"Not everything has been said about the “war to end all wars”, about the
history of that immense treachery and infinite waste. Far from it.
Between 1914 and 1918 entire armies were submerged in unprecedented brutality
and a hitherto inconceivable eruption of suffering. World War I altered the nature of
war. It ended in a declaration of war against war and the determination to end it
once and for all.
In contrast to the prevalent notion ...
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"Not everything has been said about the “war to end all wars”, about the
history of that immense treachery and infinite waste. Far from it.
Between 1914 and 1918 entire armies were submerged in unprecedented brutality
and a hitherto inconceivable eruption of suffering. World War I altered the nature of
war. It ended in a declaration of war against war and the determination to end it
once and for all.
In contrast to the prevalent notion of the soldier as victim, what we will say and show
on the screen is new: the First World War continued due to general consent.
The first historians of the Great War neglected the soldier in favour of studying military
and diplomatic strategies. When a second generation of historians turned to life in
the trenches, the idea that such suffering must have been forced upon the soldiers
took on the allure of fact. The story of the war thereby became the story of the
soldier’s refusal: spontaneous truces and fraternisation, desertions, rebellions, the
Russian Revolution.
This vision of refusal was excessively exaggerated but nonetheless considered to be
« historically correct ». In the end, it distorted the truth. The soldiers and the public
both supported the war and believed in the absolute necessity of victory. This
support can be seen, for example, in the large numbers of volunteers that
maintained the armies of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Entire societies
threw themselves into what they considered to be a conflict between civilisation
and savagery. For this reason they became involved in the first modern massacre,
without the slightest idea of what awaited them.
Following the analysis of Annette Becker, one of the leading scholars in this new
historiographical approach, this documentary offers a new perspective on this
conflict whose extent, violence and character foreshadowed and gave rise to many
of the tragedies of the 20th century.
This film is international. A German or an Englishman can as easily recognize himself in
it as a Frenchman or a Belgian would. The human, social and military experience and
the culture of war were markedly of the same nature in each of the war-raging
countries, and the suffering equally shared. The film’s transversal treatment represents
them all."
Quoting the description from the Official Site
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