The corner stone of British foreign policy since 1700 until our entry into the EEC has been that no single country in Europe should be allowed to become undisputed masters of Europe.

So was the declared policy of all other powers including German, and their newspapers offered "news" that the other countries were now trying to become such masters. As someone mentioned upthread, the French and British governments did not really trust each other either - let alone Belgium. Alliances were forged in order to win, not by moral criteria.

Frenchmen in 1914 (including two of my grand-uncles) were certainly right to defend their country once the disaster was there. This must not lead us to glorify or "celebrate" their government - as my grandmother, their sister, clearly understood and later told me. (She also told me that the British soldiers had a completely distorted image of continental Europe - but that should not be news to anybody.) Of my distant German relatives I know nothing at all, but I read that German and Austrian soldiers were about as convinced of their cause being good, as French and British were.

Newspapers were among the main culprits, and often they did not have to lie, just to select. (I wrote that before, sorry.)

"Well led" in terms of military technique is a completely different category. Its moral component is about weighing human lives against chances for victory. Not easy to decide by philosophy and in practice. However, the idea of sacrificing lives to defend one's society's claims is anchored deeply in our genes, simply because those who did not have those genes were exterminated long before the others had even evolved to become homo sapiens, and sophisticated inter-society morals were invented. "Right or wrong".