The Necessary War

On 5th October 1915,

my great-uncle, Lieutenant Aubrey Hastings,

of the 7th East Surrey Regiment,

was killed in France,

blown to pieces in his trench, during the Battle of Loos.

I grew up with his story, reading the unhappy letters that he wrote

amid the poppies of the battlefield,

along with those of a grandfather

and another great-uncle who survived.

But this is the first time I've visited the cemetery

at Fouquieres-les-Bethune where Aubrey is buried,

one of some 900,000 British Empire dead of the First World War.

Almost everyone in this country shares such links

with that catastrophe for our forefathers and for Europe.

It's a funny business,

looking down at the last resting place

of one of my own family, whom I never met,

who died in a struggle I've spent decades reading about.

Its horror is not in doubt.

But where I part company from what we might call

"the Blackadder take on history"

is to believe that it was also futile -

that it didn't matter which side won.

In the 21st century, the British people are deeply wedded to the idea

that the Second World War was our "good" war,

the First our "bad" one.

But what if we'd stayed out?

What if Germany had won?

In my opinion, the deaths of Aubrey Hastings

and hundred of thousands of his comrades were assuredly a great tragedy,

but they were not for nothing.

Many British people honour the men who fought and died

with a mixture of sorrow and a sense of waste...

..a belief that no cause could have justified so horrendous a sacrifice.

BUGLE PLAYS "Last Post"

But a hundred years after the outbreak,

it seems time to revisit the reasons we went to war in 1914.

I want to argue that, far from Britain having plunged

into a bloodbath we could have stayed out of,

our part in the First World War was tragically necessary.

Any exploration of why Britain had to go to war in 1914

must start on the continent of Europe.

The spark was ignited in the Balkans on 28th June,

when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb,

shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

heir to the Austrian throne.

The Empire's rulers immediately determined to exploit the outrage

to justify invading neighbouring Serbia,

where the murder weapons had come from.

But the Russians were Serbia's close allies,

and they made it plain they would fight to protect their fellow Slavs.

Through July 1914,

the great continental powers waded ever deeper into crisis.

But from the outset, the key player was Germany.

On 6th July, its rulers pledged the Austrians

their unconditional support to smash Serbia,

promising to deal with Russia and its own ally France,

if they intervened.

Day by day, it became plainer

that none of the big players would back down,

and thus began the countdown to the First World War.

Some historians have argued that once it became clear

that Austria and Germany were going to war with France and Russia,

we, the British, should simply have let them get on with it, stayed out,

that all that would have come out of a German victory

was a fast-forwarded version of today's European Union.

I don't buy that.

The people who were running Germany cared nothing for democracy

or other people's freedoms.

Once the shooting started,

it became plain that their war aims were little different

from those of Hitler 35 years later,

excepting only the Jewish genocide.

The causes of the war are hugely complicated,

with the death of the Archduke only setting in motion existing forces.

No one nation deserves all the blame.

But there's an overriding case

that German recklessness contributed more than anything else

to make a conflict intended to settle a local score

escalate into a European war.

And once the fighting and dying started,

it became cruelly apparent

that a Germany victory would be a disaster for Europe.

In 1914, Germany was by far the most powerful state on the continent,

the most advanced society in Europe.

Industrially, it was racing ahead of its rivals in every field,

from pharmaceuticals to automobile design.

Socially, it pioneered a welfare state

by creating unemployment insurance and old age pensions.

German culture was revered across the world.

But it became Europe's historic tragedy

that the German system of government

lagged generations behind everything else in the country.

The Empire's elected parliament

had the largest socialist party

in Europe.

But while the Reichstag

dominated domestic affairs,

it was the Kaiser, the so-called All Highest, Wilhelm II,

who still made every key appointment

and controlled decisions about war and peace.

Wilhelm was a weak man who sought to masquerade as a strong one,

chronically unstable and prone to violent mood swings.

He wasn't at heart a warmonger as, of course, Hitler was,

but he loved to play at soldiers.

He offered threats and blandishments to other powers,

which he ALWAYS got in the wrong order.

'Professor John Rohl has spent a lifetime

'studying and writing about the Kaiser.'

How personally influential was Kaiser Wilhelm

in the decision for war?

Kaiser Wilhelm took over the reins from his father in 1888

and inherited Bismarck's immense power himself

when he threw Bismarck out, but not content with that,

he then went back to an almost 18th-century notion of monarchy,

in other words, he insisted on ruling personally.

With the result that he appointed all ministers, all the chancellors,

all the generals, all the admirals himself, personally,

according to his likes and dislikes.

He was an extremely assertive bully.

It's an extraordinary situation that you had a socialist majority,

violently anti militarist majority, in the Reichstag and yet,

exercising no influence at all, really,

over this regime and foreign policy.

Yeah, one of the reasons, I believe, behind the German generals' decision

to go to war around about 1914 was the rising tide of democracy at home.

The thinking was, "Well, if we leave it too long,

"we will not be able to get our way and do what we really need to do

"to make Germany great, so we'd better go before that time comes."

