The Pity of War

Tonight are going to talk about the Great War for Civilisation.

That's what my grandfather

John Ferguson's Victory Medal called the First World War.

He earned it as a teenager in the Ypres Salient,

serving as a Private in the Seaforth Highlanders.

John Ferguson was one of the lucky ones who came back

more or less in one piece.

One in four Scottish soldiers didn't return.

The First World War was Britain's deadliest war.

It killed two and a half times more servicemen

than the Second World War.

And I suppose it was trying to understand this

national catastrophe that first got me interested in history.

After a hundred years of research and debate,

there are still those who lay the blame for the war

on dastardly German plans for world domination

and lament the end of a golden era of peace and prosperity.

But I'm going to show you that the British government

bore a heavy share of the responsibility for turning an act

of state-sponsored terrorism in the Balkans

into a global bloodbath.

I also want to persuade you that, considering the horrendous

consequences of the First World War,

Britain's decision for war was a disaster

not just for this country, but also for the entire world.

Now, to debate the causes,

course and consequences of the First World War,

I'm joined by a distinguished panel of experts

and an audience that includes students of the war.

First, I'm going to make my case

that the war was a horrendous mistake,

and then we're going to have what I can guarantee

will be a very lively debate.

Now, to understand the full disastrous significance

of the First World War,

you need to appreciate that before 1914

the world had been moving in quite a good direction.

That only becomes clear, however,

when you put the war in a long-term perspective.

At the beginning of human history, life was unspeakably violent.

An astonishing one in six skulls exhumed in Scandinavia

from the late Stone Age had nasty head injuries like this.

As the 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes

famously remarked, "Life before civilisation was solitary,

"poor, nasty, brutish and short."

So much of human history is the history of violence.

Even the most ancient civilisations were astonishingly bloodthirsty.

In medieval Europe as in ancient Rome, torture was routine.

Criminals were hanged or at least mutilated,

and heretics, religious dissidents,

were burnt at the stake or broken on a wheel.

War was frequent, at times even incessant.

The Crusaders killed up to a million Muslims and Jews.

The Spanish Inquisition claimed another 350,000 lives.

The English fought the French for a hundred years,

when they weren't fighting the Scots, the Irish and one another.

Even the 17th century, the era of the scientific revolution,

saw the Thirty Years' War,

which killed at least three million people.

Yet the long-run tendency was for violence to diminish.

There was the most amazing decline in the European murder rate

beginning around the 14th or 15th centuries,

as the multiple feudal territories

were consolidated into just a few kingdoms.

Then, in the 18th-century, men grew still less violent,

the Enlightenment teaching them to empathise with one another,

to imagine themselves as the victims of violence.

True, men were murdering one another less, but they were still engaging

in the most organised form of violence, namely war.

Britain was at war for all but 12 years of the 18th century.

The American War of Independence, for example,

or the French Revolutionary wars.

Nevertheless, the Duke of Wellington's decisive victory

over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo

appeared to usher in a new era.

Aside from the Crimean War,

Britain fought no European war for a century.

Of course, there were plenty of colonial conflicts

and wars of unification, not to mention the American Civil War.

Still, by the late 19th-century,

contemporaries felt the trend was away from conflict towards commerce.

Inventions like Marconi's wireless were integrating the world economy

as never before.

And this first age of globalisation seemed to imply a new era of peace

based on economic self-interest.

Liberals like Norman Angell argue that war was now inconceivable,

because even the victors stood to lose more

than they could possibly gain.

It was a view later satirised by the playwright JB Priestley

in An Inspector Calls.

War? Fiddlesticks! The Germans don't want war. Nobody wants war.

There's too much at stake these days.

And just in case the audience missed the irony,

Priestley has the same character say, "The Titanic?

"Unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable."

In 1914, it was peace that hit an iceberg.

Hopes that war had become a great illusion

were shattered by four and a quarter years of global war.

A staggering 65 million people from around 20 different countries

were mobilised to fight.

There were around ten million military deaths

and about the same number of premature civilian fatalities.

The technologies that had made possible

the Industrial Revolution and the first age of globalisation...

..were now harnessed to the work of destruction,

of industrialised slaughter.

This wasn't war as the European powers had known it in the past.

It was far more destructive than any previous conflict.

Armies were bigger, weapons more powerful.

This war, to say nothing of the even larger conflict

that contemporaries began to anticipate

the moment they started talking about a First World War, shattered

the hope that the human race was getting steadily more peace-loving.

The First World War killed more than 10% of all men

aged between 15 and 49 in at least seven countries...

..including my own, Scotland.

Moreover, the war ended with a lethal influenza pandemic,

which spread as massive armies moved across oceans and continents.

The flu alone killed an estimated 40 million people.

Between 1914 and 1918,

it seemed as if the civilising process had come to an abrupt halt.

And even gone into reverse.

But how?

And why?

So, what caused this huge historical U-turn

that we call the First World War?

We know, or we think we know, where and when it began.

On June 28th - everyone, I think, knows this -

the Archduke Franz Ferdinand

visited the town of Sarajevo in Bosnia.

Bosnia is...

That was my hero, the great AJP Taylor, lecturing about

the causes of the First World War here on the BBC nearly 40 years ago.

That lecture is a wonderful example of the way my profession works.

Not long after any big crisis happens, the historians

arrive on the scene ready to piece together retrospectively

the chain of causation that led to disaster,

tracing the origins of the First World War

back from the assassination

of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne

to the Austrian annexation of Bosnia

and then back even further to whatever it was that caused that.

Actually, most people were completely blindsided by the war

when it broke out.

Probably the best informed people in the world,

who were the bankers of the City of London,

were paying much more attention

to the danger of a civil war in Ireland.

So how could a single assassination

have such world-shaking consequences?

After all, assassinations were pretty regular occurrences

in those days.

Why did the great powers of Europe line up in the way that they did

with Britain, France and Russia on one side

and Germany, Austria and Turkey on the other?

Because of alliances to which they'd all committed themselves?

Because of the logic of their generals' war plans?

Because of militarism, imperialism, nationalism or some other "ism"?

Or was it just that one of the great powers,

the German Reich, seized the pretext provided by yet another

Balkan crisis to launch a war of conquest?

In recent years,

the younger generation of German historians have come more and more

to the belief that the Imperial German government

was actually a driving force for war

and that the war of...

which broke out in August 1914, far from being a war of accident,

was a war of design

as one of them said "long prepared for".

Well, the German historians,

led by Fritz Fischer argued that there was indeed a German bid for

continental if not world domination

dating back to 1912 if not earlier.

Elsewhere, Taylor argued that an arms race,

and, in particular, the war plans of the great powers,

created a kind of unstoppable war by timetable.

