World War I's unprecedented brutality and prolonged stalemate created profound psychological trauma among soldiers, leading to widespread shell shock and mutinies across European armies, while the war's devastating human cost and economic strain ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Russian Tsarist regime and the rise of revolutionary movements, demonstrating how the Great War fundamentally reshaped both military psychology and political landscapes across Europe.
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1914 - 1918: The Great War, Ep. 5 | Narrated by Dame Judi DenchAjouté :
[music] [music] [music] >> In 1917, [music] Siegfried Sassoon was in the south of England recovering from a bullet wound.
Auntie Evelyn's delphinium [music] spires were blue against the distant blue of the sky and the shadows [music] of Irish yews were lengthening across the lawn.
>> [music] >> Out in France, the convoys of wounded and gassed were being carried into the field hospitals.
>> [music] >> And up in the line, the slaughter went on because no one knew how to stop [music] it.
"Men are beginning to ask for what they are fighting." Dottrel had written in his last letter.
>> [music] >> Could I be blamed for [music] being one of those at home who were asking the same question?
As the year 1917 began, prospects for the allies were bleak.
The naval battle of Jutland had ended in stalemate.
Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, had been lost at sea.
On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was exhausted.
On the Western Front, the slaughter at the Somme and Verdun had taken its toll on the French and British armies.
Europe was in the grip of a freezing winter.
By now, nearly every family had seen a loved one die.
To continue the war or to give up, this was the universal preoccupation of 1917.
For individuals, for military units, and even for whole nations, the limits of endurance had been all but reached.
Every week, Wilfred Owen wrote home to his mother from the front.
January 4th, 1917.
>> [music] >> My own dear mother, since I set foot on Calais quays, I have not had dry feet.
We were let down [music] gently into the real thing, mud.
It has penetrated now [music] into that sanctuary, my sleeping bag, and that holy of holies, my pajamas.
I chose a servant for myself yesterday, not for his profile, nor yet his clean hands, but for his excellence [music] in bayonet work.
I censored hundreds of letters yesterday, and the hope [music] of peace was in everyone.
Wilfred Owen's letters are interesting because he was literally genius and because they reveal the mind of the British officer, a young man who'd been raised on the classical literature of war.
Uh when Owen came to the Western Front, of course, he discovered that you could show fortitude and endurance, but there was wasn't battle in the Greek sense where men went forward weapon in hand and clashed with the enemy. It wasn't like that at all.
Um and so in a way Owen, like so many of the young British officers, was an innocent at war.
Oh, meet it is and passing sweet to live in [music] peace with others, but sweeter still and far more meet to die in war for brothers.
Commissioned a second lieutenant, [music] Owen joined the second Manchester Regiment on the Somme.
>> [music] >> It was the worst winter in memory.
My own dear mother, I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days.
I have not been at the front.
I have been in front of it.
I held [music] an advanced post in the middle of no man's land.
The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn't.
Those 50 hours were the agony [music] of my happy life.
I nearly broke down and let myself drown [music] in the water that was slowly rising over my knees.
I suppose I can endure cold and fatigue and face-to-face [music] death as well as another.
>> [music] >> But extra for me, there is the universal pervasion of ugliness, the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dugouts.
In poetry, [music] we call them glorious, but to sit with them all day, all night, and [music] a week later to come back and find them still sitting there in motionless groups, that is what saps the [music] soldierly spirit.
Many of the soldiers >> [music] >> had to cope with images that wouldn't go away.
Many of these parts of human bodies were actually used to shore up the trench system itself. Some soldiers found it humorous uh to hang their water canteens on a protruding arm or a protruding leg.
These were [music] not people who were disrespectful of the dead. They were living with the dead.
One can imagine the possibilities of becoming numb [music] to such images, but those who couldn't turn off their feelings internalized them, brought them [music] home with them, lived with them, dreamt about them, and went mad because of them.
>> [music] >> Wilfred Owen was having to learn how to live with the dead.
He spent days trapped near the dismembered body of a friend.
When finally relieved, he tried to make sense of it all in a letter home to his sister.
My very dear sister, you must not entertain the least concern about me.
