 Hello, good evening, thank you very much indeed for coming, it's a pleasure to see so many people here, I'm Roli Keating, I'm Chief Executive here at the British Library and tonight we have the First World War, The Debate, and I think the fact that this is a sold out event gives a sense of just how much energy, curiosity, passion and just desire really to think and reflect on it. There is in the air, particularly I think in the last month or so, I think ever since this historical debate found its way deep into the political consciousness, into the public life of the nation. Michael Gove's intervention, the response from Sir Richard Evans, something happened that made us want to take this further and I hope one of the things the British Library can do as an institution is provide, if you like, a safe space for big ideas to be thought through and for people to understand and question and maybe question themselves and I'm sure that's what's going to happen over the next hour and a half. We try to do other things here as well, particularly in commemoration of the 1914-18 conflict. We are a research library, we're very proud of course to be able to put primary research materials out there onto the web increasingly for everyone to have access to and explore. Some of you may be familiar with the Europeana 1914-18 project where collections all over Europe are being published online together, some 400,000 items never before available, not just from the traditional archival collections but also materials from personal collections, there have been road shows all over Europe where private papers have been brought out and we've participated in that. From that material we've also published very recently our own website for an educational purpose primarily, it's focused on what can be done for young people in classrooms but I hope you will all find our World War One website because there's material of great interest for anyone interested in the period. Beyond that, as the year unfolds, there'll be events, conferences, Kate Adie will be here talking about women and the war and June 19th we'll see the opening of a free exhibition in our main public space here at the library called Enduring War, Grief, Grit and Humour about the personal experience, home front and on the front, how people coped and of course that's what journals and poems and manuscripts can reveal so clearly. We're also an active research institution and I'm delighted to say it is one of our active researchers, one of the collaborative doctoral students we have working here, Vincent Trott and in fact he's working with Annika on the panel who suggested that we do this, that the moment had come and we should seize the moment to have the debate and thank you Vince wherever you are but I'm delighted that from a spark like that we can assemble such a distinguished panel. I'm not going to do that introduction however, I'm going to hand to our chair for the evening, historian and journalist Paul Lay, former founding editor in fact of BBC History Magazine, a senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham, he's on the advisory board of the Institute of Historical Research but you may well know him as the editor of history today. Paul please introduce the panel. Thank you. Thank you really. We've got a very distinguished panel here, I should say something about the way this came about, it was a great initiative by the British Library because it actually came about from a Twitter conversation that was born of the debate that well we'll call it a controversy between Gove and Richard Evans and Tristram Hunter was there and people like Simon Sharman became involved in Gary Sheffield I think was the main agent there. And Gary is one of our guests today and the BL responded tremendously quickly and put together this debate, it didn't even feature in the Watson listings so and I think that the number of people have turned up here is practically a sold out event, 280 people shows that great war fatigue has not set in yet and it looks as though it won't at all. So anyway I will introduce you to the panel. On my far left is Gary Sheffield who is Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton where he's a recent appointment he was formally at Birmingham University and he's written mainly I suppose his most famous for his work on Douglas Hague which is of course revisionism. He's associated with some, The Forgotten Victory, The First World War myths and realities, all fantastic books that have reassessed entirely our understanding of the First World War. On my left is Dr. Annika Mumbaugh who is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the Open University and I think that anyone who wants to engage with The First World War and really wants to go back to the sources should get a copy of origins of The First World War controversies and consensus and there are recent publication from Oxford University too that looks at the sources there. You can actually look and hear the words from the horse's mouth there and it's very very valuable to go back to those sources and to see and escape anachronism and hear the voices of the period. On my right is Dr. Dan Todman who is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London who engages with the social, military and cultural history of the Great War looking at its course and its legacy in particular and he's the author of The Great War myth and memory and on my far right, not necessarily politically, is Dr. Neil Faulkner who is a research fellow at Bristol University and interestingly a First World War archaeologist a high profile Marxist historian it says here and he is a politically engaged one too. He wrote the Stop the War Coalition pamphlet No Glory, The Real History of the First World War so we have a wide range of opinions here but we also have serious academic engagement with the subject and I think that's very important because no subject is quite as riddled with myth as the First World War and I think what we want to do today is