‘Great War’ Explores Seeds Of Today’s Chaos Documentary Takes In-Depth Look At World War I

Near the 20th century’s end, with Russia in turmoil, Sarajevo in ruins and thousands of Gulf War veterans suffering the effects of chemical weapons, a documentary about World War I could not be more timely.

The first global conflict of the 20th century ignited in Sarajevo. It introduced the horrors of chemical warfare, the mass aerial bombardment of civilians and the first systematic genocide, the annihilation of the Armenians by the Turkish government.

“The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century,” premiering nationwide on PBS stations Sunday (8 p.m. on KSPS in Spokane, KCDT in Coeur d’Alene and KUID in Moscow) and continuing the next three nights, examines this horrifying historical pageant with the kind of depth and sweep that Ken Burns applied to his masterly examination of the Civil War.

Flowing from the patriotic fever that gripped Russia, Germany, Britain and France, World War I consumed 9 million lives from five continents and toppled the crowned heads of Europe, except for Britain’s.

The 1914-1918 conflict stopped without really ending, paving the way for the terrors of World War II, the Holocaust and the Cold War.

And yet, World War I has been so overshadowed by the Second World War that it’s been 30 years since the airing of a major documentary about the conflict once called “the war to end all wars.”

“The Great War” takes viewers to the bleak landscapes of “no man’s land,” where young soldiers huddled in the trenches, waiting in dread their turn to go “over the top.”

There were 52,000 American dead from that distant war - nearly as many killed during about eight months of combat as there were in as many years in Vietnam.

British, French, German and Russian dead numbered in the millions, along with the victims of other countries and colonies. Twenty thousand British troops were killed in one day’s fighting in the Somme offensive. Those who survived became known as “The Lost Generation.”

Produced by Blaine Baggett of KCET and historian Jay Winter, “The Great War” is wrought with the pathos and dread of those who experienced the war firsthand. Through their letters, their memoirs, their poetry, the voices of the dead return to life.

The common soldiers sharing the misery of the trenches get their due, even reverence. But the heartbreak and struggle of women isn’t overlooked.

Narration includes the poignant verse of life amid the mud and blood from poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the accounts of women who lost their men, women who nursed torn bodies and souls, women who lost their youth in munitions factories.

“There is a moral purpose to doing a series like this,” Winter said. “It’s to identify the extent to which the chaos of the world hasn’t come out of thin air, but instead comes directly from the events of our parents’ and grandparents’ lives.”

For Winter, a life’s study of World War I became a calling he was guided to by the death of 16 relatives at Auschwitz. He felt driven to discover the seeds of the Holocaust that were planted in the earlier conflict.

“The important thing to understand about the war is that it was a common disaster,” Winter said.

The cast of narrators includes Ralph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, Yaphet Kotto, Martin Landau, Jane Leeves and Natasha Richardson.