You know, it was not the Germans that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old [ __ ] Robin, as we used to call [music] Second Lieutenant Croker, who lay not only nearby, but [music] in various places around and about, if you understand.
On the 6th of June, 1917, Owen was sent home. He had lasted only 4 months. The diagnosis, shell shock.
Physicians of the time described shell shock as the nervous system's withdrawal from an intolerable reality.
During the war, doctors used training films to show the effects of mechanized warfare.
These films have been buried in hospital archives for almost 80 years.
This man had been forced to bayonet an enemy in the face.
This soldier responded to nothing except the word bomb.
This French soldier couldn't even look at an officer's hat.
It was part of their therapy to film their road to their own recovery.
There is some extraordinary material about the way in which soldiers who were incapable of acting were taught first to sew, [music] then to weave, then to farm, then to carry a gun, and then to shoot it again.
As if they're moving from a kind of feminine recuperation to masculine combat status, and then they can go to the to the men's war.
Electric shock treatment was given to thousands of shell-shocked victims.
For training purposes, French physicians filmed their colleagues applying electrodes to the spines of shell-shocked men who had trouble walking.
This was an entirely new kind of illness, one that left doctors grasping for solutions.
>> [music] >> Far from the Western Front, [music] doctors started to experiment with another new treatment for shell shock.
Psychotherapy [music] is commonplace today.
It was an innovation in 1917.
>> [music] >> My own dear mother, we left Netley on Monday [music] morning.
I woke up as we were rounding the coast by Dunbar.
The castle looked more than ever a hallucination with the morning sun behind it.
A taxi brought me [music] up here about 2 and 1/2 miles from the town.
There's nothing very attractive about the place.
It is far too full of officers, some of whom I know.
>> [music] >> Wilfred Owen had been sent to [music] Craiglockhart on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
In this former sanatorium, doctors attempted the emotional repair of British officers.
It was here that Freud's pioneering work in psychotherapy was put into practice in Britain for the first time.
Officers called it the talking cure.
For Owen, it gradually began to [music] take effect.
My dearest mother, last night I had a consultation [music] with Dr. Brock from 11:00 till midnight.
I still have disastrous dreams, but they are taking on a more civilian character.
Motor accidents [music] and so on.
Nothing more to tell, I think.
Ever your own, Wilfred.
Whilst [music] at Craiglockhart, Owen first encountered a book of verse written at the front by one of Britain's most controversial soldiers.
I have just been reading Siegfried Sassoon and I'm feeling at a very high pitch of emotion. Nothing like his trench [music] life sketches has ever been written or ever will be written.
Shakespeare reads vapid after these.
It's bad to think of war when thoughts [music] you've got all day come back to scare you. And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad unless they've lost control [music] of ugly thoughts that drive them out to jabber among the trees.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights, their dreams that drip with murder, and they'll be proud of glorious war that shattered all their pride.
Siegfried Sassoon had suffered many close encounters with death while serving at the front.
But the war hit him hardest when his younger brother was killed at Gallipoli in 1915.
His family never recovered from the shock.
>> [music] >> Sassoon's friend, Robert Graves, witnessed [music] the depth of the family's grief when he visited the Sassoon home.
Later he would recall what it was like to stay in the dead brother's room.
The mother kept the bedroom exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, the linen always freshly laundered, flowers and cigarettes [music] by the bedside.
The Sassoons were not alone in their grief.
All over Europe, mourning families were finding it hard to let go of their dead.
Many began [music] turning to the occult.
The first night I spent there, Sassoon and I sat up talking about the war until after 12:00.
>> [music] >> The talk had excited me, and though I managed to fall asleep an hour later, I was continually wakened by sudden rapping noises, which I tried to disregard, but which grew louder [music] and louder.
They seemed to come from everywhere.
>> [music] >> Soon, sleep left me, and I lay in a cold sweat.
>> [music] >> At nearly 3:00, I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door.
In the passage, I collided with the mother, who, to my surprise, [music] was fully dressed.
"It's nothing," she said.
"I'm so sorry you've been disturbed."
>> [music] >> There were thousands of mothers like her getting in touch with their dead sons [music] by various spiritualistic means.
In the morning, I told my friend, "I'm leaving this place. It's worse than France."