The most powerful institution in Wilhelm's Empire,

and indeed in all continental Europe, was the German Army.

The Kaiser was also eager to extend his power across the seas,

and personally promoted the creation of a big-gun navy.

This thoroughly alarmed the British, who feared Germany's fleet

as a threat to their global trade routes and empire.

As Queen Victoria's grandson,

Wilhelm retained some respect for her people,

but he was determined that neither he

nor his empire should defer to them.

It's almost as if he feels obliged

to be more military and more masculine than any other monarch,

perhaps because there's always the whiff of Englishness about him,

his mother being English, he was always very keen to say,

"No, no, I'm not English,

"I'm Prussian, I'm extremely Prussian."

So there's this autocratic side to him, there's extreme militarism.

But some of it does come from England.

For example, the love of the navy, the idea that he has a mission

to become THE superpower in Europe, in place of Britain.

He feels he has a right as leader of this new,

energized Germany after unification.

Fear of Germany's might, and of its aspirations to dominate Europe,

prompted Russia and France to forge a close military alliance.

Although Britain's government made no firm written commitment,

it posted an option on supporting them in the event of war.

Many British people recoiled from the idea of joining

an alliance with Tsar Nicholas II,

whose people had been Britain's enemies through the 19th century.

But the fears of Europe's rulers

that a general war would result from their rivalries

caused every nation

to huddle close to its friends.

The Germans to the Austrians,

the Russians to the French,

with the British as cautious maybes.

Germany's warlords were haunted by fears of Russia's growing might.

Some of them were convinced

that challenging the Tsar's armies sooner rather than later

offered Germany the best chance of victory.

This is one of many German memorials

to Prussia's 19th-century military triumphs.

Instead of perceiving big wars, as we do today,

as universal tragedies,

the Kaiser's generals, and sometimes Wilhelm himself,

believed that trial by battle was an acceptable instrument of policy.

All Germany's leaders were insecure, even paranoid,

about threats at home from the socialists,

abroad from Russia and France,

probably backed in a showdown by Britain.

In those days, not many people thought seriously about economics.

The Kaiser and his generals counted soldiers, they failed to realise

that their country was achieving dominance of Europe

without firing a shot through its industrial power.

By 1914, so many Germans had come to believe

that a European clash in arms was inevitable

that their fatalism contributed mightily to bringing this about.

The Kaiser, who was almost certainly clinically unstable,

was one of three men in Germany

who took the key decisions which resulted in war.

To this day, historians argue fiercely

about which pulled the levers to precipitate disaster.

The others were the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg,

appointed by Wilhelm,

and General Helmuth von Moltke, head of the Army.

The Kaiser and the Chancellor were the ones who, on 6th July,

promised Austria Germany's support against Serbia.

Bethmann Hollweg,

knowing that Russia was committed to protect the Serbs,

pressed the Austrians to hurry their invasion to pre-empt the Tsar.

This has become known as Berlin's "blank cheque",

keystone of the argument that Germany was most blameworthy

for the horrors that followed.

'Professor Sir Hew Strachan has been studying

'and chronicling the war for over 30 years.

'He agrees that Berlin took a huge gamble.'

The Germans actively encouraged the Austrians

not merely to invade Serbia, but to get on and do it

even more quickly than they were ready to do it.

Yes, partly because I think if they do it quickly,

you'll get away with it - you'll be able to crush Serbia,

there'll be a Balkan war that's over so quick that nobody will have time to intervene,

so the presumption here is speed

and what Berlin is doing is constantly taking best-case advice.

You know, will Russia stay out of this war

because they're worried there will be a revolution in Russia?

The best answer is that, yes, they will, because there has been

a revolution in Russia in 1905 and there might be again.

So they work with that assumption. Whereas, in fact, of course,

the Tsar's going to be put under tremendous pressure

to back the south Slavs in Serbia.

But throughout July, the one nation surely that had the power

to stop this process, if the Germans had said to the Austrians,

"Stop, do not invade Serbia,"

there would have not been a general European war, would there?

That's right, I think they had the power to say no.

I mean, after all, the blank cheque is central

and the blank cheque is issued by Germany,

and Germany then seems to show remarkable insouciance

as to how that cheque will be used, you know.

Austria-Hungary still has to cash it,

it's Austria-Hungary that has to initiate war.

But absolutely, the balance then shifts to Berlin

and if any power has the capacity to stop it, it's Berlin,

particularly at the very end of the crisis.

Army chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke,

who answered only to the Kaiser, also played a pivotal role.

On 28th July, Wilhelm and Bethmann Hollweg

experienced a brief panic attack.

The looming war now looked far bigger and graver

than they'd bargained for.

But Moltke, on his own initiative, telegraphed the Austrians

and urged them to hasten their attack.

The chief of staff had long argued

that if Germany must face a European showdown,

it was better to have it before the Russian's big armaments expansion programme was complete.