But, once again, it was the German plan, the Schlieffen Plan,

that bore the brunt of the blame.

And yet there really is no iron law of history stating that all

arms races must end in war.

After all, the Cold War nuclear arms race didn't.

And what about the three "isms" - imperialism, militarism

and nationalism?

A pretty important part of the case against Germany is the idea

that these "isms"

were somehow more widespread in Germany than elsewhere.

But were they?

MILITARY BAND MUSIC

All Quiet On The Western Front is the most famous anti-war book

and film of all time.

It won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931.

The elderly teacher Professor Kantorek

personifies prewar nationalism and militarism.

It's Kantorek's jingoistic ranting

that inspires his pupils to flock to enlist.

But now, our country calls! The Fatherland needs leaders!

Personal ambition must be thrown aside in the one great sacrifice

for our country.

-I'll go.

-I want to go!

-Count on me!

CHEERING

But just how representative was Kantorek of German public opinion?

This is still our perception of Germany in the years

leading up to the war...

..an ultra-militarist society hellbent on conflict.

But contrary to public belief,

Germany wasn't the most militarised nation in Europe in 1914.

France was.

In fact, the very term "militarism" is French in origin.

France spent a higher proportion of its gross domestic product

on defence than Germany, and imposed peacetime military service

on a higher proportion of its young men.

In fact, it was Germany that had the strongest

antimilitarism in Europe.

In 1912, the Social Democrats became the largest party

in the German parliament on an anti-war ticket.

Indeed, in a whole range of ways,

Germany in 1914 was among the most progressive countries in the world.

This is Berlin's boulevard.

You will find everything here - palaces, a university, opera,

royal guard, arsenal, museums, a government house.

Germany had the biggest and most innovative economy in Europe.

And, unlike in Britain, in Germany,

every adult male had the right to vote.

Enthusiasm for war was far from unique to Germany.

In Britain, we have in our mind's eye images of wildly celebrating

crowds in the streets and young men flocking to the colours.

That was certainly what my grandfather did

at the age of just 16.

But just how widespread was such popular enthusiasm for war in 1914?

In truth, for most people,

the prospect of war was cause not for jubilation, but for trepidation.

As war broke out,

the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey,

stood at a window in the Foreign Office watching the lamps

being lit as dusk approached,

and famously remarked, "The lamps are going out all over Europe.

"We shall not see them lit again in our time."

Less well known, however, is the pessimism of the Germans.

Nine years before the war, the chief of the Great General Staff,

Helmuth von Moltke, had already warned the Kaiser that the war would

turn into a long and tedious struggle with a country that will

not give up before the strength of its entire people has been broken.

The archival evidence actually makes it clear that the Germans

were not bidding for world power, rather their main motivation

for going to war was a sense of weakness, particularly with regard

to the rapidly growing economic and military strength of Russia.

And that's the most striking feature of the crisis to me -

almost every one of the major powers acted

out of a sense of weakness rather than strength.

Most of the dramatic phenomena that we historians study,

not only wars, but also revolutions and other big crises,

are not the climaxes of protracted, deterministic storylines.

Instead, they represent the often sudden breakdowns

of complex systems.

To see what I mean, take a look at these paintings,

which are my favourites

in the New York Historical Society's collection.

They are called The Course Of Empire...

..and were painted by the American artist Thomas Cole

between 1833 and 1836.

The world is transformed

from the lush wilderness of the savage state...

..to the agrarian idyll of the pastoral state.

To the opulent citizen consumers of the Consummation Of Empire...

..until, in destruction, the survivors flee the invading hordes.

Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting -

Desolation.

There's not a living soul to be seen.

For centuries, historians thought about the past in these terms,

as a series of gradual, cyclical ups and downs.

As one empire waxed, another waned.

But such historical cycles are much easier to see

through the rear-view mirror.

At the time, they are less visible.

So let's ask ourselves, what if collapse comes suddenly,

like a thief in the night?

What if that's what happened to the international system

in the summer of 1914?

The world in 1914 was dominated by the great European empires,

which controlled close to half its land surface and population

and an even larger share of its economy.

At their hearts were big industrial and commercial capital cities,

like London, Paris,

Berlin, Vienna

and St Petersburg.

Yet, thanks to new communication technologies,

these cities were able to rule over vast areas as not only orders

but also capital, people and ideas were relayed around the world.

By 1914, this international imperial order was a truly complex system

characterised by very high levels of interdependence.

The problem is, that at a certain crucial moment...

..even a small shock to such a system...

..can produce huge, often unanticipated changes.

The weak points of this complex system were where the empires met.

These were the nodes where a relatively small perturbation

could spread a shock right the way round the world.

in 1914, there were two nodal points that mattered.

The first was the Balkans.

But the retreat of the Ottoman Empire had created

opportunities for Austria, Hungary and Russia to exert their influence

over the weak nation states of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.

The other nodal point was Belgium - the artificial, half-French,

half-Dutch buffer state set up after the Napoleonic wars

to impose some barrier on France's northward expansion.

The important thing about Belgium was that its neutrality in a war

was guaranteed by a treaty signed by all the great powers in 1839.

So, the assassination in Sarajevo was the butterfly

that flaps its wings in the Amazonian rainforest

and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world.

From the point of view of the Austrians,

this was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

They clearly had to do much more than just ask Serbs

to cooperate in a murder enquiry.

From the Russian point of view, ten years after

humiliation by the Japanese, this was a chance to man up,

so they stood shoulder to shoulder

with their Slavic brothers in Belgrade.

The Germans did not really care that much about the Balkans,

but they saw here an opportunity to check

Russia's massive arms build-up,

which by 1914 wasn't yet complete.

A German war with Russia implied a German war with France.

Why?

Because, A, there was an alliance between the French and the Russians

and, B, there was a German war plan, the Schlieffen Plan,

that required the Germans to knock out the French

in order to stand a chance of beating the Russians.

What's more, that German plan also implied the violation

of Belgian neutrality. Why?

Because the German generals calculated that they could

only knock out France if they sent a part of their force

to the north and west of Paris...

..rather than across the heavily fortified Franco-German border.

All of this was more or less a predictable consequence,

a chain reaction, from the catalyst in Sarajevo.

Indeed, maybe be surprising thing

was that the war hadn't happened before.

There was just one unknown quantity

and that was the biggest empire of them all - Britain.

What made the First World War a world war,

and a four-year one at that, was the British decision to intervene,

ostensibly to uphold the neutrality of Belgium.

In reality, to avert a German defeat of France.

And contrary to what you may have been taught at school,

this British intervention was far from inevitable.

August 1914.

In Whitehall, ministers weigh

the pros and cons of intervention in the war.

The 2nd of August 1914 was a rather stuffy, thundery Sunday

and all the members of the Cabinet would much rather have been

down in the country.