to do what Hugh Strawn has asked us to do and that is engage in controversy that controversy is the means by which we will best understand this war but controversy contention that is informed by the tremendous amount of academic history that's been produced in recent times. Myths do arise very quickly. I was thinking of Michael Gove's intervention. I'm not one of those people who just has a knee jerk negative reaction to Gove. Some things he says are interesting, some things aren't and some things are frankly ridiculous and what was ridiculous was the point about the arguments of the origins of First World War of the apportioning of guilt and blame being a left, right split. It's certainly anything but that. If one considers that John Charmley, Neil Ferguson, Dominic Sandbrooke, John Redwood and of course originally Alan Clark are of the left then one is confused. But those are all people who have argued that Britain did not benefit or Britain should not have taken part in the First World War. So I want to start this debate by going in at the deep end and by asking each of the speakers to mark out their positions as to the origins of the First World War where guilt, where blame is manifest if indeed it is at all. So I'll start with Dan, Dan Todd. Well actually I think it's interesting to be asked to place yourself in that position as a result of a debate initiated by Michael Gove to promote his own position as Scourge of the Left rather than to make any kind of contribution to the history of the First World War. But along with Paul I think sometimes there's a function for people driving debate even if that's not actually their intention is different from that of historians. For me what's interesting about that rather manufactured debate was how much it focused on Britain's participation rather than the mechanics of Europe going to war. So I mean as ever these discussions were about as if they were sort of an issue as if nobody had thought about these issues before whereas actually it's a kind of tribute to 100 years of Britain's debating. Is this a war that was worth it? Was it worthwhile? Should Britain enter? So I think we need to recognise this is something which is controversial at the time and which has continued to be controversial since and in a way that's a distinctly British argument in the sense that it's because Britain has a choice about whether it takes part in 1914. In a way that other countries I don't think feel they have the same way it's not invaded. So I think identifying this as a distinctly British argument is probably something that I'm most interested in. That's a way of avoiding taking a position. Well let me try and force you on that then. Did they make the right decision by taking part? Well I see it's defensive at your very right. That's a good historian's answer isn't it? Because it seems to me that if we accept an argument that Britain needs to take part for sort of geopolitical reasons which might be an argument for example that Gaby might make now, I won't cast him into a particular position. But then we have to accept that there's a particular value to the nation that exists in 1914 and perhaps we have to draw linkages to the one that exists now. I think that's why I'm anxious about saying this is something that is right for Britain to do because it may have been right for the Britons of 1914 and many of them certainly thought they were engaged in a righteous conflict. I think that Britain of 2014 is so different from the Britain of 1914 that it would be very dangerous to say this is a just war for example because to me that's to draw on the metric of the time in a sort of false way. Does it matter to Britain that it ends up on the winning side if there's a war to be won, if the war is going to be fought? It's an important facet of British history in the 20th century that it's on the winning side. I don't think you can understand what happens in Britain in the 20s and 30s, its reaction to the course of the rest of 20th century history without saying victory matters. But that's not the reason that it enters battle in the summer of 1914. And of course even victory in terms of someone like Ferguson would be Pyrrhic. We'll probably deal with those issues later. Annika, your position. I completely agree with you that this focus on Britain is important and also somewhat curious. We talk of the First World War but actually what we're looking at, we're always just looking at Britain's war, always looking at the Western Front and all the associations we have with the war. So it's quite important to think of the origins internationally but also to think of this debate internationally. And while we've been debating in this country, in Germany a parallel debate has been going on which is very interesting and at the moment I think it's no longer parallel but the two have crossed. So here we've debated I'd say until about six weeks ago, the main debate was about how to commemorate the war. There wasn't really much debate that it should be commemorated and I'm sure all of us would agree that something should happen to commemorate the war but how do you commemorate it? And historians have been quite worried about the fact that the government seemed to only want to commemorate defeats rather than perhaps also the fact that some battles were actually won and that in the end Britain was, as we just said, on the winning side. That debate hasn't taken place at all in Germany where the government doesn't want to commemorate the war at all. There are local regional initiatives but there is no concern by the German government to commemorate the war in a national way. So the debate, while we've now been debating what Gove and others have said in this really fascinating debate and I love the fact that what we all do for a day job has suddenly just become what everybody's interested in and that's just really wonderful. But while we've been debating whether or not the war was futile for Britain, in Germany they've been debating whether or not