At an imperial council meeting in December 1912,

he's reliably reported as saying,

"War, and the sooner the better."

'Annika Mombauer is a German scholar

'who has written a biography of the chief of staff

'which emphasises his role in the July crisis.'

Where did Moltke fit into the decision for war?

Well, Moltke very much advocates war.

He thinks that war is inevitable in the long run.

He thinks that eventually Russia will become too strong,

too militarily powerful for Germany to defeat her.

And therefore, he creates an atmosphere in which war seems

a good solution out of a perceived problem.

One thing that seems extraordinary to us about how dysfunctional

the German government was in July 1914 is that here you've got Moltke,

who's supposed to be just the head of the army.

And at a critical moment, July 28th,

he sends a telegram to Vienna, to the Austrians,

telling them to get on with invading Serbia,

and it does seem an extraordinary reflection of both

how reckless Moltke could be and of how powerful he was.

Well, you're right, he does send that telegram,

and in Vienna, they end up saying, "Well, who actually...?

-"Who rules in Berlin?!

-Who rules in Berlin?

"Moltke or Bethmann?" Or was it, in fact, the Kaiser?

So, yes, you're completely right.

He exceeds his authority, if you like, by sending this telegram.

Germany's leadership in July 1914 was extraordinarily reckless

in accepting the risk that by promoting a small Balkan war,

they would trigger a huge European one.

When it became plain that the Russians would fight

rather than see Serbia go under,

the Germans refused to take the one step

that could have prevented a general European catastrophe -

telling the Austrians to pull back.

Instead, they themselves prepared to mobilise against Russia.

And that's why, I believe,

they deserve most blame for all that followed.

On 28th July,

Austria declared war on Serbia

and two days later, the Tsar ordered his army to mobilise.

Germany then issued two ultimatums - one to Russia

and another to France, its ally.

Neither was expected to accept,

and few of the Kaiser's generals wished them to.

Berlin then set in motion its hugely ambitious war plan,

designed to crush France before turning on Russia.

Created almost a decade earlier

by Moltke's predecessor,

Count Alfred von Schlieffen,

the plan required an invasion of France by way of its back door,

through neutral Belgium.

It was the German commitment

to overrun Belgium

which suddenly propelled Britain,

hitherto a mere spectator of the continental drama,

to the forefront of the stage.

Under a treaty signed in 1839,

this country was among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality.

I'm one of those who still wonder

whether Britain really would have come in

if it hadn't been for the invasion of Belgium.

-Moltke got this dead wrong, didn't he?

-He did, he did.

He was in an impossible situation,

militarily speaking, or strategically speaking,

because Germany is in a sense encircled

by France in the west and Russia in the east

and the only way he thinks he can win this war is by implementing

the so-called Schlieffen Plan, and that plan can only work

if France is defeated quickly, and that means invading Belgium.

But interestingly, in France, the chief of staff similarly

thinks our best chance would be to advance through Belgium.

But the politicians, the diplomats tell him,

"We can't do that because of Britain."

The British told France, "On no account go into Belgium."

Exactly, exactly. And so, had Germany also respected Belgian neutrality,

there would have been all sorts of possibilities right at the end

of July and early in August perhaps to come to a different outcome.

Thus, in the first days of August 1914,

Germany prepared to invade and crush France in a campaign of 40 days,

before turning on Russia.

Europe had a war.

But must the British be in it?

Would they fight?

Basking in the balmy summer of 1914,

and preoccupied

by industrial turmoil

and the threat of Irish civil war,

the British people had scant

appetite for a continental conflict.

But Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith,

and several key cabinet colleagues, were appalled by the prospect

of Germany achieving dominance of Europe.

They doubted that Britain could merely remain a bystander

while this happened.

One such was the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey,

who played a critical role.

Sir Edward Grey is traditionally seen

as a reticent English gentleman,

whose grand passions were fly-fishing and bird-watching,

both of which he wrote good books about.

But more recently, he's become a focus of fierce controversy.

Some historians claim that Grey made rash secret commitments to the French

which dragged us unnecessarily into the war.

For centuries, it had been a British article of faith

that a balance of power,

which denied absolute dominance to any one nation,

must be maintained on the continent.

Between 1908 and 1914,

when Grey was not casting a fly on bright waters,

he held secret talks with the French about British support

in the event of a German attack.

The Foreign Secretary was less clever and less of a statesman

than his admirers thought.

But the claim that he should be damned for dragging Britain

into an unnecessary war doesn't stand up.

I suggest that Grey was a realist about the difficulty,

indeed impossibility, of Britain simply standing by doing nothing

while Germany conquered Europe.

If the French and Russians had been beaten,

as they almost certainly would have been if Britain hadn't come in,

who can imagine a victorious Germany allowing Britain to continue

ruling the waves and the world's financial system

any more than Hitler would have done

if Churchill had tried to strike a deal with him in 1940?

Nothing Grey said beforehand could have deterred the Germans,

because they had weighed Britain's military power and discounted it.

