Musket (Darwin Thread!)
I notice your mate Sheffield was back-pedalling in the paper this morning.

Sheffield published this, 9th Feb 2014.

" but by refusing to set the commemorations into the context of the origins of the war and the aggression of the Central Powers, this is exactly what it has done. Merely commemorating the sacrifice of British troops without explaining why they died tacitly gives support to the dominant popular view that the war was futile and the deaths meaningless. So does the fact that the original programme of official commemorations included defeats such as Gallipoli and the First Day on the Somme, but omitted the great victories of 1918 that won the war, such as Amiens and the breaking of the Hindenburg Line."

" It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the idea of the war being 'futile' and the battles meaningless bloodbaths conducted by callous and criminally incompetent generals is (to use an appropriate word) 'entrenched'. In a two-decade career as a public historian, putting forward alternative views on television, radio and in the press, I have become well aware that daring to suggest that Blackadder Goes Forth is not actually a documentary brings forth paroxysms of anger."
http://www.historytoday.com/gary-sheffield/great-war-was-just-war