Siegfried Sassoon followed Graves back to [music] the Western Front and to some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
His bravery at the Somme [music] in 1916 earned him the Military Cross for gallantry and the nickname Mad Jack.
While I was running, I pulled the safety pin out of a Mills bomb. My right hand being loaded, I did the same for the left. Just before I arrived at the top, I threw my two bombs.
Quite unexpectedly, [music] I found myself looking down into a trench with a great many Germans in it.
Fortunately for me, they were already retreating.
It had not occurred to them that they were being attacked by a single fool.
In April 1917, Sassoon was hit in the shoulder by a sniper's bullet while leading an attack on Arras.
Even after his physical wound had begun to heal, it was apparent that Sassoon was still not well.
Like his mother, the dead were visiting him at night.
When the lights are out and the ward is half shadow and half glowing firelight, then the horrors come creeping [music] across the floor.
A livid, grinning face with bristly mustache hears at me over the edge of my bed, the hands clutching [music] at my sheets.
There is a hole in his jaw, and the blood spreads across his face like [music] the ink spilled on blotting paper.
I wish I could sleep.
Sassoon had had enough.
On July the 31st, 1917, [music] he published an open letter to his commanding officer in The Times.
It caused a sensation.
>> [music] >> I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party [music] to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
The army had a problem. What to do with a clearly decorated, brave, honorable man who reached a conclusion that the war was dishonorable?
What will they do with him?
The answer was very subtle.
It was to claim that anyone who found that the war was mad must be mad himself.
On August the 23rd, 1917, Sassoon was committed to Craiglockhart.
Throughout his time at Craiglockhart, Siegfried Sassoon was in touch with uh various close friends of his at the front. He doesn't seem to have been blamed at all by them for the protest, and indeed many of them supported what he said.
Here, Sassoon met Wilfred Owen.
The two poets became friends and spent hours analyzing each other's work.
Between them, they would produce [music] some of the most important war literature of the 20th century.
I am banished [music] from the patient men who fight.
They smoke my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, they trudged away [music] from life's broad wheels of light.
Their wrongs were mine, and ever in my sight [music] they went raid in honor.
But they died, not one by one, [music] and mutinous I cried to those who sent them out into the night.
The poems Siegfried Sassoon produced at Craiglockhart are among the very best that he ever wrote, >> [music] >> and the most bitter. He did feel very deeply for the men at the front. He knew his protest had been absolutely ineffectual, and in the end, I think it was suggested to him very subtly that in continuing to stay at Craiglockhart, there was an element of running away.
And for a man of Sassoon's pride and courage, that thought was absolutely intolerable.
After 3 months of treatment, [music] Sassoon returned to the front, not for the sake of his country, but for the men he had left behind.
Love drove me to rebel, love drives me back [music] to grope with them through hell, and in their tortured eyes, I stand forgiven.
In March 1917, the German army on the Western Front drew back to a stronger position.
The Hindenburg Line was an enormously deep, thick belt of wire and entrenchments, which uh was the strongest position either the British or the French had seen on the Western Front. And it meant that uh the war now would take longer to finish. The German army on the Western Front retreated to the Hindenburg Line partly to shorten their line, which meant that they would have more men available, and partly to retreat to a stronger position.
>> [music] >> With no end to the conflict in sight, a rebellion took place in the French ranks that could [music] have cost the allies the entire war.
What a sorry scene.
Seven straight days of insomnia, fatigue, thirst, and sheer agony have transformed these healthy young men, these proud, disciplined companies, into a ragged band of laggards.
Corporal Louis Barthas was one of the survivors of Verdun, where France had suffered almost half a million casualties.
The experience led him to see himself as fighting two wars, one against Germany, the other against his own officers.
Louis Barthas wrote a diary during the war, and it's an exceptional document because Louis Barthas [music] was a socialist and a pacifist from the beginning to of the war to the end of the conflict.
And in this diary, he tried to to keep some parcels of humanity in the brutality of the war.
Barthas cared little for promotion.
He wanted only one thing, the survival of his unit, which the year before had fought alongside British troops on the Somme.
In one night, more cannon shells were fired than in any of Napoleon's campaigns.
