'à la fin de l'année. Point d'orgue de ces commémorations, Anne Hidalgo inaugurera le 11 novembre, le monument aux Morts parisiens, implanté sur le mur d'enceinte du cimetière du Père Lachaise.

La fin de la Première Guerre mondiale

Après quatre années de violents combats, neuf millions de morts, dont 1,4 million de Français, ont laissé derrière eux 600 000 veuves et plus d'un million d'orphelins. Cent ans plus tard, les poilus ne sont plus parmi nous pour témoigner de cette page de notre histoire.

Trouver de nouvelles formes de transmission de cette mémoire était donc un défi : les commémorations doivent demeurer des temps de recueillement et de souvenir, mais être aussi des moments de réflexion et de partage.

Autour de l'inauguration, le 11 novembre prochain, du Monument dédié aux 94 415 morts parisiens au cimetière du Père Lachaise, plusieurs événements rendront hommage à tous les acteurs et actrices de la Grande Guerre : cérémonies, balades, visites guidées, conférences, colloques, lectures musicales, expositions... émailleront ce parcours dédié à notre histoire.

Les principaux événements de cette commémoration

Dans l'immense majorité des villes et villages de France, près de 30 000 monuments aux morts ont été édifiés entre 1918 et 1925, recensant les noms des Français tombés pour la paix de leur Nation. Si Paris compte de très nombreux lieux de souvenir de la Grande Guerre, sous forme de plaques, stèles, sculptures au sein des mairies d'arrondissements, établissements scolaires, entreprises ou encore édifices religieux, aucun d'eux jusqu'à présent ne rassemblait l'intégralité des noms des 94 415 Parisiens morts au combat.

Cent ans après, Paris inaugure enfin son Monument aux morts, installé sur le mur d'enceinte du cimetière du Père-Lachaise, le long du boulevard de Ménilmontant.

Le 11 novembre à 17 heures, Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris dévoilera le monument aux Morts parisiens de la Première Guerre mondiale

Premier monument de Paris à rendre hommage aux 94 415 combattants parisiens morts pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, le monument est un véritable trait d'union entre notre Histoire et notre présent, il redonne une place symbolique forte dans Paris à toute une génération, et traduit la volonté politique de la Ville d'inscrire dans le paysage urbain, l'identité de ces combattants.

Le monument aux Morts parisiens est constitué de 150 panneaux bleu acier installés sur le mur d'enceinte du cimetière du Père Lachaise. Le long de ces 280 mètres pour 1,30 mètre de hauteur, il rassemble les noms des 94 415 morts parisiens de la Grande Guerre. Il est l'œuvre de l'artiste Julien Zanassi, assistant à maîtrise d'ouvrage (atelier d'architecture Philéas). Un aménagement végétal a également été mis en place afin de faire de ce lieu un espace propice à la mémoire collective et au recueillement.

Samedi 10 novembre, veille du centenaire historique, la Ville de Paris recouvrira le parvis de l'Hôtel de Ville d'un parterre de 94 415 fleurs aux couleurs du drapeau français, en mémoire des " Poilus " parisiens dont les noms défileront sur un écran géant. La façade du bâtiment sera également éclairée en bleu blanc rouge pour l'occasion.

Dans les jours qui suivront l'évènement, ces fleurs cultivées depuis le mois de juin dernier par les agents du centre de production horticole municipal seront distribuées aux Parisiens (jardins partagés, titulaires de permis de végétaliser...) ainsi qu'à la ville de Fresnes.

Infos pratiques : Inauguration du monument par Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris, dimanche 11 novembre à 17 heures - Mur d'enceinte du cimetière du Père-Lachaise - Entrée principale - Boulevard de Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris

Monument aux morts virtuel

8 novembre 2018 à 10h30 - Centenaire de la mort de Guillaume Apollinaire

Tout en poursuivant ses activités littéraires, le célèbre auteur du " Pont Mirabeau " s'était également engagé dès 1915 sur le Front en Champagne en tant que sous-lieutenant du 96 e régiment d'infanterie. Naturalisé français en 1916, il poursuivit son engagement de soldat dans l'Aisne, où il fut blessé à la tempe par un éclat d'obus. Le 9 novembre 1918, deux jours avant l'armistice, il meurt de la grippe espagnole, affaibli par ses blessures et sa trépanation. La cérémonie s'est tenue autour de sa tombe au cimetière du Père-Lachaise, à l'occasion du centenaire de sa mort.