Germany actually caused the war because they've in a way got their get out of jail card in the form of a couple of publications that have made a huge splash in Germany, one of which is Chris Clark's Sleepwalkers, which has been available in German translation since September and is an absolute barnstorming success. Last I heard he sold 160,000 copies, I mean that's something I'm sure we can all just dream about and I would say until quite recently, I don't know, I don't want to talk for you but I dream about that. But until quite recently I'd say unless it was a book about the Second World War you had no chance of ever topping the bestseller lists but suddenly the First World War is very present in Germany and the debate there is about whether or not Germany caused it and the current consensus is well actually no, Germany didn't cause it, it was everyone and where the two debates now merge is that some German historians have picked up on this futility argument and they are quite certain that Britain could have stayed out of the war and it's quite astonishing to read that. They say that Britain was pretty much the only country who had no actual reason to go to war in 1914 and that it was the entry of Britain into the war that turned that European war into a global war so they completely turned it on its head which is really quite astonishing and worrying to read. But in terms of declaring a position after 100 years I'd still say that essentially the Allies got it right in 1919 and that Germany is more to blame than anyone else and that Britain should not have stayed out of the war. I think we're approaching this with hindsight but what we need to do is look at what were the options for Sir Edward Grey in 1914 and I just can't see how he could possibly have decided for Britain to stay neutral. It wasn't possible because it's not just Germany that's threatening Britain, it's also Russia in the understanding of the foreign office. Russia will be by 1916, 17, everybody in Europe things, Russia will be an invincible power. So what can Sir Edward Grey do? He can stay neutral then he's let down France and Russia, he's no longer got a credible ally on the continent. There is really actually no choice that I can see for a different decision so it's not really a very an apt question to ask could they have stayed out because in that constellation in 1914 and given the values that people had, I mean James Joel speaks of unspoken assumptions, there are actually lots of spoken assumptions, they're about honour, they're about prestige. These are things that today we can't really quite understand any more but at the time Austria-Hungry did go to war partly because of prestige and honour, those were the reasons and Britain and Germany and France and Russia all thought in those terms. So I think they needed that their hand was forced, they needed to enter this war but their hand was forced primarily by Germany. Thank you Annika, I'm sure we'll discuss Christopher Clarke's sleepwalkers later. I mean do you think just a quick question is part of the appeal of that in Germany because I was astonished by the number of copies it sold, I found out last week. Is that because it presents there I say to flattering picture of Germany in 1914 and in the build up to that? I think that would do Chris Clarke a disservice. No, not in Chris Clarke, I'm talking about the commercial success. No, it's a fine piece of scholarship. Yes, it is a fine piece of scholarship, it is also extremely well written and it was published and marketed at just the right moment in time so he's lucky in that his book was the first. Now there is an absolute avalanche of books on the first world war also in Germany and it's I think much harder now to stake that claim. Most people who bought the book will probably only buy one whopper of a book. They're not going to go and read everything that there is. So it was partly timing, it's partly that it's very readable but it is also that a lot of people in the media and in the German public where this has been debated in an unprecedented way, it really reminds me of the Fisher controversy of the 1960s where there was a similar interest and a similar public debate that you don't normally get in this way. And it is, you get for example one thing that you can do is look on Amazon and other such sites for the comments that people leave and it is absolutely astonishing how many comments, how long, how knowledgeable people are but also how they do say, well finally somebody says it wasn't us, we can't have been the baddies in everything and the fact that he's not German is particularly significant and often pointed out he's an Australian scholar working in Cambridge, he's got no ulterior motives, he's got no axe to grind, if he says it wasn't us then I guess it wasn't us. Neil, what's your position? Well you see it's very interesting that Annika refers to Sir Edward Gray and poses the question what should Sir Edward Gray do and there's a tendency I think among academic historians to assume that if they were to be transported back to the period that they study 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago they would be reincarnated as a great statesman or general or a senator if they study the ancient world or whatever. I want to suggest that we really need to think about the First World War in a different way because there are two ways of looking at history, there have been two ways of looking at history actually for about 5,000 years since the world was divided into rich and poor and in 1914 there were two Europe's, not just two Europe's in the sense that there was an entente alliance and a central powers alliance, there was another sense, a more important sense in which there were two Europe's, there was a Europe of rulers, of industrialists, of bankers and of generals and if you view history from above that's what you see and you see one group of bankers and industrialists and generals gathered around a union jack in one place and as you pan across