These men, exhausted, poorly fed, stuck in the muddy trenches, took the order to attack grumbling to themselves.
Not everybody can be a hero.
One man determined to be a hero was Robert Nivelle, the new commander of the French forces.
Dashing, self-assured, and vain, Nivelle promised new tactics to break out of the trenches and win the war.
The plan was to break through German lines and join a British thrust southeast of Arras.
Nivelle succeeded in convincing uh governments, politicians, and generals alike about his ability to break through the German front. And for this reason, there was a real optimism at the end of '16, beginning of '17, in the French army and in the French opinion about uh the uh French army's ability uh in breaking through uh this front.
To guarantee his victory, Nivelle embarked on a massive buildup of arms that amazed even battle-hardened soldiers.
He insisted that violence, brutality, and speed should characterize the offensive. The greater the numbers, the greater the victory.
The aim, total success within 24 to 48 hours.
Many were caught up in Nivelle's bravado, but not Louis Barthas.
We had read to us an order of the day from the great [music] executioner, General Nivelle, saying amongst other absurdities that the hour of sacrifice has arrived.
Well, no one was enthused by this [music] lecture of patriotic gibberish.
On April the 16th, Nivelle's forces massed on the fields of Chemin des Dames.
Their aim was to pierce the German lines near the city of Soissons.
Here were gathered 700,000 French soldiers, and on the ridge above them, 600,000 Germans.
As morning broke, the French soldiers went over the top hoping this would be the decisive battle of the war.
The plan called for advancing 6 miles by sundown.
The troops had moved only 600 yards.
Ignoring his promise to stop [music] the offensive if not successful within 2 days, Nivelle pushed ahead for 10.
200,000 men [music] were killed or wounded, and still no breakthrough.
>> [music] >> After a few hours, [music] that was the beginning of of the offensive, uh soldiers considered that uh the offensive was a [music] failure.
It was perfectly clear to them that it was a failure.
>> [music] [music] >> By now, the war had claimed a million and a half French soldiers, one casualty for every minute of the war.
The survivors had reached breaking point.
Soldiers going back into the lines began bleating, pretending to be sheep being led to slaughter.
2 weeks after the offensive, the only full-scale mutiny on the Western Front broke out.
At first, groups of men, >> [music] >> then entire units, refused to re-enter the trenches.
There were very emotional scenes between the officers and the men. I I don't mean that it was grand opera, um but it was charged with emotion on both sides. For the officers, because their worst fears, nightmares, had come true, that their men wouldn't obey them. That's what every officer fears most.
Our captain arrived on the scene with a police escort.
He tried to speak, but his first words were drowned out by the crowd.
Seething with rage, but powerless, he ordered an immediate roll call.
The several hundred soldiers crowded around and mocked these orders. [music] For an hour, they hurled abuse at him.
For emphasis, several shots were fired into the air.
More units began refusing to return to the front lines.
Louis Bartas's regiment began to discuss [music] election of new officers.
To my amazement, they put my name forward as a replacement for the colonel.
Imagine, me, an obscure peasant, commander of the 296th regiment.
It was beyond belief.
Naturally, I refused, since I had no [music] wish to be tied to an execution post.
Nivelle [music] was powerless to stop the mutinies.
If his soldiers would not fight, the Germans would overrun the country and win the war.
Fortunately for France, it was not that kind of mutiny.
For the men, it was the emotion of divided loyalty, because they were loyal to their officers, who who had shared their sufferings, and they were loyal to their country, but they wouldn't couldn't bring themselves to attack any longer. They said that there was no point. That they'd got nowhere. That too many of them had been killed for no purpose, and so they would defend their country. They would defend the trenches that they were in, but they wouldn't attack.
Half of the French army took part in the mutiny.
The Germans never found out.
The French soldiers never fraternized with German soldiers. The mutinies were in fact a sort of general strike. And during this strike, soldiers tried to negotiate a new balance of power between generals and themselves, a balance of power more favorable to their own expectations. In this way, soldiers were not soldiers anymore. They were citizens.
Nivelle was replaced by Philippe [music] Pétain.
Leave arrangements and living conditions began to improve, and the protests slowly faded away.
Of the half a million mutineers, [music] 49 were shot.