The little British Army seemed incapable of influencing

a huge clash of continental hosts.

The Royal Navy was thought irrelevant because,

in the Kaiser's scornful words,

"Dreadnoughts have no wheels."

The Foreign Secretary's secret and unwritten assurances to France

seem to me to have reflected not warmongering,

but prudent and essential precaution.

In July 1914, by proposing an immediate European conference,

Grey did all that he could to avert war.

'Sir Michael Howard is Britain's most distinguished living historian.

'He and I have spent many hours discussing the vast puzzle of 1914

'and, crucially, whether Britain could have done more to avert disaster.'

Grey's proposal, which they rejected out of hand,

to address the confrontation between Austria-Hungary

and Serbia by having a peace conference -

it wasn't a contemptible proposal, was it?

No, it was an absolutely typical Grey thing to do.

A typical sort of Liberal solution and...

-But the Germans rejected it flatly.

-The Germans rejected it flatly

because this would have meant letting down the Austrians

and they were not going to let down the Austrians.

There was this sense throughout all classes in Austria,

it is time to finish with the Serbs.

If we don't finish with the Serbs, they will nibble us to death.

This is the moment to strike.

The Germans knowing this was the case were not going to bring in

the Austrians to debate about what their future was going to be.

So to that extent also, you could say that the Germans were

responsible for not letting there be a peaceful settlement.

On 2nd August,

the Germans issued an ultimatum to King Albert of Belgium

demanding passage for their armies.

He flatly refused and appealed to Britain as a guarantor

of his country's neutrality.

Thus, it fell to Sir Edward Grey

to convince a still reluctant British parliament

of the necessity for Britain to join the war on the continent.

On the afternoon of 3rd August,

Grey delivered the most important speech of his life

to the House of Commons.

By now, most of the Cabinet believed that Britain must fight

in the name of Belgium's rights.

"Could this country," Grey demanded,

"stand by and watch the direst crime that ever stained human history,

"and thus become participators in the sin?"

He added,

"We should, I believe,

"sacrifice our respect and good name before the world

"and should not escape the most serious and grave consequences."

This was one of those extraordinary parliamentary occasions that changed history.

It persuaded much of the Liberal Party,

hitherto bitterly hostile to intervention,

now to support it - as the Conservative opposition already did.

Thus, on 4th August 1914,

after Berlin rejected an ultimatum

demanding its withdrawal from Belgium,

Britain declared war on Germany.

Was Belgium the real reason that Britain went to war in 1914

or, as some historians nowadays try to argue,

"Oh, it was just a pretext,"

-that the British government really wanted to fight anyway?

-Yeah.

Well, I would tend to say, "It's both and."

There are two arguments here.

One is the security of Belgium

and the absence of a dominant power on the mainland of Europe

is seen as central to Britain's strategic position.

There can't be an equivalent of Napoleon, facing Britain across

the Channel and dominating Britain's routes to the rest of the world.

The second issue is - does it matter that Germany

disregards its international obligations, enters Belgium,

which is a neutral state, and fails to reflect

both international law and the rights of small nations?

And the answer is it does matter and it matters because, for Britain,

international law and what we might now see as morality, also matters.

But it's more fundamental than that,

because Britain is an economic power, a trading power,

a power that depends on its shipping,

actually, international law is more than just a sense

of legal, of moral, obligation.

It's also a matter of economic necessity.

You need to respect international law

to make sure that Britain can continue to exercise

the degree of leverage it does as a neutral itself.

Well, some people say now, "Oh, it was incredibly silly for Britain

"to get involved in this horrific experience of the First World War

"just because the German Army marched into Belgium."

But actually, it seems to me,

it was a pretty good reason for going to war.

It was an excellent reason for going to war.

And it did something which, at the beginning of the July crisis,

-seemed unimaginable to many, which is...

-It united the British people.

It united the British people. United the Cabinet and united the people.

As Britain mobilised its little army in that first week of August,

Germany's vast host was already surging into Belgium.

Within days, the first reports appeared in the world's newspapers

describing the extraordinarily brutal conduct of German troops

towards the Belgian people.

They were not merely carelessly destroying homes and villages -

all invading armies do that.

They were seizing and killing civilian hostages

in scores and hundreds.

Even before 1914,

the Kaiser's Army had earned a reputation for exceptional brutality.

Between 1904 and 1907,

when the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against German colonial

rule in South West Africa,

the Kaiser's soldiers killed

or deliberately starved to death

almost 100,000 native people.

Wilhelm applauded and decorated the officer responsible.

Even by the imperial standards of the day,

this action was worse than any British excess.

But the Herero genocide had been far away in Africa.

In August 1914, world opinion was stunned by German savagery

towards fellow Europeans.

In Flanders, the destruction of the medieval university town of Louvain,

today rebuilt from ashes,

became a symbol of the excesses of the Kaiser's soldiers,

endorsed by Berlin.

Professor John Horne has exhaustively researched

and catalogued the German Army's actions

in Berlin and France during 1914.