you see another group of bankers and industrialists and generals gathered around a French trickleur and then you pan around a little further and you see another group of them gathered around a German cross and they're competing with each other, they're competing for empire, they're competing for markets, they're competing for raw materials, they've gobbled up the rest of the planet among themselves and now that war for empire and profit has rebounded into Europe, created an arms race that plunges Europe into war, a war of the great powers, a war of the great empires in 1914, that's what you see if you look at the top, if you take the perspective of Sir Edward Grey, there's another way of looking at 1914, you can look from below, you can look at the experience of the mine worker on strike against poverty pay in south Wales and compare him with the mine worker on strike against poverty pay in the Rhineland or the Czech mine worker in Bohemia or the Russian mine worker in the Don Basin and their enemy isn't other mine workers who've been put into uniform and sent by their rulers to kill foreign mine workers, their enemy is the mine boss, you can look at history that way, you can look at history from the perspective of the suffragettes fighting for the right to vote, who have no say in whether or not the British ruling class decides to go to war in 1914, you can look at the war from the perspective of the Irish nationalist for whom the enemy is the British empire, not Germany, you can look at it from the perspective of the Indian nationalist, let's remind ourselves that the British who in 1914 adopt a holier-than-thou attitude to Germany, arguing that Germany is the aggressor, Germany is autocratic, Germany is threatening the peace of Europe, it was the British who controlled a fifth of the world's land mass and a quarter of the world's population, hundreds of millions of people living under British imperial rule in order to enrich a tiny minority of bankers and industrialists at the top of British society and the British ruling class in defence of that empire and in defence of that wealth were willing to plunge Britain into a war that cost 15 million lives. Look at history from below and it's not a question about what Sir Edward Gray should have done but a question about what ordinary people should have done when their rulers made the decision to plunge Europe into four years of modern industrialised slaughter. If what happened between 1914 and 1918 isn't madness, isn't a world gone mad, isn't the proof that this system was a dysfunctional system, I don't know what is. Sorry, I'm just interested to know whether you're talking about what the European working class should have done or what they did. Do you want to come straight back? Because I take a lot of your points about Britain, the British Empire is not something one would now wish to fight for and it being a war of empires, that's an important way to think about it, but it strikes me that as an awful lot of South Wales miners who end up joining the armed forces, there's a lot of people across Europe who end up, you know, one of the great factors of explaining that outbreak of war is the failure of European socialism isn't it? No, I mean that is absolutely right and it seems to me that the leaders of the mainstream socialist parties and the trade unions in 1914 across Europe with some noble exceptions but they were a minority, betrayed the interests of their own supporters. I would put it as strongly as that because the socialist parties organised together in a second international and many of the trade unions had passed resolutions year after year after year at their conferences in the run up to war saying we will take mass action against war if it's declared. I mean many of them were committed to calling general strike action to stop the war. My view is they should have acted on that and then we would have avoided the four years of war between 1914 and 1918. We wouldn't have had to wait for that eruption of anti-war opinion from below that finally does bring the war to an end in 1917 and 1918 but only after 15 million people have been killed. And with very poor terms there are imposed by Germany there as well. But beyond that do you not think just one question that rises out of that and I very much agree about the importance of understanding history from below as well as above. But the way it's understood now there could be an argument that the social history, the way we understand what has become social history at least as far as public history goes has become divorced from the politics and the diplomacy so that we see very much a solipsistic kind of who do we think we are culture where we trace our family, we trace our culture. Perhaps it's due to the decline of Marxism, one of the sad parts of the decline of Marxism is that we no longer think of those social structures in terms of at least the way public history is presented. And so the kind of arguments that you're making which are probably valid arguments are not ones that are really getting through to the wider public because we tend to concentrate on the individual and then we tend to concentrate on the high politics and don't merge the two anymore. But anyway let's move to Gary Sheffield who I think will have probably different take on this. Gary. Well I was rather embarrassed by Michael Gove's comments because he sort of fingered me implicitly as a right wing historian. I'm a soft squishy guardian reader and I had a series of texts from various friends of mine who work in the state school system saying do you have any influence over your new best friends policies answer sadly no. My belief, I must say I have been very influenced by reading Annika's work and work of many other historians is that war was caused in 1914 by the deliberate and conscious decision of the ruling elite of two states of Austria, Hungary and of Germany. Austria clearly used the assassination of the Archduke as a pretext to go to war with Serbia. They wanted to