Transcribing the Past

   Link https://youtu.be/UC9PEkbC6Y8 Hello and welcome to the Witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. And today using recordings from the BCC archive we go back 100 years to November 1918, when in the final weeks of World War One Germany was on the point of collapse and facing revolution. Archival Witness One: The whole life of the country was becoming grimmer, it was getting very difficult. The war was lasting too long and Germany didn’t have much chance of winning it because conditions within the country were getting so very difficult and there was a general feeling that the war as a whole had to stop. This feeling was spreading very fast among the civilian population and I saw that the war would have to end soon. That was the feeling shared by most of the soldiers I met in those days, they were fed up with the whole thing and they wanted to go home badly. Alex Last: After four years of war by late 1918 the situation in G...

  Link https://youtu.be/-XrU9Pdbc54 The French Army Mutiny Of 1917 Transcript Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. And as part of our centenary series on the First World War, using archived recordings we go back to the spring of 1917 when the French army was rocked by mutiny. Edward Spears: The thing that astonishes me is that the French army didn’t mutiny a long time before 1917. They had had absolutely appalling losses, due largely you know to mistakes and to mistaken theories. Alex Last: General Edward Louis Spears was in 1917 the head of the British military mission to the French Government. Edward Spears: At the beginning of the war in August 1914 I myself had seen the French army attacking German positions and machine guns with bands playing and officers in white gloves leading them in. they went on suffering terrible losses, still they endured displaying qualities of stoicism and stay...