Infos pratiques ; Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, 71 rue des Rondeaux, 75020 Paris

9 novembre 2018 à 11 heures - inauguration de la plaque en mémoire des victimes de l'explosion de la fabrique de grenades Louis Billant, le 20 octobre 1915

En collaboration avec le Génie du ministère de la Guerre, Louis Billant, ingénieur mécanicien, conçut un nouveau type de grenade, très percutante. Après des essais en avril 1915, l'Armée lui demanda d'entreprendre la fabrication de 100 000 de ces grenades. Malgré les risques de sécurité, la demande était forte, et la production montait jusqu'à 15 000 grenades par jour. Le 20 octobre 1915, la fabrique explosa, dévastant le quartier alentour, et provoquant officiellement 46 victimes dont de nombreuses femmes qui y travaillaient, ainsi que 97 blessés. Il sera ainsi apposé une plaque en leur mémoire, à l'endroit même où se situait l'usine Billant.

Infos pratiques : Vendredi 9 novembre 2018 à 11 heures - 168 rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris

12 octobre à 11 heures : inauguration de la plaque en mémoire d'Edith Cavell

Infirmière britannique, Edith Cavell a participé entre l'automne 1914 et juillet 1915 à faire évader des soldats alliés prisonniers en Belgique. Dénoncée, elle fut arrêtée le 5 août et condamnée à mort le 11 octobre 1915 par les autorités allemandes. Le 12 octobre 1916, un hôpital-école portant son nom fut construit et inauguré à Paris en présence des autorités officielles des pays alliés. L'hôpital était destiné à former des infirmières professionnelles pour la durée de la guerre. La plaque en mémoire d'Edith Cavell a été inaugurée à l'emplacement de cet ancien hôpital de guerre, dont il ne reste plus de trace aujourd'hui. La cérémonie a été l'occasion de rendre un hommage plus général aux infirmières de guerre dont le rôle fut essentiel et déterminant dans l'issue du conflit.

Infos pratiques : 62 rue Desnouettes, 75015 Paris

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Paris célèbre le centenaire de l'Armistice

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Le 11 novembre 1918, la signature de l'Armistice acte la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale et la défaite des Allemands. Pour célébrer ce centenaire et " rendre hommage à nos poilus ", un programme ponctué d'événements qui s'adressent autant aux passionnés qu'aux curieux et aux rêveurs, se déroulera à Paris jusqu'à la fin de l'année.

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Notes from class 08/11

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Their pain has long gone. No odor from the gas warfare they endured remains. There are no echoes of the thump of artillery, no reverberation of the clash of arms, no sound of fusillades or the rat-a-tat of the machine guns. The trenches have long been filled; the entanglements of harsh wire gone, too. All is quiet on the Western Front.

But the memory remains of the industrial slaughter that was World War I. It echoes for later generations in fading black-and-white photographs, letters home stained with foxing and the poems of war poets like Wilfred Owen. And it echoes in the thoughts of the few surviving sons and daughters, frail and aged themselves, of the fathers who never came home.

And this week in the days leading up to November 11, the centenary of the end of World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in the history of the human race, testimonies to the carnage are being pored over, discussed and debated.

On Sunday, hundreds of mourners turned up in the French village of Ors - some from as far away as the United States and New Zealand - to retrace the fateful last steps of Wilfred Owen, who died a week before Armistice Day along with hundreds of his fellows trying to cross a canal. They heard the plaintive notes of the Last Post being played on a bugle Owen retrieved from the battlefield.

His last letter home, written while he and his men rested before battle, included this final line: "You could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me."