John, we are here, in the university library at Louvain,

what happened here?

Well, on 25th August, there was the sound of fighting -

German soldiers shooting at what they claimed was a civilian insurrection.

Round about 11 o'clock in the evening,

this beautiful university library was broken into by the German soldiers

and deliberately set fire.

One young Jesuit, Father Dupierreux, had written in his notebook

that he thought the Germans, in burning down the library,

had done something as barbaric

as the destruction of the library of Alexandria in antiquity.

This was seized by German soldiers and he was summarily executed.

And by the 29th or the 30th,

you have to imagine Louvain as an almost empty town.

The population that hadn't been deported gradually straggled back in

to find between 1,500 and 2,000 buildings destroyed,

and well over 240 of their own townspeople had been killed.

All armies in all wars can behave very badly.

What seems different about what happened in Belgium in 1914

was that it wasn't just the question of the odd soldiers

brutally murdering a few civilians,

they were systematically shooting them in scores

-and sometimes in hundreds as hostages.

-You are quite right.

What we've just described in Louvain was a terrible incident

and it immediately grabbed the international headlines.

But it was typical of something that happened across the whole

invasion front, in Belgium and also in eastern France.

And it wasn't the worst case in terms of the death rate.

Dinant was destroyed as a town

and 674 of its inhabitants executed two days before...

-In cold blood?

-In cold blood.

In the first weeks of the war,

nearly 6,500 civilians were executed by German troops

in Belgium and France.

Berlin claimed that they were merely exacting legitimate reprisals

for resistance by civilians, so-called franc-tireurs,

'but John Horne rejects this.'

You found no evidence at all of franc-tireurs activity, did you,

of guerrilla activity against the Germans?

None, it was... er, apart from the odd

very isolated incident,

but nothing which justified the German accusations,

which was that there had been what they called a "Volkskrieg",

a people's war, a mass uprising.

And the Kaiser, already by 9th August, only a week into the war,

is accusing the King of the Belgians of fermenting such an uprising.

It didn't happen.

But it was the institutional response of the German generals

and right up to the Kaiser that seems striking.

And it does seem to say something about the character of the regime.

That's right.

Because, very quickly, what starts out as panics

and localised responses by German soldiers

is immediately endorsed by the whole German command structure.

And then what swings into play is a series of very brutal reprisals,

which are justified in terms of German military doctrine

as to what you do when you're faced with civilian uprising.

For years, apologists for Germany claimed that the Belgian atrocities

were figments of Allied propaganda.

Some of the stories that made headlines in 1914,

for instance, claims that thousands of babies

were maimed by German soldiers, were indeed fabrications.

But a big truth persists -

the German Army behaved with systemic barbarity

during its advance across Belgium and France.

Its actions persuaded many hitherto doubting British people

that they had chosen the right side

in the ghastly conflict that was unfolding.

Some historians today claim that the British government's decision

to go to war in defence of Belgium's neutrality was simply a fig leaf,

a pretence, when really, it was all simply

about supporting the French against the Germans.

I'd put it a bit differently.

Yes, it's true that some key ministers wanted to fight anyway,

but Belgium provided a tipping point -

all sorts of British people who cared nothing for Serbia or Russia

could easily get their minds around the notion

that it was outrageous that the most powerful army in Europe

proposed to crush beneath its boots a small state

simply to serve the convenience of the Schlieffen Plan.

And wasn't that indeed a decent and honourable reason

for Britain to go to war?

'Had Germany been victorious on the continent,

'Britain would have found itself in a desperate and lonely predicament.'

If the Germans had won, and now I hypothesise, there would have

been an Anglo-German war within a matter of years.

The fear in Britain was that a power which unified the continent

would then be in a position

to challenge Britain's command of the sea.

If she commanded, challenged,

and successfully overturned Britain's command of the sea,

not only would we no longer have an empire,

we would be at the mercy of whoever commanded the whole of Europe.

That was what the British feared. That was what...

-And they were right to fear it?

-And they were right to fear it,

because there was a substantial element in Germany,

led by the Kaiser,

whose one objective was to challenge Britain as a world power,

to build a great navy which could then defeat the British

and Germany would then become a world power at the expense of the British.

So if the Germans had won the war,

I see no way in which they would not have used their dominance of Europe

to bring the British down.

So we would not have avoided a war, we would only have postponed one.

By early September,

the German Army had swept through Belgium and into France.

With Berlin believing that its victory was imminent,

Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg drew up a list

of his country's demands at the peace talks.

They included seizing large swathes of land from both France and Russia,

annexing Luxembourg, making Belgium and Holland vassal states.

The September Plan, as it became known, was designed to secure

Germany's absolute political and economic control of Europe.

But in the second week of September,

the French Army achieved a historic victory in the Battle of the Marne,

driving back the Germans from the gates of Paris.

What followed, in the autumn of 1914,

finally wrecked Germany's dream of swift victory.

It also witnessed the first big and seriously bloody battle

of the war for the British.

