"If we accept that the purpose of remembering the First World War is to learn about the horrors of war, we are not teaching it as it was but rather as we presume it to have been. In other words, we have accepted that the conflict is not a historical event to be dissected and understood, but a moral lesson to be recalled. That is profoundly dangerous.

Teachers often complain about market ideology being poured into their classrooms, but it is equally as dogmatic to maintain that the only possible lesson to be learned from the 1914-18 hostilities is about the horrors of war. In fact, if the centenary is to be truly historical, the First World War needs to be considered in far greater depth, and the myths that have grown up around it challenged.

I would like to take aim at three here: first, that it was, without question, an unjust and imperialist war; second, that war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen provide a representative response of soldiers to the conflict; and third, that the generals of the First World War were ignorant and callous butchers who had no regard for their men. All three of these myths appear to be deeply embedded in too many of our schools and in too much of our culture."

"The service experience of European soldiers ought also to be re-examined. Few British children can have made it through school without at least one English or history lesson on "the war poets", the teacher sonorously intoning Owen's immortal phrase, "you would not tell with such high zest/to children ardent for some desperate glory/the old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori".

This bitter anger at the futility of it all is sold as the authentic voice of the front-line soldier. Except it probably wasn't the majority view at all. Martin Stephen, a former high master of St Paul's private school in London, who completed a doctorate on the war poets, interviewed hundreds of First World War veterans in the 1970s and found not one who had a copy of work by the famous war poets or endorsed the views in that poetry."


"Many of the men Stephen interviewed were outraged by the patronising attitude of later generations that they had been mere cannon fodder, ignorant of the causes of the war and maltreated. They were clear why they had fought and satisfied that the war had been worthwhile. Nor had their experience been as unremittingly dreadful as some historians and polemicists claimed: 80 per cent of enlisted men came home again, and although most communities in the country bore some loss, there are villages in England where there is no war memorial because every man returned."