The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was a keen fly fisherman.

He would rather have been casting for trout.

The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, would have preferred to be

sipping gin with his mistress, Venetia Stanley.

Both men knew that Grey had privately committed Britain

to support France in the event of a continental war,

but there was no formal alliance.

They had not been able to commit the Cabinet or Parliament to the policy.

The only person in the room who was truly happy

was the First Lord of the Admiralty,

but then Winston Churchill openly admitted to loving war.

The anti-war element in the Cabinet looked to the radical

Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Welsh wizard, David Lloyd George.

They were convinced that he would speak up against

British involvement in the unfolding continental war.

Britain's decision for war in 1914 was the result not of

grand strategy, but of low politics.

What kept Lloyd George silent

and ensured that the rest of the Cabinet

lined up behind Grey, Asquith and Churchill

was the realisation that if they didn't, the hawks would resign,

the government would fall and the Tories would be in.

And the Tories were even more enthusiastic than Churchill

for a war against Germany.

If only those poor opponents of war sat round the Cabinet table

that day had been able to glimpse just a little of what

lay in store for them, might they have acted differently?

Well, we can't know for certain what might have happened

if Britain had delayed intervening.

Maybe the Germans would still have failed

to break the French will to fight on.

But I think the absence of a British expeditionary force

would have been decisive.

As in 1870, and as would happen again in 1940

even with British support, the French would have faltered.

After all, the opening six months of the war

saw half a million Frenchmen permanently incapacitated -

a shattering level of casualties.

Without escalating British support, the war would have ended with

a German victory in 1916 if not earlier.

But then what?

Well, the traditional answer to that question is that Britain

would have suffered a disastrous loss of prestige and power.

Not only would have Perfidious Albion have left

the Belgians in the lurch, now a superpower Germany

would be able to build naval bases on the Channel coast.

And yet there is absolutely no evidence from the period

before the British intervention that the Germans intended to

establish a long-term presence in Belgium.

Left to their own devices might they not have focused on defeating

Russia, which was in fact their main objective?

Now, remember not to confuse the two world wars here.

For example, Eastern Europe's Jews would have been much

better off under the Kaiser than under the Tsar.

And if the Kaiser's Germany had used victory on the European continent

to annex Belgium, would that really have posed a fatal threat to

the mighty British Empire covering, as it did, a quarter of the world?

Ruling not only the waves but also the international capital market.

Britain would still have had the option to intervene

when ready to do so.

Could we not have bided our time to see how the continental contest

turned out and to build up our land forces,

rather than throwing barely trained recruits at the German lines?

When I reflect on all the young men whose lives

were lost between 1914 and 1918, to say nothing of the horrendous cost

of the war, I can't help feeling that the British Cabinet made

the biggest error in modern history on that sweltering summer Sunday.

For British intervention in 1914 didn't just change the course

and outcome of the war, it also changed the way the war was fought.

British intervention turned a continental war into a world war...

..which the European nations

could wage only by mobilising

all their resources,

including manpower

and materials from their empires outside Europe.

The result was bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.

But what is often forgotten is that your chance of being killed

depended a great deal on where you came from.

In absolute numbers, the French, the Germans, the Russians

and the Austro Hungarians lost by far the most men in the war.

But if you put the figures in percentage terms,

a very different picture emerges.

Take the case of Britain and Ireland.

Something like 6% of men aged between 15 and 49

lost their lives during the war,

but that was by no means the highest percentage.

In the case of France and Germany, the figure was above 12%.

The same, by the way, goes for Scotland.

But for Romania it was 13%

and for the Ottoman Empire, 15%.

And yet by far the largest casualties in relative terms

were suffered by Serbia,

where around 23% of military age men lost their lives.

The contrast couldn't be more extreme

between Serbia on the one side

and the United States at the other end,

where just 0.4% of military age men were killed.

This was a world war all right, but where you came from

significantly influenced your chances of surviving it.

British intervention also ensured a step change in the way

the war was conducted.

It wasn't the tank, much less mustard gas,

that inflicted most of the war's casualties.

The technological innovations of this war were in fact

far fewer than those of the Second World War.

Beyond the rail heads, horses still hold the supplies.

Men still fix bayonets. The real change was in this.

SHELL WHINES

RAPID ARTILLERY FIRE

"Hark! Thud, thud, thud,

"Quite soft...

"They never cease...

ARTILLERY FIRE

"Those whispering guns O Christ, I want to go out

"And screech at them to stop

"I'm going crazy; I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns!"

HUGE EXPLOSION

Well, that was the poet Siegfried Sassoon's electrifying

Repressions Of War Experience, written while he was convalescing

in Kent, where the guns of the Western Front were still audible.

And you've just experienced the sight

and sound of 20 seconds of artillery shell fire.

On 21st February 1916, before the Battle of Verdun,

the Germans fired 100,000 shells from 1,400 guns

every hour for ten hours along an eight-mile front.

The Germans called it Trommelfeuer - drum fire.

The overwhelming majority of casualties in the First World War

were caused by such storms of steel and explosives. Never before

in all of military history had so much firepower been unleashed.

And this was because of the way Britain's intervention

had turned what might have been a relatively short

and mobile war into a protracted war of attrition.

At the beginning of the war, in August 1914,

French infantry, conspicuous in their traditional blue coats

and red trousers, advance through the Ardennes Forest.

Who could have designed a better target for the German machine gunners?

RAPID GUNFIRE

In just one day, 27,000 Frenchmen died.

But with the British Expeditionary Force helping to halt

the German advance at the Battle of Marne, in September 1914,

the war soon mutated from this...

..into this.

What distinguished the Western Front from the other theatres of war

was the scale of the trenches and fortifications set up

to protect troops from lethal hails of machine-gun bullets and shells.

The repeated efforts by both sides to launch frontal attacks

seem like madness to us today.

Perhaps that's why so much of the literature inspired by the war

has focused on the psychological traumas it caused.

Most famously, shell shock,

the mental damage inflicted by artillery bombardments.

Yet the truly remarkable thing about the First World War is that

despite the terrible conditions, only a tiny minority of men

suffered mental breakdowns or, for that matter, deserted.

The reality is that most men coped with the hardship and the danger.

Why was that?

Well, it seems that the threat of being shot at dawn wasn't crucial.

Because they were so static, the armies of the Western Front

could build the infrastructure to give the front line soldiers

the things they needed to make war bearable...

..regular leave, tolerably dry accommodation, alcohol, tobacco,

hot food, entertainment and even sex,

thanks to the French system of maisons tolerees.

Yet that is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for why

the First World War just kept on going.

Another reason was the growth of mutual animosity, even hatred.

Men who lost comrades to enemy snipers or shells

were seldom forgiving.

