A season of Remembrance
Â鶹Éç Two: Timewatch - The Last Day Of World War One
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Michael Palin, traveller, comedian and amateur historian, presents Timewatch: The Last Day Of World War One.
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The film is a personal odyssey for Michael as he travels to the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium, armed with new research and photographs to tell the tragic stories of four men, British, French, Canadian and American, who died shortly before the fateful 11 o'clock ceasefire.
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He reveals the shocking fact that a further 11,000 troops became casualties in the hours after the Armistice had been signed.
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Michael also discovers the fate of his Great-Uncle Harry, who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
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Michael Palin said: "The First World War has been so firmly etched in my mind since my schooldays that this Timewatch programme seemed a quite natural thing to be involved with.
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"It may be a little different in tone from my usual offerings, but in a small way it was as important to me as anything I've ever done."
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Using newly discovered photographs and original research never before seen on television, contemporary film archive, newspapers and state-of-the-art graphics, Timewatch tells the explosive story of the final day of World War One - The Great War.
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At 05.10 on the morning of 11 November 1918, the Armistice between the Allied forces (essentially Britain, France and America) and Germany was signed in a railway carriage at Compiegne just outside Paris, but it would be a further six hours before the treaty would come into effect.
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Michael Palin travels to Europe and discovers the terrible truth that in those final six hours the killing continued.
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One historian estimates that more than 11,000 soldiers on all sides were killed, wounded or were missing on the final day of the war, a higher figure than D-Day.
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By the end of WW1 there were just two areas of fighting left, both of them on the Western Front.
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Around Mons in Belgium, the Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie was leading British and Canadian troops on that final day. Knowing the end was in sight, neither Britain's General Haig nor Currie wanted a bloodbath and, as a consequence, the deaths were not excessive.
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Further south near Verdun it was a very different story. American Generals continued sending men into action throughout the morning of 11 November right up to 11am, with hundreds of deaths and several thousand casualties.
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Michael travels to the battlefields of the Argonne where US troops were fighting and he finds the soil still full of guns, bullets and personal artefacts of the American doughboys.
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He handles the guns last dropped over 90 years earlier. He sees German trenches and bunkers hidden in remote woods and visits the US cemetery.
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Michael then travels north into France to see the area of the final set battle of WW1 where 2,000 British soldiers (including the war poet Wilfred Owen) lost their lives by the banks of the Sambre Canal.
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He travels on to Mons where the war ended for the British and Canadians and visits the graves and tells the story of the final soldiers to be killed in the war.
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Interview with Michael Palin
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How did you get involved with Timewatch and what is your interest in the First World War?
I was very pleased to be involved in the Timewatch programme on the last day of World War One.
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I've always been fascinated by the First World War. As a teenager Robert Graves's book, Goodbye To All That, affected me deeply, and I was also much moved by the war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, who so powerfully evoked that peculiar combination of pain, indignation and camaraderie that accompanied the most frightful slaughter.
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I had read much about the trenches but never visited them, and so this was a great opportunity to see the landscape over which the battles raged.
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The particular angle of this programme intrigued me. The story of how a war ends is as complex and confusing as the war itself, and to learn that attacks were being initiated and men were being sent to their deaths after it was officially declared to be over seems to mirror the wilful waste of life that characterised the war as a whole.
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How did making the programme affect you?
I found myself moved almost to tears in the cemeteries of Northern France and Flanders, where the long lines of white tablets stretch into the distance bearing the names of thousands upon thousands of those who died before their time.
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The cemeteries are so well-kept that, standing amongst the graves I felt as if the war had ended only yesterday.
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Ninety years on the extraordinary emotional closeness with those who died remains very powerful. Perhaps it's because there's hardly a family in Britain (and of course Germany and France) who didn't suffer some loss.
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In my own case it was Lance Corporal HWB Palin, my great-uncle Harry, killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
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I've never known much about him, but thanks to the skills of our research consultant Paul Reed, I now know where he died and how he died and for the first time in my life I saw his name on a wall commemorating those whose bodies were never found.
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I'm indebted to the makers of the programme, not just for teaching me so much about this awful war, but for tracing great-uncle Harry and letting me remember him.
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Did you learn anything else while making the programme?
Firstly, the fact that the dead were honoured and revered, whilst those who came home badly wounded were often seen as little more than an embarrassment. Also that the American troops suffered appalling losses in taking German positions when the war was effectively over.
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And I've stood, for the first time, at the grave of Wilfred Owen, the man who brought the horrors of war home to me so poignantly.
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The First World War has been so firmly etched in my mind since my schooldays that this programme seemed a quite natural thing to be involved with. It may be a little different in tone from my usual offerings, but in a small way it was as important to me as anything I've ever done.
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