Pétain stopped the assaults against the German lines.
He would wait for [music] tanks and the Americans.
>> [music] [music] [music] >> Isolated individuals, military units, entire nations.
Mutiny expanded as the war expanded.
In Russia, not only an army, but an entire [music] nation rebelled.
After 3 [music] years of bloodshed, no country had suffered more than Russia.
Facing stalemate on the Western Front, Germany had aimed for a breakthrough on the Eastern Front by shattering the will of the Russians to carry on the war.
Nearly 2 million Russian soldiers had been killed.
One aspiring Russian soldier, a young woman, described the hardships.
The winter was severe, and life in the trenches unbearable.
Death was a welcome visitor.
There were many cases of men snowed under and frozen to death, but we were patient, like true children of Mother Russia.
Maria Bochkaryova, known as Yashka, left a detailed account of war and revolution on the Eastern Front.
The daughter of a former serf, she had petitioned the Tsar to allow her to join the army.
"Do you know what war is?" I asked myself.
"It's no woman's job.
Are you strong enough in body to shed blood and endure the privations?
Search your soul for an answer of truth and courage."
And I found strength enough in me to answer, "Yes."
By the winter of 1916, the Russian army had little more to give.
After a good start, the war was going badly.
Socialists and revolutionaries had many converts among the ranks.
Discontent was rising.
The spirit of insubordination was growing among the soldiers.
The men were weary, terribly weary of the war.
It was the third winter, and there was no end in sight.
Civilians were angry, too.
Relief from shortages of food and freezing conditions was becoming more important than victory on the battlefield.
The difficulties stemmed from the rise in the cost of food and the serious shortage of bread.
The government was held responsible, for it truly was responsible for bread shortage.
The killing at the front and the suffering at home had driven the Russian people to despair.
Demonstrations and strikes erupted, 169 in Petrograd in January alone.
But Sergei Mstislavsky, [music] army officer and socialist, wrote in his diary that what happened [music] next took everyone by surprise.
The revolution found us, like the foolish virgins in the gospel, fast asleep.
Political protests had always been contained by the Tsar's loyal troops, but not on February the 24th, 1917.
After 3 years of war, many soldiers, Mstislavsky among them, had socialist sympathies.
They shared the crowd's anger.
>> [music] >> Ordered to fire on civilians, they instead shot their officers and joined the people.
Army revolt transformed a bread riot into revolution.
Caps are thrown into the air.
Everywhere there are motor cars and crowds.
The arsenal has been taken.
They say that about 20,000 automatic pistols have been handed out.
>> [music] >> The state was overwhelmed. Police stations were [music] torched by crowds on the rampage.
Prisons were stormed, their inmates set [music] free.
Liberals and socialists seized their opportunity to take power.
Mstislavsky was among those defending Petrograd against the threat of loyal Tsarist troops.
Our machine guns have been hoisted onto the palace roof, but it is all for show, since they still don't work.
A huge crowd is reportedly gathering in front of the government alcohol house.
If they break in, the revolution will drown in a sea of vodka.
Those who receive orders do not fulfill them.
Those who act, act without orders.
And after all, could it have been otherwise during a revolution?
Within a week of the uprising, the Tsar had abdicated.
He handed over power to a provisional government of members of parliament and industrial leaders.
Yashka described how the news was received at the front.
"The miracle had happened.
Tsarism, which enslaved us and thrived on the blood and marrow of the toiler, had fallen.
There were tears of joy, embraces, dancing. It all seemed a dream, a wonderful dream."
On the home front, as the news spread, people surged into the streets.
>> [cheering] >> Dare I confess it?
I envied all of them to the point of pain.
All those happy people with shining crystal clear gazes who so sincerely believed it was all over.
As I was listening to another succession of orators barking the same sounds about liberty from the podium, suddenly the clear, quiet, and hard words of my wife came to my mind.
Over?
Oh, no. It can't be over.
Not enough blood has been shed.
Amidst the chaos, the provisional government met at the Winter Palace. [music] Crucially for the allies, they remained committed to throwing the German army off Russian soil.
In terms [music] of the provisional government's own view of things, it makes sense to carry on with the war.
