Keith:
"The Kaiser presided over a pretty nasty regime."
So did the king - as witnessed by our popularity throughout the Empire. We were still slaughtering our 'colonial brothers' in Kenya and Malaya well after WW2 (The War To End All Wars)
"Would hundreds of thousands have marched off to a foreign war, for an implied promise of something they were not even bothered to vote for?"
You mean like "A land fit for heroes to live in?" - yes, they certainly would/did and they returned from the carnage of the trenches to the the mass unemployment and squalor of the great depression. Many of the men who fought in the trenches were shipped off as Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to suppress the Irish. Apart from the Easter Week executions one of the factors that led up to Irish independence was Britain's threat to bring in compulsory conscription. The recruiting techniques were outlined beautifully in volume one of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 'The Scots Quair, and in Joan Littlewood's 'Oh What A Lovely War'(among other works).
The majority of the population (women) did not get the vote until 1919 (Catholics in the North of Ireland only received the vote comparatively recently - hence the Civil Rights Movement and the Troubles which broke out in the 70s).
Minna,
The term 'Foggy Dew' occurs in (in fact it gives its name to) an extremely popular English folk-song. The meaning is obscure - there have been rain-forests of paper and oceans of ink used in discussing what it refers to (probably a sexual reference), pretty much without reaching any satisfactory conclusion.
Jim Carroll