Historian Dr Gary Sheffield.
His own actual words Jim.
German policies in occupied territory fell short of the genocidal approach of their Nazi successors, but were brutal enough. In occupied France and Belgium there was a 'reign of terror', to quote two modern French historians, involving deportations, forced labour, and harsh living conditions. Democracy and liberalism would have been extinguished in most of continental Europe. No wonder the Allied troops advancing in 1918 were greeted rapturously as liberators by French and Belgian civilians in the occupied zone. For Britain to have stayed out of the war would have been to condemn the peoples of occupied Europe to a very dark existence.

British faced an existential threat in 1914. A German victory would have imperilled the security of the British state and Empire, and left it in the position it actually found itself in a generation later, in 1940 – isolated, without allies, and facing a bleak future. That is why Britain entered the war and continued to fight it, in spite of the appalling cost. The British people were prepared to bear that cost: the evidence is clear that they recognised that there was something worse than the war – a German victory.