The Great War - 1914-1918

The great-grandson of a Grimsby trawler captain who left 16 Germans to die on a crashed Zeppelin has met a relative of one of those who perished.

Pat Thompson wanted to meet Emile Specht, whose uncle Heinrich drowned in the North Sea in 1916.

Mr Thompson's grandfather William Martin found the airship while fishing off the coast of Grimsby, with the Germans still alive and clinging to the wreckage.

He ordered his trawler to turn away rather than save the men, who all died.

100 years ago, the horror ended on the battlefields of the First World War. The cinema has captured these memories — in famous feature films and in a documentary sensation.
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Now, advanced digital technology makes it possible to perfectly colorize old black-and-white footage and set it to sound. In this vein, a documentary film was recently premiered at the London Film Festival, which viewers saw as a sensation: They Shall Not Grow Old by Peter Jackson.
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To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the war on Nov. 11, various film distributors are also offering premium DVD editions of classic films, such as these three cinematic masterpieces.

Westfront 1918 (1930)

Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Westfront 1918 is often compared to the even more famous All Quiet on the Western Front, which was first screened in cinemas at about the same time. Both are undoubtedly anti-war films, but Pabst's film is, according to contemporary and later critics, the more committed film to this end. In Westfront 1918, one of the first German talkies, the director depicts the experiences of four German soldiers at the front in the last year of war and shows episodes from their home leave.

Pabst used a very realistic narrative style. In contrast to many popular films of the time glorifying the war, Westfront 1918 shows the war in all its brutal facets — death, injury, and madness. "The war film Westfront 1918 rejects the most furtive transfiguration of war as a place of human probation," the film historian Enno Patalas said of Pabst's ruthless work.

The film was banned in 1933; the Nazis had clearly recognized the director's cinematic pacifism.

Kameradschaft (1931)

In 1931, Pabst shot Kameradschaft (Comradeship). Even though the plot of the film is not set during the First World War, it is still a record of the post-war period. Kameradschaft depicts the fatal late consequences of combative conflict and the deep mistrust between the French and the Germans after 1918.

Over a decade after the end of the war, a devastating mining accident occurs in France near the German border. The film shows how German miners decide on a selfless rescue operation, which helps saves the lives of many French miners. French and Germans thus shake hands.

A special feature of Kameradschaft is that the film was shot in two languages, with the Germans and the French speaking their own language. There was no synchronization of the respective foreign languages, and subtitles were also omitted.

"Several scenes and twists in the plot live precisely from the fact that misunderstandings arise through the lack of a common language," said Martin Koerber of Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen (German Cinemathek – Museum for Film and Television). Koerber was jointly responsible for the restoration of the film. Even today, the mistrust can be perceived when viewing the film, but also the attempts to overcome the lack of understanding.

Paths of Glory (1957)

A quarter of a century later, one of the most famous anti-war films in cinema history, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, was also an anti-class film — one that harshly and ruthlessly showed that war is also a war between different social classes, that of ordinary soldiers and officers.

Kubrick focused on the trench warfare between Germans and French in his film, exploring like Pabst in Kameradschaft the "emotional solidarity across national borders," as write film scholars Bodo Traber and Hansjörg Edling in Filmgenre: Kriegsfilm (Film Genre: Anti-War Films). Here, however, it is exclusively the French side that comes into the picture.
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If you think the First World War began senselessly, consider how it ended.

After four harrowing years, the message trickled in via Morse code on the morning of Nov. 10, 1918 at a telegraph office in North Sydney, N.S.

And before anyone else in North America knew, people in the small Cape Breton town had already begun to celebrate the joyous news direct from the War Office in London: an armistice would be signed the next day.

There had never been a known leak from the Western Union telegraph office on Court Street before that day, but this news was simply "too good to keep quiet," said Richard Rose, chair of the Nov. 10 commemoration committee with the North Sydney Historical Society.

"As you might guess, they were overjoyed, so that word very quickly leaked into the community and the party was on," he said.

"From what we can find in our research, it was just pandemonium​. People came out banging pots and pans."


Richard Rose, chair of the Nov. 10 commemoration committee with the North Sydney Historical Society, says celebrations broke out soon after the local Western Union telegraph office received word of an armistice. (Yvonne LeBlanc-Smith/CBC)
More than 300 U.S. personnel who were in North Sydney joined off-duty military personnel in a spontaneous parade around the town as part of a celebration that lasted all day.

In the evening, bonfires were lit and the festivities continued. Bars that would normally be closed on Sunday were opened, but they had to close early when they ran out of liquor.

"So effectively, by the time the rest of North America found out about the war being over, North Sydney was nursing a giant hangover," said Rose.

The telegrapher that received the momentous message was Annie Butler Smith.

The key she used that day is part of a display at the North Sydney Historical Museum.

"Of the more than 600 Western Union telegraph centres around the world, North Sydney was by far the busiest," said Rose.

"In 1913, before the war started, that centre processed over 30,000 messages a day."

A new building opened near the beginning of the war in December 1914, employing 325 people. Soon, the number of messages doubled or even tripled as all messages between North America and Western Europe came through North Sydney.

This Saturday, 100 years after that Morse code message, North Sydney will mark the end of the First World War and the town's unique place in history.

There will be a re-enactment of the receipt of the message starting at 9:30 a.m., followed by a parade, music and readings. The day will be capped with a bonfire at the Ballast Grounds at 6 p.m.