"We just looks on you as vomit,"

one Tommy told a cowering group of German prisoners.

And this may be the key to understanding why

the First World War broke the trend

of declining violence in the Western world.

This new kind of industrialised warfare seemed to strip away

much of the hard-won civilisation of the previous centuries...

..and to expose the fundamentally violent nature

of the male of the species.

BELL TOLLS

Most of us regard ourselves as upstanding members of society,

who don't harbour violent thoughts towards our fellow citizens.

So the findings of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker

may surprise you.

The vast majority of us

are never going to commit an act of violence in our entire lifetimes.

However, a large number of us harbour fantasies of committing violence.

And if we just do surveys of even university students,

and ask them, "Have you ever fantasised about killing someone

"that you don't like?" a majority of them will confess that they have.

And often people will play out in their minds

how they will cut or shoot or strangle or torture,

in theatrical detail, their former tormentor or enemy.

So what happens when these demons are taken to war?

In modern wars, what often happens is that the nation state gets defined

psychologically as the in group or the out group.

And we can project distrust, fear, prejudice

against the enemy coalition.

It's easy to demonise the other side if the other side

commits a harm against you or your allies, then it's natural to

think that they are less than human, they are evil, and that sets the

stage for a willingness to retaliate and a belief that it's just.

Then if, suddenly, the opportunity presents itself

where they outnumber a member of the enemy,

then savagery just... can burst forth.

The founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud

called it the "death instinct".

What Freud is saying is that under particular kinds of cultural

and social conditions, quite suddenly, the mask slips,

and what is revealed is the most primitive forms of cruelty,

aggression and hatred, which Freud is saying

is part of what we are and we pay a great cost by not recognising it.

Literally, one week people could be neighbours,

going to the shops together and, virtually the following day,

because of a sudden imposition of an ethnic divide,

they become other and they become the hated enemy to be annihilated.

So the First World War was a turning point not only in the history

of war, but also in the history of the human condition.

It seemed to shatter the illusion of human progress onward

and upward and to confirm the most pessimistic views of our nature.

Ask yourself a simple question -

why, if the war was so appalling, did it keep going for so long?

The answer is that men got very good indeed

at killing one another.

And yet, even as the death toll rose to dwarf all previous

European wars, the weaker side stubbornly refused to give up.

Once Britain had intervened, the so-called Entente powers,

mainly Britain, France and Russia,

had overwhelming superiority and financial resources

and numbers of men relative to the Central Powers, Germany and Austria,

plus Turkey, which had come in on the German side in November 1914.

In terms of population,

the ratio of advantage was more than five to one.

In terms of economic output, nearly four to one.

The Entente powers spent two and a half times as much on the war

and yet it dragged on for four and a quarter years. Why was that?

One answer, as we've seen,

is that industrialised slaughter was just much more tolerable

than anyone before the war could possibly have imagined.

But a better answer is that the Germans were able to

compensate for their demographic and economic disadvantages

by being better killers.

If you judge military success

by the philosopher Bertrand Russell's yardstick,

maximum slaughter at minimum expense...

..then Germany won the First World War.

As you can see, in literally every month of the war,

from August 1914 through until the summer of 1918,

the Germans consistently killed or captured

more British and French soldiers than they lost themselves.

And the margin of superiority was even greater on the Eastern Front.

To put it absolutely brutally, the Germans were more efficient.

They killed 35% more than they lost,

they captured 30% more than they lost,

and, what's more, they did it more cheaply.

Here is a grotesque statistic.

It cost the Germans roughly £2,300 to kill an Allied soldier.

It cost the British £7,500 to kill a single German.

So why were British soldiers less efficient killers?

Well, the obvious answer is that for most of the war

they and the French had to take the offensive to dislodge

the Germans from their heavily fortified positions in Belgium

and northern France.

But the Germans were also the leaders

when it came to tactical innovation.

It was they who pioneered the lethal creeping artillery barrage

and the system of defence in depth.

For these reasons, despite their economic disadvantages,

the Central Powers had a serious chance of winning the war.

By late 1917, a savvy investor might even have been tempted

to bet on a German victory, or at the very least on a stalemate

and a negotiated settlement.

By the spring of 1918, a German victory looked even more likely.

After imposing a punitive treaty on Russia's

new Bolshevik government,

the Germans moved more than half a million soldiers

to the Western Front for a massive offensive.

For a time, the German Army carried all before it, capturing and

killing dazed British soldiers and driving deep into enemy territory.

After years of stalemate, victory seemed to be within their reach...

..but no.

Just a few months later, in August 1918,

the German army suffered what its commander admitted was

"its greatest defeat since the beginning of the war".

On October 4th...

..Germany was forced to request an armistice.

Many Germans reacted to their defeat with incredulity and anger.

Among them was this man, Adolf Hitler.

He's the one on the left who isn't smiling.

Hitler, a messenger in the Bavarian Army,

was lying in a hospital bed recovering from a gas attack

when the news of the German surrender came through.

For Hitler,

the only way to explain this extraordinary reversal

of military fortunes was that the proud German soldier,

undefeated in the field,

had been stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists at home.

Let's see why he was wrong.

One obvious answer to the question of why the Germans lost is

that 1917 the United States joined the side of the Entente powers.

And yet it's a mistake, I think, to imagine that the US decided the war.

In reality, it was the British Army that won the First World War,

and it did so by finally beating the Germans at their own game,

lethally combining infantry, artillery, armour and air power.

As you can see, from July 1917 until June 1918

there were hardly any German surrenders.

But then, beginning in July 1918, there was an explosive

tenfold increase in the number of Germans laying down their arms.

Now, the key to this collapse of German morale was the role

their officers played. This wasn't a breakdown of discipline.

Often the German men laid down their arms at the order of their officers.

So this was how the war ended,

not with Hitler's mythical stab in the back

but with a sickening recognition by what was left

of the German officer class that the war simply couldn't be won.

It turned out that the key to victory

was not maximum slaughter at minimum expense.

The key was to persuade one side to start surrendering.

To win the First World War,

the victors had paid a staggering price in blood and treasure,

indeed a much higher price in absolute terms

than was paid by Germany and her allies.

We're left with just one question.

Was it worth it?

Imagine a country which has lost 22% of its territory...

..incurred debts equivalent to 135% of GDP,

a fifth of it owed to foreign powers...

..where inflation and then unemployment have risen to

levels not seen for more than a century...

..and which is in the grip of an unprecedented wave of strikes.

Imagine a country in which the poverty of returning soldiers

and their families contrasts grotesquely...

..with the conspicuous consumption of a hedonistic and decadent elite.

This was not only Germany in 1918.

It was Britain too.

