In the second part of his landmark series on how the First World War affected the lives of the British people, Jeremy Paxman describes the crisis facing the country as it becomes clear it is fatally unprepared to fight a modern industrial war.

Now the whole population is enlisted to turn the country into a war machine: women fill the factories to make bombs and bullets, men are forced to fight at the Front, conscientious objectors are threatened with the firing squad, and striking shipbuilders with jail. Even the beer is watered down on government orders.

Britain is having to learn to do as it is told.

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.