On New Year's Day 1914, a respected weekly literary publication carried a long article penned by an author referred to only as A Rifleman. Entitled "Letters on War" and published in The New Age, an influential radical magazine in Britain, the three-page piece argued forcefully in favour of military conflict.
Success in war, argued the writer, "carries with it the potentiality of the highest form of economic development … [and] the highest degree of physical and moral development". The armed strength of nations was, the article stated, "the highest expression of that physical force which is the basis of all our moral codes".
Seven months after the article was published, the first world war erupted. It was not, as A Rifleman had hoped, an opportunity for physical and moral development, but a conflict of unparalleled destruction. By the time the armistice was signed near the end of 1918, 10 million men had lost their lives on the battlefield, with another 20 million wounded. HG Wells called it "the war to end war" – a grim optimism that was to prove unfounded
Full article: theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/04/january-1914-no-hint-war
As the Times Literary Supplement notes, the political situation in 1914 was extremely complicated, and it must have seemed extremely unlikely up until the last minute that England would go to war with Germany, whose ruler was after all a cousin of England's own King George. That it did happen was as much a failure of the old political system as it was an indictment of German militarism.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1339584.ece
Meanwhile, Tory education secretary Michael Gove would like us all to believe that the Somme was an entirely right and well organised undertaking, and anyone who says otherwise is just a defeatnik lefty who was probably showed that unpatriotic scoundrel Blackadder in school:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/gove-history-first-world-war
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| Model T Ford: new for 1914. |