For winners and losers alike ended the war exhausted -

bereaved by their losses, weighed down by debt,

demoralised by four years of deprivation.

And for what exactly?

At the beginning of this programme, I said that the First World War

was the great turning point of modern history.

Well, now I hope you see why.

Not all its consequences were negative, to be sure.

Autocrats fell from power

and for a time it seemed that democracy would be the victor.

Between 1914 and 1919 in more than 20 countries,

and six American states, women got the right to vote.

Nevertheless, the war ended the illusion of a world steadily

growing more peaceable and civilised.

It transformed war in its scale and its nature.

Itself born of a terrorist act, it brought forth chemical weapons.

It vastly increased the power of the state

in both economic and political life.

And it also altered our very understanding of the human mind,

laying bare its deepest and darkest destructive impulses.

At a peace conference held in Paris,

the winning empires tried to impose a new order on the losers with

a series of treaties, most famously the one signed at Versailles.

As was traditional, the victors took away land,

reallocated colonies and imposed indemnities, known as reparations.

But to imagine that the Germans could simply be kept weak

by making them pay reparations was to dream.

The war had been sold to the American public

as the war to end all wars and yet in the subsequent decades

the violence was more or less unceasing.

In the ruins of the Russian Empire,

a civil war raged that claimed millions of lives.

Meanwhile, in what was left of the Ottoman Empire,

what had begun with the genocide of the Armenians continued with

the ethnic cleansing of the Orthodox Greeks.

In the Far East, in the Middle East, war raged on,

long after the guns of the Western front had fallen silent.

Part of the reason the violence continued was that the war created

opportunities for abnormally violent individuals to come to power.

Without four years of slaughter,

it's very hard to believe that a psychopath like Stalin

could ever have come to rule over Mother Russia.

But for the First World War, Hitler might have ended his days

as an obscure postcard painter in Munich.

It took the war to create the two inhuman ideologies,

Soviet socialism in one country and German National Socialism.

It's always illuminating to think about what we historians call

the counterfactuals, the what-ifs of history.

What if the British Cabinet had decided not to intervene in 1914 and

to leave the French and the Russians to fight the Germans on their own?

Would there have been even one world war, never mind two?

And what would Europe look like today

if the Germans had indeed won that limited continental war?

Well, perhaps the answer is just a little bit like this.

A Europe dominated by the German economy.

What's more, the German Chancellor's proposal

for a European customs union, which was one of Germany's stated aims

after the war had begun, was to a remarkable extent

an anticipation of our own European Union - except, of course,

that our EU is the product of peaceful integration, not war,

and Angela Merkel is a lot less scary than Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Well, Britain's decision to enter the war of 1914 wasn't merely

tragic for the hundreds of thousands of British men

who lost their lives, I believe it was a catastrophic error,

without which the era of totalitarianism

couldn't have come about.

This isn't to denigrate the sacrifice of the men and boys

who laid down their lives for their countries, it's merely

to suggest that we need to learn the right lessons from history.

My grandfather was told he'd fought for civilisation -

that's actually what it says here on his victory medal.

Really?

Perhaps a more honest inscription would have been

that my grandad fought for the balance of power,

to prevent Germany from dominating the European continent.

Was that ever going to be stopped by brute force of arms?

Well, I've now said my piece. It's time to hear some other views,

and we're extremely lucky to have with us tonight

some of this country's leading experts on the First World War.

Gary Sheffield, I'd like to go to you first if I may.

Was Britain right to intervene in August 1914,

given how limited its land forces at that point were?

I think Britain really had no alternative

but to go into the war in 1914.

Because I must say I fundamentally disagree with your view

of the essentially benign nature of a German... if a German victory had occurred.

I think Britain went into war in 1914 for pretty well the same reason

that it had fought a series of aggressive states in Europe

going back at least to the time of Elizabeth,

including wars against Louis XIV of France, Napoleon,

and of course later against Hitler,

and pretty well for the same reason that Britain joined NATO in 1949,

to stop one continental power gaining hegemony over Europe.

-I...

-I can buy that,

but if you think of just one of those parallels you just drew,

the one with Napoleon,

Britain didn't immediately send large land forces to the continent

in the case of revolutionary France and Napoleonic France.

We waited, and we didn't actually deploy a large army until 1809,

relying up until that point on financial and also on naval power.

Can I go now to Hew Strachan, if you'll forgive me - we'll come back to you, of course.

Hew, do you agree with Gary's point that Britain had no alternative?

Would it really have been a catastrophe to have let the Germans

win a limited continental war sometime after 1914?

Why have you decided to call it a "limited" continental war?

Well, tell me why it would have been unlimited.

Well, it seems to me a war between major powers within Europe is inherently unlimited.

The ambition for a limited war is Austria-Hungary's ambition

for a limited war in the Balkans.

But the fact that the war has widened by the time,

or the incipient war has widened by the time Britain enters it,

does change the complexion radically.

And I think you've got to also take on board Britain's imperial position.

You present Britain as widening the war because it's an empire.

I would argue very forcefully

that Britain is trying to limit the war because it's an empire.

Germany wishes to widen this war beyond Europe.

The Kaiser makes that very clear himself at the end of July 1914,

saying that at least if there is to be war then Britain must lose India.

And it's then Britain's responsibility

to try and narrow it, try and contain it.

Britain wants it to be a European war, not a world war.

Let me go to David Reynolds now.

David, you've thought a lot about these international

historical questions.

Was there an alternative strategy that Britain could have pursued

that would have had a better outcome than the one that we saw?

Well, the question of course is posed with hindsight, as you've said.

It's the hindsight of knowing that death toll

and the fact that a war went on for four years.

In terms of the decision that the Cabinet finally made,

it seems to me that it did make sense

in terms of the traditions of British foreign policy.

I agree with you that there are various traditions here,

this is a power that is dealing with the continent,

dealing with a global sense and so on,

but I do think that the issue for the Cabinet which held it together

was not simply the question of, are we going to let the Tories in or not?

You mentioned Lloyd George in your presentation.

Lloyd George agonises over the question of whether to come into the war.

In September he finally comes out publicly

and says why he felt it was right that the British should fight.

Obviously the kind of speeches made in September

have an element of propaganda about them,

but they reflected Lloyd George's strong personal opinions, and he said

we are now fighting against what he called "the road hog of Europe".

The Prussian Junker is the road hog of Europe.

He's driving, as Lloyd George put it,

little 5' 5" nations off the road, like Serbia, Belgium and so on.

Lloyd George had been a Welsh nationalist in the 1880s,

he stood up for the Boers against the British in 19...in 1899,

but now he felt that the British were essentially right

on the issue of power politics but also on the issue of morality.