crush Serbia for a matter of prestige. The Balkans was the last place in Europe that the Austrians could still throw their weight around and it seems very clear to me that they were determined to go to war no matter what. What I think is the crucial activity of the Germans and I certainly would agree with Annika that the Germans are very largely to blame was the issue of the so-called blank check, the blanket guarantee of support for Austria no matter what they were going to do. And both Austria and Germany, the other leaders were talking about very small groups of very cliques in both cases, took those decisions in the full knowledge of the likely outcome which would be that a war would not be confined to the Balkans that it would bring in Russia which run the hugely strong risk of converting into a general European war. Now, some historians, Fritz Fischer has already been mentioned, John Rol, whose magisterial third volume of his biography of the Kaiser has just appeared, would argue that there is conscious intent by the Germans to seek to carve out an empire in Europe. Others would say, okay, maybe that's not precisely what they're aiming to do, but at the very least the German elite are prepared to run the risk of bringing about a war like that in order to achieve at the bare minimum breaking up the entente of France and Russia with Britain on the sidelines peacefully, okay, but if it comes to war so be it. So the very best thing you can say about the leaders of Germany and Austria-Hungary is they were prepared to take criminal risks, I use the word advisedly, with the peace of Europe. It strikes me that the sleepwalker's thesis very much speaks to our time, to a time in which we don't want to allocate blame. Chris Clark and Richard Evans actually gone on record of saying that we should get away from the blame game. This strikes me as being frankly ahistorical, that the evidence to me is absolutely clear. Whatever their motivations, those two states bear the war guilt, the huge burden of the war guilt. Whatever you might say about the leaders of Britain, France and particularly Russia, their actions I think were largely defensive and reactive. Could Britain stay out of the war? No it couldn't. The geopolitical reasons, which Down has already referred to, I think are desperately important. If we see the British decision to go to war in 1914 as part of a continuum that goes back at least to the age of Queen Elizabeth, that's to keep the low countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, out of the hands of a hostile power, particularly a hostile naval power is, you know, one of the primary principles upon which British security and foreign policy are constructed. The wider issue of course is the balance of power. The Britain has historically sought to prevent the domination of Europe by any one power and thus allied with Germany, at least German states, against France under Napoleon and allied with France against Germany 100 years later. Britain basically went into the Second World War in 1939 for the same reason, joined NATO in 1949 for essentially the same reason. The other thing, the other issue, which I must say is actually loomed much, I've come to believe is much more important than I did when I did some writing on this about a decade ago, is the moral case. It's clear to me that people in Britain, particularly the non-conformist conscience, were so outraged by the invasion of Belgium, Germany ripping up a treaty, that it certainly brought, I think, the Asquiths government into the war more or less united. It brought Lloyd-Georgian board, certainly. We've got so used to politicians lying, we think nothing of it anymore, but in 1914 they thought differently. So the moral case, as well as the strategic case, I think is absolutely critical. The final thing I'll say actually is even if we could somehow wave a magic wand and discover that Chris Clark's sleepwalkers thesis is in fact correct, the way that Germany then proceeded to behave once war had broken out with the September programme, not only the policy but the plans or the actual policy of annexations in East and West, the treatment of occupied states, and the threat, the absolute dire threat that this posed to the very existence of Britain as a sovereign state, makes the First World War, for all the fact, is a terrible, absolutely ghastly experience of war which had to be fought and had to be won. Nobody in Britain really wanted war in 1914. There's a very, I think, if Germany had avoided going through Belgium, I think it's an extremely good chance Britain would have either stayed out of the war altogether or possibly have not come in until several weeks or even months later because the Asquiths government had fallen apart, which I think probably would have meant that Germany would have won and France and Russia would have lost. It's not a war anybody in Britain really wanted in 1914, but it's a war that people at the time from the very top of society, the very bottom, recognise the threat and recognise the war that had to be fought and had to be endured. I put my hands on my carton table, I'm for one profoundly glad that our ancestors took that decision, fought the war and ended up on the winning side. Can I just make one point? I've got a quote here, it's very interesting what you say about the reluctance that there was in Britain to fight. I'm sure that's true. I've got a quote here from a leftish academic journalist, Gilbert Murray, who very much opposed the Board and wrote in 1915, I've never till this year seriously believed in the unultrably aggressive designs of Germany. Now I see that on a large part of this question I was wrong and a large number of people in my honour most were wrong. One is vividly reminded of Lord Melbourne's dictum, all the sensible men were on one side and all the damn fools on the other and Igad Sir the damn fools were right. Now the damn fools he's talking about were people like Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, Lord