In October, the British Expeditionary Force

marched towards the old Belgian cloth town of Ypres -

Wipers, as millions of British soldiers came to know it.

They arrived there just in time to

clash head-on with a massive enemy

offensive - the last great German effort

to win the war by Christmas.

What took place in the five weeks of battle around Ypres

set the pattern for the vision of the First World War

which has been etched into our national culture ever since.

Former soldier Clive Harris today guides visitors

to the battlefields of the First World War,

and especially those around Ypres.

'He's brought me to Polygon Wood, one of the most famous,

'or notorious, landmarks of the desperate struggle in 1914.'

It's right at the edge of the Menin Road, which runs back towards Ypres,

which is about five, six kilometres behind us now.

It sits right at the centre of the battlefield as well,

so from the moment the Germans attack us on 18th October,

right through to the last knockings of first Ypres on 11th November,

this wood here and the two woods just to the rear of us,

were key as part of the battles.

This is where the Germans made their last huge push of 1914

to try to win the war before Christmas?

They did, yeah. They now realise

that they needed to knock us out of the war

and by doing so, they needed to capture the Channel ports.

And therefore, they moved away from the von Schlieffen Plan

to a degree and the capture of Ypres, this is the last thing...

other side of Ypres, there is no defences.

It was our last chance -

there is nothing behind us, but the Channel ports.

-And there were battles all over the shop, small battles all over the wood.

-There were, yeah.

We tend to think that the British line would be a continual line

when, in fact, it was more a series of outposts and, quite often,

units found themselves isolated and having to make small unit charges

into Germans as opposed to a larger cohesive defence.

Here, in western Belgium, the war of manoeuvre

ranging across thousands of square miles that had been waged

through the late summer of 1914,

gave way to a stalemate across the Western Front.

The technology of defence and destruction,

artillery and machine guns had achieved a dominance

which confounded the generals of both sides.

At Ypres, cavalrymen saw their horses almost for the last time,

before being obliged to join a death grapple on foot.

Well, we are here, this is the site

of the Horse Guards memorial

and it marks an area where the Horse Guards

fight as infantry pretty much on this spot, we are just on the...

So they came charging up, dismounted...

Yeah, initially by horseback.

This actual spot is where one of the machine gun positions...

cos it gives us a great arc of fire over the advancing enemy.

But what seems important here, Clive, it wasn't just

that the British threw back the German Army,

it was also that the whole character of the war changed

for all the armies, that here was where they first came to terms

with what everybody now understands as the full horror of the Great War, wasn't it?

Yeah, trench warfare, and this is the end of that war of movement

that starts in the August, all the way down to the Marne,

all the way back again,

and it's here that we start to dig, dig, dig.

So, yeah, we are on the spot where it changes.

-And when it started to rain...

-Yeah.

..they weren't in the earth, they were in the mud.

Yeah, and you have to learn to cope with things such as trench foot

and how to get around that,

and reinforce your trenches to withstand bombardments.

We're no longer going to see the artillery now in front

of the infantry firing as field guns. They're going to be behind the lines,

or, certainly, in sunken lanes and that sort of thing.

And nobody dared show his head above the parapet?

No, we go subterranean from now on, that's right.

Any movement by day would have been suicidal, yeah.

But the British paid a devastating price

for their narrow victory at Ypres.

56,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in a month.

The old professional British Army was largely destroyed.

Thereafter, it would be civilian

volunteers and, later, conscripts

who accounted for the overwhelming majority

of the six million British soldiers who eventually served.

But however terrible the sacrifice,

it seems mistaken to imagine that there was ever an easy means

by which the war could have been ended.

BLACKADDER CLIP: 'Gentlemen, our long wait is nearly at an end.

'Tomorrow morning, General Insanity Melchett invites you'

to a mass slaughter.

We are going over the top!

Well, huzzah and hurrah!

The hugely successful Blackadder series epitomises the enduring

popular view of the First World War

that the British Army fell victim to idiot commanders

devoid of brains or courage.

Well, best of luck to you all. Sorry I can't be with you,

but obviously there's no place at the front for an old general

with a dicky heart and a wooden bladder. Well...

'Chuff, chuff, then. See you all in Berlin for coffee and cakes.'

Most of the war's commanders

really were pretty unlovable and unimaginative men.

But once the most powerful industrial states in Europe were locked in strife,

it seems wrong to imagine that even a Wellington or Napoleon could have found an easy road to victory.

George Orwell wrote, a generation later,

that the only way to end a war quickly is to lose it.

He was right.

The trench stalemate on the Western Front posed intractable problems

which no commander proved able to solve.

Generals needed to be able to control their forces by telephone

and could only do so from behind the front

rather than at the head of their troops,

as on history's battlefields.

But the price of long-distance command was to create

a divide between the top brass in their chateaux

and their men, calf-deep in mud,

which has made an enduring and bitter impact

on posterity's view of the war.

In the summer of 1918,

Allied forces finally broke the stalemate on the Western Front,

and pushed east across France with the British Army

taking more prisoners than all their Allied partners put together.