David Stevenson, thinking about the imperial standpoint,

did Britain have any alternative strategy in 1914

than to take what amounted to a huge risk,

to intervene in a land war for which it was in no way prepared?

From the vantage point of 1918

it surely hadn't been very good for the British Empire.

You're not making a moral or an ethical point.

Of course one can look at these one million dead,

the pictures that you've shown us, and one can say,

"How on earth could that have been justified,

"what could possibly have been sufficient to explain

"or to justify that level of sacrifice and suffering?"

But I don't think that's your starting point.

Your starting point is a political point, that this was a mistake,

this was an error.

That, in other words, that choices existed and the bad choice was made.

But what you miss here, I think,

is the...what is the fundamental problem

is your comparison of a possible scenario of Europe

settled on the basis of a German conquest and victory in 1915,

as against the settlement that actually emerged in 1918.

I think you're much too benign in your interpretation of what

a Europe under German domination in '15, '16 would have looked like.

Your question, I think, has to be

whether a Europe based on German military power, domination,

vassal states, which is they language used in German terminology

and planning documents,

is that really like the European Union that we have today?

However much you may disagree or dislike certain features of it,

I don't think it is. I don't think it was a stable basis.

David, I noticed as you were talking Heather Jones nodding

when you said that a German victory would not have had such

benign consequences, and that seems a really crucial point.

We're trying to imagine here a world that didn't happen,

a world in which Britain doesn't intervene.

Heather Jones, what do you think a German victory would have looked like,

especially one that had come much earlier than the ultimate end of the war in 1918?

What we're looking at is really a very ruthless occupation of Belgium.

The invasion itself has been very ruthless,

we have 6,400 Belgian and French civilians,

women and children, quite young children,

shot by the invading German troops,

and the actual occupation which follows is also extremely ruthless.

Civilians are deported to work in German war industries

against their will, civilians...women are deported

from Lille to work in... on the German war effort.

This kind of Europe that you're envisaging

that the Kaiser's Germany would have created

would have been something really quite oppressive,

and in the east as well, in the Baltics,

where we know that there's a very oppressive occupation as well.

I mean, this is a Germany that goes to war where the parliament

has no control over who is in government,

the government is chosen by the Kaiser,

where by 1916 we have a military dictatorship,

headed by the generals, Ludendorff and Hindenburg.

It's not a benign Germany.

This was a very ruthless invasion from the start,

it aimed at increasing German power, Germany wanted to become

an empire, and it saw France and Britain as having achieved that.

Just before we go to the audience, I can't resist getting a German perspective on this.

John Jungclaussen, speak for Germany!

HE CHUCKLES Let me, yes!

Well, I think what we tend to underestimate

in this discussion quite easily

is the importance of the economic growth of Germany after 1871.

Germany's nationalism, er, was not least bolstered

by this extraordinary economic growth that the country experienced.

The growth was such that it spurred a kind of nationalism on

and let the Kaiser, er, ride ahead.

But I think, had it been for a German victory early on,

it would have been...return to a degree of economic sense, I think,

a degree of what makes sense to grow the economy further,

rather than to oppress smaller countries.

Well, this is the moment that I'm going to turn from the experts -

I'll be back - to the audience.

In 1914, the people who made the argument that I'm making

were the people of the left.

This might not have struck you yet,

but the only people who strongly argued for nonintervention

in 1914 were the far left of the Labour Party, and that indeed

is one of the puzzles of the debate that we have these days about 1914.

Almost nobody seems to want to make

that left-wing case for nonintervention.

Is there anybody here who buys the idea

that Britain should have stayed out,

or are you all convinced by the majority of the panel

that we did the right thing to intervene in 1914?

There's a lady there, in the nice red jacket.

Can I just say, I think the problem with your broad brush

and drawing the relevance for today is you've actually done it

with certain inaccuracies that our panel have pointed out.

The first is the idea that if Britain hadn't gone in it would have

been a small-scale conflict, and that's been answered.

The second is this preposterous, and you call it playful,

idea that if Germany had imposed its customs union

it would have been like the EU.

I mean, that I think is actually quite a damaging sort of argument

and modern analogy to make.

So, although I'm not against your counterfactual ideas

and your popular interpretations, I think

you must do it with a level of... of accuracy, dare I say.

Well, of course there's a very big difference

between speculation and fact,

and we can none of us say factually what would have

happened if Britain had not intervened.

In that sense it's not about accuracy, it's about interpretation.

And as for the parallel with the European Union,

I said quite deliberately that that was playful but it's designed to make us think.

After all, are you telling me that Germany doesn't dominate

-the European Union?

-No, but I think it's...

-Tell that to some Greeks.

I think it's actually rather irresponsible of you to be playful

about, dare I say, a serious subject, you know, um...

Why is it...? Why is it irresponsible

to ask a question about

whether it was worth the United Kingdom

fighting for four and a half years,

sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives,

if the net result is not profoundly different from

the one that we've ended up with?

I mean, that fundamental question,

was it worth fighting to resist German domination

of the European continent, doesn't seem to me facetious at all.

It seems to me highly relevant today.

Let's think a little bit more about these issues

of why the war lasts so long.

After all, we're actually rather accustomed to wars ending

via negotiation, and that doesn't happen in this case.

This war ends because one side collapses.

Are there any thoughts over here about the duration of the war?

I'm particularly interested to hear from men in the age group

that fought, which...I think you definitely are in that age group,

you wouldn't have been able to dodge the draft.

You made that point about soldiers having a lust for revenge,

which kept them fighting possibly until the last man was standing.

And then famously in 1914

didn't the Germans and the British forces have a football match?

-That is true.

-And then exchange gifts.

I was just wondering... where was the turning point?

Like, where the war became serious

and these soldiers actually wanted to fight until the end.

This is a great question because it goes to one of the most

famous episodes of the war,

one which is sometimes dismissed as a myth,

the idea of a Christmas truce between British and German soldiers,

Christmas of 1914.

It's actually true, it did happen. At this early stage in the war

relations between the two armies were sufficiently good

that they actually fraternised in no-man's-land, and although

there were still some snipers taking pot shots -

it was a pretty dangerous thing to go and celebrate Christmas in no-man's-land,

I don't recommend it if you ever find yourself in that situation - it didn't happen again.

And maybe this is a good opportunity just to switch back to

one of the experts, Heather Jones,

because Heather's done some important work

on this precise question of why

relations between the two sides at the front deteriorated.

Is it right, as I've tried to argue,

that they go from potential fraternisation to hatred,

and is that one of the reasons that men keep fighting?

-Heather Jones.

-Well, I think there's many reasons why men keep fighting,

one of which is small-group camaraderie,

the simple fact of fighting for the man beside you.

Another reason is a sense that actually there's

a need for vengeance, as you said.

