All episodes

On June 28, 1914, the murder of an obscure Austrian-Hungarian archduke in Sarajevo triggers the most terrible conflict that the world has known. Germany invades Belgium, and in September is already at the gates of Paris. Will she win the war so quickly?

The French poilus stop in extremis the German advance at the Battle of the Marne. On the eastern front, the Germans stopped the Russians at Tannenberg. In France, after numerous murderous assaults, the belligerents bury themselves in the trenches: the soldiers of the French and British colonies come to lend a helping hand to their colonizers and the war becomes world.

1916. The war rages in Europe and extends from the trenches of France to the sands of the East, passing by the mountains of Italy or the Balkans. The conflict became industrial and millions of shells fell on the battlefields: Verdun and the Somme are the most deadly examples. How to stop this madness ?

1917. People are fed up with war. In the rear the revolts rumble, like that which overthrows the Tsar in Russia; On the front the mutinies multiplied, like that of Chemin des Dames in France. In the Atlantic, the ravages of German submarines will drag Americans into the war. In Belgium, it is the hecatomb of the battle of Passchendaele for thousands of soldiers of the British Empire.

The Allies seem lost. The Italians are defeated at Caporetto, and Russia now Bolshevik emerges from the war. But the American reinforcements were decisive, and the victory finally came to the Allies: they were, however, incapable of negotiating an honorable peace, and the Treaty of Versailles carried the seeds of the Second World War.