The Germans, exhausted and demoralised,

fell back in growing disarray

until an armistice was signed on 11th November.

Around ten million combatants,

900,000 of them from the British Empire, had lost their lives.

Two months after the shooting stopped, the victorious Allies

convened a peace conference at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.

Their task was enormous,

their purposes the most ambitious in history.

The Versailles summit has often since been branded a failure

which condemned Europe to a further generation of strife.

Prime Minister Lloyd George,

French premier Georges Clemenceau

and American President Woodrow Wilson led the negotiations,

involving delegations from many other interested nations,

which lasted for six months, between January and June 1919.

Their intention was to produce a treaty

that would not only reshape Europe,

but also ensure that there could never again be a great war,

by disarming the Germans and making them pay the costs of the conflict.

Historian Margaret MacMillan is the author of the most compelling

and vivid modern narrative of what happened at Versailles.

What was at stake for the Allied powers at Versailles?

I think they had two things they had to think about.

They were deeply concerned about the state of Europe,

and indeed their own countries included.

There was real fear of revolution

and they were worried that the situation might deteriorate.

What was also at stake, of course, is they were democracies

and they had to think of their publics and the publics

had been led to believe and had been kept going in the war

by the promise that it was going to make a much better world.

And so what they had to try to do is create a better world...

-Incredibly ambitious objectives.

-It was very ambitious,

but then, of course, the First World War is so unusual

compared to earlier wars, because it was so exhausting,

that you couldn't just say at the end of it, "Well, that's it, done.

"We'll make a few border changes and we'll go back to normal." You couldn't go back to normal.

I seem to remember that the Germans eventually paid less

than they had made the French pay after they beat the French in 1871.

What the Allies couldn't say to their own people was,

"Look, there's no way Germany can pay what really we need to rebuild,"

because their own people had suffered so much,

and so they had to put a bill in, but they did was they fudged it.

They divided the total reparations bill up,

so the Germans only paid a fraction.

Once they paid the fraction, they'd pay the rest,

which of course the Germans never wanted to do.

The Allies really failed afterwards

to convince their own peoples

that their cause had been just, didn't they?

Well, I suppose the problem with the First World War

is that the expectations are so high, the promises are so great

and all sort of promises, as we know, are made during the war

to try and keep people in the war,

but there's no way that all those promises can be cashed in after the war is over.

Abuse fell upon the Versailles Treaty

almost before ink was dry on the signatures.

The economist John Maynard Keynes,

one of the British treasury delegation,

published a scathing broadside entitled

The Economic Consequences Of The Peace.

A strong German sympathiser,

Keynes made a case that the terms imposed upon Germany

were both morally unjust and economically foolish.

How influential was Maynard Keynes in his book

The Economic Consequences Of The Peace,

which absolutely damned Versailles?

It was very influential. I mean, he wrote it very quickly,

it became a bestseller immediately

and it's been in print ever since.

And it's a brilliant polemic,

it's not fair.

He paints this picture of these greedy, selfish,

hard-hearted cynical men dividing up Europe, punishing Germany,

and they are just making a complete mess of it.

I think that also he represents a whole generation of younger people

who had supported the war believing

that the world was going to be a better place

and when they saw it wasn't going to be, they reacted

and blamed the people who were trying to make peace for everything.

I would have thought one of the huge unfairnesses of Keynes' book

is he never set it in the context of saying,

"All right, even if the Allies have made a fumbled, bungled peace,

"if the Germans had won and the if the Germans had been making the peace,

"it would have been a vastly crueller and worse one for Europe."

I think there's plenty of evidence that what the German High Command...

and they were basically in control of Germany by this point. By 1918,

you have a military dictatorship in Germany

and what they were planning were pretty extensive annexations

of other people's lands in the west

and in the east, they were planning to extend their influence.

In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,

they had forced the Bolsheviks, who were desperate,

to give over whatever gold they had left,

they'd set up an independent Ukraine.

I mean, the evidence is, unless they had a complete change of heart,

it would have been a very harsh peace.

Today, an awful lot of people have come to feel a real guilt

about the Treaty of Versailles.

"Oh, it was an unfair treaty to Germany,

"that it contributed to the rise of Hitler, it got it wrong."

Was it the harsh vindictive treaty they claim?

The trouble with the treaty, I think, is that it appeared to be harsher

than it actually was and, of course, it was all about implementation

and in the end, most of those clauses

which limited German power and forced Germany to pay reparations

were not really implemented fully.

And so I think there's a perception of the treaty as very harsh.

My question always is - what would you have done otherwise?

How would you have treated Germany if you felt it had caused the war

and caused this catastrophe for Europe, what would you have done?

Wouldn't you have tried to limit its power?

Because Versailles failed to deliver a lasting peace,

it has become unjustly blamed for the fact

that a Second World War had to be fought.

In truth, so many violent forces and crises shook Europe

between 1919 and 1939 that it seems absurd to blame the peacemakers

for having failed in their grand purposes.