Milner, people who wanted to create in the years running up to the war a much stronger army, the British army was very, very small, it relied on its naval power for its strength. Is there any sense that the war could have been avoided had Britain been more militaristic? Well the argument has certainly been made that if Britain had introduced conscription, had effectively had a continental army to back up its quasi alliance with Britain, with France and Russia before 1914, that's a possibility. But of course it was never going to happen because Britain before 1914 was simply never going to allow conscription to come in, so yes might be but really not worth debating because it was never going to happen, never practical politics. I can't see that it's in Britain if we're talking national interests, I can't see that it's in Britain's national interests to fight like France and Germany or Russia when it's not France or Germany or Russia. It's the world, it's the workshop of the world, it doesn't have an agricultural peasant class, what it's very good at is making stuff, so it should fight a war based on high technology, which is what it does. Exactly. And of course if you say that Britain should have had a big army, well you're kind of missing out the role that the British navy plays in eventually winning the war. So I think, I'm not sure just because Gilbert Murray thought that the kitchener was right to say we would have a big army, it's interesting of course it doesn't end up being deployed in the way he wanted it deployed anyway, which has led everybody else in Europe to fight themselves to a standstill and then disinterming the peace. So wars don't end up how people think they're going to be at the start. Of course. Was there any means, historians refer to the Court of Arbitration at the Hague for example? Was there any peaceful means by which it could have been resolved through such methods as Arbitration here? I mean are you aware of any such methods? That could have avoided the conflict. That could have avoided the conflict. That were based upon Congress. No, not really because you see if you have a world which is divided as the world of 1914 was between rival European nation states, creating empires and spheres of influence in America, Asia and Africa and building great armies to back their position both in Europe and in the wider world. You don't have the material basis for international cooperation to resolve conflicts of this nature. You have to overturn what was a profoundly and still is a profoundly dysfunctional global system where instead of having a world in which there is international unity and solidarity and a resolution of human problems collectively and democratically in a rational way by agreement of us all as a species. If you have a world that is divided in this way, internation states and corporations that are competing with each other, if that's the dynamic of the system, it doesn't matter what international institutions you set up. It doesn't matter if you set up a League of Nations. It doesn't matter if you set up a United Nations. It doesn't matter what kind of international organisation you set up. You are not going to be able to prevent war which is intrinsic to a system which is divided and competitive in the way the modern capitalist world is the world that has given us a century of war. It's a pipe dream. Yes, there could have been. The war could have been stopped by international mediation. Sir Edward Gray, I think on six separate occasions, proposed either an international conference on mediation. Now in the past two years, that is 1912, 1913, the Balkan Wars, had seen a revival of the old concert of Europe, actually the great powers around a table, both to prevent the war from spreading and actually to decide in some cases on which state was going to get which chunk of territory. And all the indications from 1912, 1913 was that Gray actually was quite sympathetic to the Habsburg case. Vernon Bogdano, a very important lecture sometime last year, and I think it's coming out in... It's the core of a book that's coming out later this year, has made the point, I thought very, very, very forcefully, that it is entirely possible, had the Austrians and Germans been serious about peace, which of course they were not, that had they been serious about it, there could have been an international conference ending with Serbia being punished, isolated, although not destroyed. So war could have been avoided, the Austrians could have got some sort of revenge for the assassination, the Russians wouldn't have been drawn in, but such peace process only actually work if the principal parties are serious about it. Russia was serious, France was serious, Britain was serious, Serbia, remember the choice, I suspect, but serious, Germany and Austria were not. But it's even worse than that, isn't it, that they actually say in Vienna after the assassination that a diplomatic victory would be odious. We do not want a diplomatic victory this time, particularly the chief of staff in Vienna, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who's been absolutely gagging for a war with Serbia for some time. Every kind of crisis he wants to have a war with, so this is his moment. The last thing he wants is arbitration or mediation. And as you say, there are all these offers on the table, they get dismissed out of hand in Berlin and in Vienna, and what the leaders in Berlin do is they say, we will pretend to pass on your mediation proposal, but please don't be fooled by this, we don't want you in Vienna to mediate, but we can't lose face, so we have to appear to be in support of the offers that are coming from Sir Edward Gray. And as you say, there's this tradition of solving crises around the conference table, and I can't see why this couldn't have worked again if that being the desire to resolve it. Edward Gray has come on for an awful lot of criticism from a whole series of historians, normally for not being tough enough, and I think that