I would agree with that point, that if one has been in battle and seen

friends killed beside you it gives an impetus to continue fighting.

The other thing is simply by 1916 it is a different war,

a different type of battlefield.

It's industrialised, many of the men are actually killed at long distance

by artillery shells, they don't actually see those who kill them,

so a lot of the killing is actually anonymous in the First World War.

You don't actually have to have extreme enmity for your enemy

to...to participate, you simply are in a trench being shelled from above.

So there's a number of factors,

and I would argue it's an interactive process between them.

Gary Sheffield. Why do men keep fighting?

I would like to add to that, I spent a lot of time going through contemporary letters and diaries,

trying to understand what maintained

British troops' morale and motivation,

and the simple fact is a lot of them

looked at the devastation in Belgium and France and were saying,

"We're fighting so that does not happen at home."

David Reynolds. Let me come back to you for a moment.

When I try to imagine alternate endings to World War I,

one of the questions in my mind is whether it reaches a point

when negotiation, when diplomacy is no longer possible,

because there's just too much damage been done,

because the body count is just too high.

Do you think that's true, and does that tell us something important

about the nature of war and diplomacy?

Can you reach the point where negotiation is no longer an option?

I think you can, probably.

For example, Lord Lansdowne, who had been a former Foreign Secretary,

in 1916 first privately and then in public raises the question,

is the body count, as we would now put it,

worth carrying on this war for?

Have we gone too far?

Erm, and Lansdowne's question is pushed on one side because I think

it's almost politically impossible to say, "OK, we'll now call it a draw.

"We've had so many hundreds of thousands of people killed

"but we'll call it a draw."

So that there is a point at which

I think diplomacy ceases to be an option.

It's not clear how the war's going to end

until really quite late in the day.

The Germans still have, at least in their own minds,

a realistic chance of winning.

In the end the United States has to intervene

and become a combatant power.

Kathleen, why do you think it was impossible to end the war

by negotiation once it was clear that neither side could win easily?

Well, the thing is, what could America do to stop the war?

The US isn't threatened.

She only comes into the war not to save the world

but because she's torpedoed into it.

I myself don't think she would have joined the war

if she hadn't been torpedoed into it, no matter what Wilson wanted.

So, just to be clear, it's the Germans' sinking of American ships

using their submarines that's decisive in bringing

-the United States into the war?

-Yes, I think so.

I mean, Wilson won his election in 1916 by saying

he was the man who kept us out of war, and so forth.

But once the US is in the war, the US is the rising power.

It hasn't been killing and being killed for the previous three years,

it has a massive industrial, er, machine,

thanks to all the goods it's been doing,

it has the money - all the others are running out of money -

and it has an endless supply of Idaho farm boys.

It provides morale as well as manpower, money and armaments.

And so therefore, when you're in that sort of position,

Wilson says, "Now that they're financially in our hands they'll have to do what we want to do."

I was going to go to Gary Sheffield at this point

and say, what do you think the American role was,

not only in terms of the diplomacy but perhaps more importantly

in terms of the fighting in the final phase of the war?

Was it decisive?

On the United States' contribution to victory, I'd agree with Kathy.

I think actually their morale impact is huge,

both in boosting British and French morale

and depressing that of the Germans,

who suddenly realise there's a couple of million men coming into the field.

That's too many, to quote a German soldier at the time.

The war came to an end when the British Army,

and you put the stress on the British Army,

raised its effectiveness and was able to match the Germans

and overmatch them at their own game.

Now, I think what should be clear from the way the discussion is going

is that you need to see that in the context of American intervention.

And, in particular, what you need to bear in mind is,

sure the British Army became more effective.

Most of that effectiveness was already there by 1917.

It was being matched by increases in German army effectiveness,

so in effect, if you look at the Battle of Ypres,

third Battle of Ypres in 1917, the British Army was probably

doing more damage to itself than it was to the Germans.

Complete change by August 1918, and what's happened in the middle,

which you mentioned, is the Ludendorff offensives,

in which the German Army essentially wears itself out,

and the morale in the German Army is actually cracking

well before August 1918 because of those offensives.

But why were those offensives launched?

Because of the German fear of American troops arriving en masse

in the autumn of 1918, and therefore the Germans

not just staying on the defensive but going onto the attack.

That's where American intervention is crucial,

plus the financial factors that have been mentioned,

plus shipping, plus Navy.

Without the American intervention,

I think the best outcome one can see for the Allies is probably

some kind of unfavourable draw in the autumn of 1918...'17.

So the British Army plays a part in the August 1918,

but only as part of a much larger coalition effort.

Heather Jones, do you buy that argument that in fact

it is the home front that's decisive, in the sense that

the German home front is hungry, if not actually starving?

How big a part did that play in the ultimate German collapse?

Actually what's striking is how long the German home front holds out

despite the blockade shortages in 1918.

We know that there's hunger and there's real difficulties

on the home front in the spring of 1918

but with the hope of victory through the Ludendorff offensives they're prepared to hold out.

It's only when the news comes in October,

and it's a shock to the German population because of censorship,

when they suddenly find out the extent to which

their armies are being pushed back in France, that their morale crumbles.

So the Army defeat comes first,

and I'd really like to emphasise here the French.

The initial rise in surrenders in 1918 by German soldiers is actually

General Mangin's offensive at the end of July 1918 by the French.

Amiens is the second strike.

Going together they pummelled the German Army back.

It's not the case simply of the British doing it alone.

And I think that's very important, to really highlight that there.

David Reynolds.

There is a real debate in the autumn of 1918 about

whether to go for an armistice with the Germans, to allow them

to accept that

or whether to push on, as Foch, for example, the French marshal,

would want to do, push on into Germany,

and that's a question where the issue is being weighed up

against a clear-cut victory in which the Germans are seen to be

defeated on their own soil

against the extra tens of thousands of men

that would die if we did that,

erm, and how would we justify that at home?

We know from military historians that they very much HAD lost

and that that's exactly why they sought an armistice.

Heather Jones.

Ludendorff and Hindenburg realise the war is lost militarily

so they turn to the civilian politicians

from the more liberal parties in the Reichstag,

who've wanted democratic reforms in the Kaiserreich

for a long period of time, and who in fact supported the war

only as a way of getting leverage to get those reforms,

and they turn to the civilian politicians

and say, "You take charge now, you will negotiate the peace with

"the Americans," who Germany believe to be more favourable to them

than the British and French -

and therefore the civilians will carry the blame for suing for peace.

And that's effectively what happens.

It's masterminded really very cleverly

by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

David Stevenson wants to jump in at this point. David.

The thing that makes all this possible

is the German High Command's acceptance that military victory,

either by offensive or defensive means, is now out of the question.

