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Britain's Great War: At the eleventh hour - guide & clips

Updated Sunday, 23 July 2017
Jeremy Paxman concludes the series by describing how the country came to the very brink of defeat.

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Jeremy Paxman stands outside 10 Downing Street Jeremy Paxman describes how the country came to the very brink of defeat in the last year of the war.

Grieving parents held seances to contact their dead sons, surgeons battled to rebuild the faces of the wounded, and a maverick MP tried to pin the blame for the crisis on a conspiracy of sexual deviants in government.

And then, dramatically, the tide of battle turned, and exhausted Britons found themselves weeping for joy as the armistice was signed.

The nation began to count the cost of four years of war, revealing some surprising winners as well as losers.

The Great War from the OU & The BBC

This episode was first broadcast on Monday February 17, 2014 on BBC One. For more information, and a link to watch again on the iPlayer where available, visit the BBC website.

 

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