How best to commemorate the "band of friends"? Was it so sweet and fitting to die for one's country in World War I? Should the victors of the war strike triumphant tones or downplay military victory in order to avoid offending vanquished European neighbors who are now allies?

Some 80 leaders from around the world, including U.S. President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, will fly into France this week to attend remembrance events marking a century since the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The culmination of the commemorations in France will come with a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Monday.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been keen to avoid any triumphalism. The tone of Macron's speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will be respectful of the millions, regardless of nationality, who died in the four-year conflict, say his officials.

That order has sparked disgruntlement from some military veterans, including Michel Goya, a historian and former colonel, who accused Macron of "insulting the soldiers of 1918." Military historian Bénédicte Chéron told France's French Le Figaro newspaper recently that Macron and his ministers misunderstand "the continuity between the engagement of 1914-18 soldiers, and that of soldiers today."

Nearly 37 million soldiers and civilians are estimated to have been killed in World War I and Macron's aides say that many people view the 1914-1918 war as an unnecessary slaughter rather than a victory that should be celebrated with too much military pomp. Many in France and across Europe seem to agree with him.

They include veterans like retired British general Richard Dannatt. "Triumphalism, victory, those sort of notions are inappropriate.There is no need for jingoistic reaction at all." Britain will also mark the centenary with a week of commemorations, small and large. including a display of 10,000 flames illuminating the moat at the Tower of London and a remembrance at Westminster Abbey.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has also struck a note of reconciliation in the run-up to the centenary. "The killing fields of France and Belgium are scarred by the horrors of war, but the strength and closeness of our relationship today is a testament to the journey our countries have traveled together," she said last week.

How to remember the Great War and its war dead have long been issues, going back even to the conflict itself and its immediate aftermath. The issues have been debated heatedly not only in France but the allied countries of Britain, Belgium, Italy and Russia as well as in the vanquished nations of Germany and Austria.

The sheer scale of the casualties meant that hardly a European household was left untouched by the war. The industrial nature of the killing, which saw young men scythed down by machine guns and obliterated by artillery barrages as well as being poisoned by clouds of noxious fumes, prompted rising despair and, as more men were hurled into the killing machine, accusations of massive miscalculation by national leaders and the senselessness of the fighting mounted.

As the war unfolded in all its horror, many wondered why they had been thrust into such a consuming, barbaric conflict by an assassination in a far-flung country in the Balkans. They questioned what the war was about. For some it was a case of imperial rivalry that had got out of hand. Others countered that right or wrong, one had to defend one's country.

In Russia, World War I triggered the Bolshevik revolution. In other European countries fury over the carnage fueled the post-war rise of organized labor and parties of the far right and far left. The memory of the war was one of the prompts for Oxford University's influential debating Union to approve the famous 1933 motion "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."

And there were disputes about the plans for formal remembrance of the conflict. In Britain, the authorities decided that there should be "equality of remembrance," a revolutionary idea, and that all the men should be buried where they fell in war cemeteries on the battlefields of France and Belgium, ordinary soldiers laid to rest beside officers. Other nations followed suit.

Many applauded the idea. But many grief-stricken wives, inconsolable in their bereavement, "disagreed with the decision not to repatriate," says historian Alison Fell. They wanted their husbands to be buried near to them in their local cemeteries at home and they organized a letter-writing campaign.

They pointed to the offer by the U.S. government to bereaved Americans to bear the costs of shipping bodies back to America, if families so wished. More than 300,000 of France's dead were returned to their families. In Britain the government ignored repatriation demands.

One British widow wrote that perhaps it is not everyone's wish to have their dead husbands repatriated, she noted, but I do. She wrote: "The country took him and the country should bring him back."

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голос америки

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Europe Remembers One of Deadliest Conflicts in Human History

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How best to commemorate the fallen from the Great War? Was it so sweet and fitting to die for one's country?

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Audio Document 4

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BBC Radio 4 - Voices of the First World War

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Audio document 5

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BBC Radio 4 - Voices of the First World War

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World War One. Interactive and Personal.