And I think the provisional government thought that inspired by a a new kind of revolutionary efficiency, and with new revolutionary personnel, then the army would prove to be more efficient than the old tsarist army had been.
But many soldiers disagreed.
Revolution had led to confusion at the front.
Yashka described how inactivity [music] bred dangerous friendships.
"Come over here for a drink of tea," a voice from our trenches would address itself across no man's land [music] to the Germans.
And voices from there would respond, "Come over here for a drink of vodka."
"Why do you continue the war?" asked our men.
"We have overthrown the Tsar and we want peace, but your Kaiser insists on war.
Get rid of your Kaiser >> [music] >> and then both sides can go home."
Sobytiya revolyutsii, kotoryye podorvali [music] distsiplinu. The revolution undermined both discipline amongst the soldiers and the authority of those in charge, both in the civil and in the military units.
A pochemu v These events explain how in just a few months during the spring of 1917, the Russian army virtually ceased to be an army.
The provisional government tried a symbolic gesture.
If Russia's men would not continue to fight, Russia's women would.
A special women's battalion was created with Yashka in command.
There were nearly 2,000 signed pledges.
I marched the recruits to four barber shops where barbers closely cropped one girl's head after another.
As soon as one of them disobeyed an order, I quickly removed her uniform and let her go.
In July, a loyal remnant of 300 women were sent to the front.
They were to take part in a new and decisive offensive on the Austrian front in Galicia.
Victory here would convince the allies that the new Russian regime had to be supported.
Defeat >> [music] >> would mean disaster.
Yashka's battalion found the Russian army in retreat.
The colonel gave the signal, but the men on my right and to the left would not move.
The officers begged, implored their men to go forward.
We decided to advance in order to shame the men.
Some of my girls were killed outright.
Many were wounded.
The provisional government and its troops had lost to one enemy.
Now they [music] would face another challenge.
Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, was in exile in Switzerland when the revolution began.
With German help, he had returned to Russia.
By the late summer, the Russian people would tolerate war no longer.
The time was right to seize power with a promise of bread, peace, and land.
What we have to appreciate is that the longer the war went on, the more and more the simplicity of the message of the Bolsheviks, bread, peace, and land, the more attractive it became. And what the Bolsheviks did was simply wait.
Lenin liked to say the power fell into his hand the way in which a ripe fruit falls off a tree.
By autumn, discipline at the front was close to collapse.
The war was over on the Russian front, as was the authority of the provisional government.
In late October, the Bolsheviks took control.
All the strategic points of Petrograd fell into their hands.
>> [music] >> The last stand of the provisional government was at the Tsar's Winter Palace.
It was defended by a handful of soldiers and members of the women's battalion.
Sergei Mstislavsky helped plan the Bolshevik takeover.
The palace had then been cordoned off, and the battleship Aurora was already moored just beneath its windows.
It certainly wasn't within the power of the women's battalion to deflect the blow which was even now being aimed at the palace.
Communist propaganda would portray the storming of the Winter Palace as the climax of a vast historical movement.
The truth was otherwise.
The Bolshevik revolution was not a product of history, but of war.
Mirovaya voyna byla samoy glavnoy In my opinion, the Great War was the main cause of the revolution of 1917, of the February and October revolutions.
Yesli by ne bylo mirovoy voyny, mozhno predpolagat' Had the Great War not taken place, v 1917 we may suppose that there would have been no revolution in 1917.
Okolo togo.
Ne bylo by.
>> [music] >> Decrees began to flow from the new source of power.
The first was the decree of peace.
Yashka described her last moments at the front.
The disbanding began.
Every 10 or 15 minutes a girl was sent away.
In the evening, I made my way to be smuggled out.
So, when Lenin takes over, and it is after all just before the winter comes, the soldiers with their feet rotting from the endless mud, without much hope of anything happening, will say, "Well, now we can at last go home."
The Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Germans in December.
Three months later, they learned the price.
In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia lost over a million square miles of land and 62 million people.
The vast empire, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific [music] Ocean, whose support for Serbia and whose alliance with France had been one of the catalysts [music] of the war in 1914, was in turmoil and disarray.
The eastern arm of the allies was broken.
>> [music] >> The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled over 1/6 [music] of the world for over three centuries,
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