And that brings us back to the other factors we were looking for,

looking at earlier on in this discussion, about why

the German Army is essentially crumbling in the summer of 1918.

Which is partly for the reasons you outlined -

British military achievement -

but also American and French contributions to that are indispensable,

which was partly why the war had to be ended in a compromise.

This is maybe the right opportunity to shift our discussion

to the consequences of the war.

We think about the law of unintended consequences,

which is probably the only law of history that I've ever recognised,

it's extraordinary in the way that it operates here.

Nobody in 1914 really sets out to blow up

the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to blow up the Ottoman Empire.

Nobody really sets out to drastically alter

the nature of political systems all over Europe,

including Germany and Russia, and yet that's the end station -

a fundamental re-drawing of the European map.

I wanted to go to Simon Winder, who's written a delightful book

on the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Did its collapse,

its disintegration into different national component parts,

represent a good outcome from the point of view, say,

of the British, who had perhaps not intended that outcome?

Well, I think it's one of the key catastrophes which really

sows the Second World War.

You can see the Second World War looming from this.

That once you have the centre of Europe broken into small pieces,

given, as you said earlier on, that these are not rational states,

and you can just see this horrible rubble forming across Europe

which really negates the whole nature of the victory

of the First World War. The allies don't really win

because they've simply created such a pressure cooker over these

four years that the centre of Europe breaks into pieces.

And those pieces effectively feed straight into Hitler's fantasies

and they feed into Communist fantasies and a kind

of horrible micro nationalism which is way outside Britain's control.

This is a moment to go to the audience

and see if there are any Leninists who want to agree with me

that this is ultimately an imperialistic war,

a war that's to be understood in terms of empires rather than,

I don't know, the rights of plucky little Belgium?

There's a young man there who wants to make a contribution. Yes, please.

What I'd like to know is, just where would Britain be today

had the war not happened, had it gone differently,

had the Entente had a more sort of decisive victory?

And would the Empire still exist today, or how long

would it have taken after 1918 for the Empire to disintegrate?

Well, any counterfactual question, we can only really guess.

But it seems to me the right kind of question to ask,

given that by intervening in 1914 in the way that it did,

Britain ensured that it paid a very, very heavy cost,

not only in terms of lives but financially, too.

And my position would be that at the end of it all,

by the time you get to the Armistice in November 1918,

the British Empire may be bigger, it ends up being bigger on paper

because it acquires territory from its defeated rivals,

but it's much weaker because, if nothing else,

it's lost an extraordinary number of skilled young men,

and perhaps more importantly, it's saddled itself with

an absolutely massive debt that makes it very difficult for Britain

subsequently to deal with the return of the German challenge.

So my answer to that question is,

in many ways, that by intervening in 1914,

the British Empire ends up hurting itself more than it strengthens itself.

Now, I'm absolutely sure there are members of the panel

who will take a very different view.

Maybe we should just think about it in terms of imperial interest.

Gary Sheffield, is the British Empire strengthened or weakened

by its intervention in 1914, do you think?

Well, I agree with you.

I think though it's bigger on paper, it is in the long term weakened.

There's a debate in Australia and New Zealand at the moment about

whether they were right to intervene in what's sometimes seen

as somebody else's war.

Trouble is, that is not how Australians and New Zealanders

thought of themselves in 1914.

There is a clear emotional link to the home country.

But even on a really basic, strategic level,

Australia's security was dependent on the Royal Navy.

If Britain is defeated, if the Royal Navy's defeated,

Australia is then vulnerable.

I'm really glad you brought up Australia.

I think to have this discussion and not mention it would've got us all into deep trouble.

One of the films that has had an absolutely massive impact

on public consciousness about the First World War has been Gallipoli.

And you have to find yourself asking the question,

why are there Australians in Gallipoli fighting the Turks?

Sean McMeekin, you have an answer to that question.

It's certainly not in the interests of the British Empire in any obvious way.

No, it was to win Constantinople and the Straits for the Russians.

It's quite simple if you actually look at the diplomatic documents.

Obviously this wasn't explained to the men who were waiting

ashore in the trenches and dying in great numbers and so on,

but if you actually look at what was literally being negotiated

in early March 1915, that's what the campaign was about.

In diplomatic terms, it's obvious. It was to win Constantinople and the Straits for Russia.

And, I must say, I hadn't realised until I read your book

that Mel Gibson had been fighting for the Tsar!

That came as a revelation to me.

Now, there's a young man here with a light green shirt

who's ready to intervene.

Are there no lessons that we can learn for our contemporary foreign policy

-from what happened in 1914?

-I think there are lessons.

-If there are lessons, what are they?

I'm sure there are lessons. If you think of Christopher Clark's recent work on The Sleepwalkers,

his message at a recent lecture on this matter was,

this could happen again but in the sense that a situation can escalate where there is not

absolute knowledge on the part of any actor involved,

rather than your argument which, I think,

if I interpret correctly, you're almost saying Britain has

the power to change a situation either for a good or a bad.

And I think you're making the terms and the possible outcomes

-on either side too easy.

-Well, in Chris Clark's book,

he makes the argument that the great powers sleepwalk into the war.

It's the consequence of bad decisions and miscalculation.

In that I think he's quite close to my view in The Pity Of War,

that it's a huge mistake and everybody's making it.

But isn't there an important lesson for our time there?

That you can end up making a very big war by mistake,

and I think it's worth maybe in the concluding phase of this discussion

just thinking about the wars we've seen in recent times,

none of which has produced a world war, thank God,

but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

Is there a sense in which we've learnt from the events of 1914

enough not to make those same mistakes again?

Or are you inclined to agree with the majority of the panel that

in the same kinds of circumstances, Britain would be right to go to war?

Kathy, what are the lessons for our time,

and in terms of how foreign policy should be made

and when military intervention is justified?

Well, there are no great principles on that

but I do think the real difference here between going to war then

and now is that we would know a lot more.

The benefit, shall we say, of the intelligence relationship

and signals intelligence and so forth

is that belligerents would know a lot more of what's going on.

The real problem, 1914, one of many real problems,

is that people didn't know what was happening.

You knew in general terms but British Foreign Office didn't know

what was happening in the German Chancellery, for example.

-It was...

-Well, one thing's for sure, the United States knows what's going on

in all the chancelleries in the world, thanks to the NSA!

I was merely going to contribute that very point, in fact!

But the point still remains, I think, is that there would be less

blindfolded stumbling into war now than there was then.

David Reynolds, could we stumble into a great war today

or have we enough intelligence to avoid it?

No, I'm not sure that we have enough intelligence but I think it would be

much harder to sustain a great war in the way that happened then.

If you think of the conflicts we've been through recently,

with embedded reporters,

with soldiers themselves taking their own pictures of a war,

the divorce between the home front