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Program Title
Credits Executive Producer: Jane Tranter, Hilary Salmon, Rebecca Eaton Producer: Gareth Neame, Nigel McCrery Director: Julian Jarrold Intro ALL THE KING'S MEN/Intro by Russell Baker There is something both terrible and touching about the innocence with which the British marched off to the Great War in 1914. Theirs was the last generation to see war as a chance for gallant lads to find glory in battle. Well, World War One was the curtain-raiser on what was to be a century of incredibly barbaric warfare, and what these gallant lads found instead of glory was human slaughter on an industrial scale. Tonight's story is based on an extraordinary event that took place in 1915 when patriotic enthusiasm for the war was still high. On a foggy day during the Dardenelles campaign in Turkey, an entire company of men was said to have simply disappeared. Most of them had worked in the King's service at Sandringham, one of the huge residential estates belonging to members of the Royal Family. You'll see two of them tonight. One is King George the Fifth, who reigned throughout the first World War and well into the 1930s. The other is his mother, Queen Alexandra, the widow of Edward the Seventh. Alexandra is famous for her patience with her husband's legendary philandering. She's said to have invited his favorite mistress to his bedside as he lay dying. Alexandra is played by one of the great stars of the British theater, Maggie Smith. Now, in one installment, All the King's Men. Extro ALL THE KING'S MEN/Extro by Russell Baker Young men of the British ruling class flung themselves into the first World War with patriotic fervor and an eagerness to prove themselves noble in combat. It was beautifully expressed in the poem we heard spoken tonight over a dead soldier's grave. "If I should die think only this of me, that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England…" Those lines spoke the mood of a whole generation of bright young men who saw the war as something in which death itself would be heroic: They are by Rupert Brooke, himself a classic example of the ruling class's young men who went into war in 1914. Brooke was handsome, athletic, intellectual, charming, and witty. He joined the Navy and did, in fact, die in the war, not in a foreign field, but on a hospital ship at sea. Not of enemy fire, but of blood poisoning. The fleet in which he served was engaged in the same campaign in which the Sandringham men died. It is sometimes known as Gallipoli, sometimes as the Dardenelles campaign. Whatever the name, it was a colossal blunder, and the casualties were devastating. The Allies lost a quarter of a million men -- dead, wounded, or missing. The Turks lost some 300,000 men. Colossal blunders were frequent in World War One, and they destroyed a big part of the generation of 1914. The poets who survived sang songs far different from the heroic stanzas of Rupert Brooke. Siegfried Sassoon, one of the best, could now write with undisguised contempt for those who believed in the nobility of war: "You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye "Who cheer when soldier lads march by "Sneak home and pray you'll never know, "The hell where youth and laughter go." I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.
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