In the decade following Versailles,

all Europe groaned under the burden

of paying the bills for the past conflict.

Britain was almost bankrupt, and the moral and political regeneration

which Prime Minister Lloyd George had repeatedly promised

failed to happen.

Many men came back from the Army to find their old jobs

taken by civilians, often women.

Whereas, in 1945, veterans returned to a country

run by a Labour government committed to creating a welfare state,

after 1918, the old gang remained in charge

of an unreformed British society.

Those who had fought felt that they had been sold a false bill of goods.

My own grandfather,

a writer who won a Military Cross as a gunner officer in France,

became one of those who, within a few years of the Armistice,

asked himself what it had all been for.

Here's an essay my grandfather wrote for a literary magazine in 1923,

after meeting a group of fellow veterans

who had served with him in France.

They now felt, he said,

"That they had gone not as 'heroes'

"but on a fool's errand to fight in a war that was not worth fighting.

"They had endured the unsightly, dirty life of the battlefields

"with a cheery and modest sense of merit,

"with a belief that they were making some contribution to a good cause.

"But now, it transpired, this had been a stupid article of faith,

"which was exploded."

My grandfather and his kind felt themselves

"strangers in a strange land",

divided by the horrendous trench experience

from those at home who knew almost nothing about it.

The poets of the Western Front,

such men as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon,

vividly described its horrors and the sense of military futility

in a fashion that later generations have found irresistible.

Here was the world's worst wound

And here with pride

'Their name liveth for evermore'

The Gateway claims

Was ever immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

But Sassoon and his kind never addressed the huge question

of how on earth Britain could have escaped from the war

except by conceding defeat.

It's a weird British thing

that while we are hugely proud that our forefathers fought Hitler,

we seem almost ashamed that they fought the Kaiser.

How has the overwhelming perception developed in Britain

over the last hundred years that there was nothing worth

fighting about in the First World War?

Well, the interesting point is not so much that, after the war,

opinion changed or opinion veered

to the point when you said, "That was a bad war,

"it was badly conducted, it was a waste of time,

"a waste of blood and it should never have happened."

Nobody thought that in 1918,

I think nobody thought that for another ten years,

until about 1928...

-The poets did.

-The poets did, but the interesting thing

is whether people would have been interested and affected

by what the poets wrote.

They became expressive of a public opinion in 1928,

they weren't expressive in 1918.

By the end of the 1920s,

there's this worldwide slump.

Total catastrophic unemployment everywhere,

especially in Germany.

The situation seemed to be far worse in 1928 than it had been in 1914

and by 1933 or so, it has become generally accepted

that the war is an unnecessary war that had been bungled, etc, etc.

So I think that what was very, very important was not so much the fact

that the war had been terribly expensive and bloody

and the losses were awful,

it was that nothing seemed to have come out of it of any good.

Europe's descent into the turmoil and privations of the 1930s

caused many people to view the Great War as bungled, the peace shambolic.

Some perversely blamed the victors for the rise of Hitler and Nazism.

While many people today

still think of the First World War as a "bad" war,

the Second has come to be seen, by contrast,

as a virtuous crusade against the Nazi architects of genocide.

Nobody went to war in 1939 to stop the Germans massacring the Jews.

I mean, sad though it may be to say that,

partly because, of course, the serious massacres hadn't yet begun,

but, principally, because Germany might be doing awful things,

Nazi Germany, domestically, but in those days, nobody saw that

as an obligation to go to war in the way in which we would today.

So, in some respects, both wars break out for similar reasons -

great power rivalries and the concerns of the balance

of power within Europe, and what is happening within Eastern Europe.

They are remarkably similar in their causation and it is perverse

that we have clothed the Second World War as the good war

and the First World War as the bad war.

And, of course, we have not remained sufficiently,

I'm talking we, as British now,

have not remained sufficiently independent-minded

or sufficiently historically aware

to put these things in our own and a proper context.

No sane person believes that Britain wanted a war in 1914.

All the great powers bear some responsibility for the carnage,

but the Germans seem to deserve most, because they refused

to use their almost indisputable ability to prevent it.

They failed to see that nothing they hoped to get out of the war

could justify its horrendous prospective risk and actual cost.

Britain emerged from the First World War with little to show

save a few worthless colonies and a host of public memorials.

But the right questions to ask about the conflict

and the nation's sacrifice today are whether we could justly

or sensibly have stayed out of it.

And what would have befallen Europe if the Kaiser's Germany had won?

I'm imagining Whitehall as it was on 4th August -

jammed with expectant people about to be swept away

by the most dreadful cataclysm in European history.

Nobody in their right mind would suggest making the centenary of 1914

an occasion for celebration.

But we should have the courage to tell our children and grandchildren

that the wartime generation did not fight and die for nothing,

that if their enemies had prevailed,

Europe would have paid an even more terrible forfeit.

To explore further the story of how the world went to war in 1914,

go to bbc.co.uk/ww1.