Kevin, Max Hastings.
"David Cameron displays unhesitating pride in Britain's World War II stand against Hitler. But his own and his colleagues' knowledge of 1914-18 derives chiefly from watching Blackadder when they were in short trousers.

They learned to think of the struggle simply as a pointless tragedy in which Britain's idiot generals committed mass murder.

This 21st-century view has also been strongly influenced by the satirical musical Oh, What A Lovely War!, and by the 'trench poets' Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, whose impassioned pens depicted in the most vivid and moving terms the nightmare to which their generation was subjected in France.

But no poet ever identified a route by which the British, French and Belgian people could have escaped the conflict, save by accepting the Kaiser's domination of Europe. Germany's 1914-18 war aims fell not far short of those of 1939-45, except that there was no genocidal programme against the Jews."

"Though a few sensationalist modern historians seek to suggest that the Russians — or even, crazily, the British — were chiefly responsible for Europe's catastrophe, the evidence shows that blame rests overwhelmingly with Austria and Germany.

It was Helmuth von Moltke, the Kaiser's army chief of staff, who said in 1912 'a war is unavoidable; the sooner the better' — and meant it. It was German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg who, in September 1914, when Berlin believed itself on the brink of victory, drew up a shopping list of draconian demands which would have imposed absolute German hegemony upon the continent.

The fact that Britain sacrificed three-quarters of a million lives to prevent the triumph of Germany's militarists should be a matter of profound pride to those men's modern descendants, not grounds for ministers to take refuge in empty platitudes.

Most veterans rejected the 'poets' view'."