completely misunderstands politically how weak he is within the Liberal government, and anything else. For me, his biggest mistake is actually believing the international processes which have worked as recently as six months before will work in December of 1914. His mistake is believing the Germans, the Austrians are serious about peace when they are not. Just to follow up on a point that Neil made earlier, it seems to me that one of the problems with trying to stop the war once it's two or three years in is the level of popular commitment throughout Europe to it, but actually these wars can't just be fought by great statesmen, they can only be fought with popular consent, and actually because there isn't that kind of universal enthusiasm that I think people used to believe in in 1914, actually you would have had popular support for a peaceful resolution in 1914, it would have been politically possible domestically as well as internationally, but of course once the war is underway, by the time you get to 1960, 1970, that's much harder to achieve because it's politically much more difficult on the home front. And mentalities are hugely different, I don't think we can underestimate that. The mentality of people there, if you're thinking of the Russian soldier fighting the church and Fatherland, Christian patriotic duties in fact all the time, Rupert Brook writes at the beginning, now God be thanked who has watched us with this hour. These are sentiments that are unimaginable to us, but in terms of the mentality of that period, they are very real and that is what people believe and it's very difficult, but I want to try and move on because I realise we're really racing through time here, and I want to look at the legacy of the war and the way we understood it and why Britons are so fascinated by it, and I want to look at the idea of a good war versus bad war. When Britons look back at the Second World War, it's almost universally accepted as the right thing to do, it's almost mannequin in the way of good versus evil. There is little regret despite the suffering that's endured there, it was the right thing to do. That is not the way on the whole, the First World War is thought of any more and perhaps hasn't been thought of over the last 50 years. Dan, I wonder if you could talk about the way in which that's changed, because you do get criticism of strategy for example, even with people like Churchill or George, Basil Little Heart right from the beginning, but nevertheless they sense that the war is still the right thing to afford, it's still right to go to war even if the strategy is wrong. We think of books like by Frank Richards, Frederick Manning, JC Dunn, that are ambivalent I suppose, ambiguous about the war, but still relatively positive about the legacy of it. That changes, I wonder if you could chart that change. I think you've got to be very hesitant about ascribing a single view to Britons in that interwar period, because actually the war is very controversial whilst it's being fought and it remains very controversial afterwards. But certainly I think there's both a much broader range of opinion which says the conflict was worth fighting and it was for something and of course it's much harder to say it was worth nothing whilst so many people have lost loved ones. So this was a kind of structural factor in what can actually be said. Of course that idea, one of the ways that society deals with that idea of this kind of controversy but simultaneously this great tragedy of so much loss of life is to try and come to a kind of mutually acceptable meaning. And I think you see that transition from the 1920s going into the 1930s so that you get this idea that this was a war justified by the achievement of peace. Which I think is a very important way actually of then looking at Britain's involvement with Europe in the 1930s and how uncontroversial the start of the Second World War was. Of course it causes much less debate politically going to war in September 1939 not least because it's seen as a war for peace. So the sacrifice of 1914-18 will only be justified if Britain stands up for peace and redeems those dead soldiers. But it's really only I think in the post-Second World War era that you have a rewriting of the experience of the First World War in more purely negative terms. So partly that's because you have a comparison. So you can have a good war and a bad war. Britain's Second World War is better in the sense that it loses fewer people. I think one of the other aspects of goodness that we associate with the Second World War is the achievement of social welfare reform at the end of it. Of course what's often forgotten is how important in terms of improving the conditions of an awful lot of working class Britons the experience of the First World War is the fact that trade unions take advantage of what our labour shortage to strike and get better rates of pay. But more particularly I think in terms of working class family incomes just the sheer level of employment that makes the First World War a transformative moment as well. And then of course wars are always repurposed and revisited over time in history. There's always been an undercurrent of questioning even when the First World War is seen in more negative terms about is it really a bad war? So it's distinctive that we're having a debate today. I think one of the things that actually happens with the remembrance of the First World War is it becomes remembered in terms of debates. And those debates can be used to keep out people's political and personal identities. So actually one of the things that even people who might not know very much about the First World War they know about there were some debates there were some things that people argue about and I know who I stand on those debates and that's part of what makes me who I am. But in fact the origins of the war the reasons Britain went to war in both the First and the Second World War are actually quite similar. And when you talk about the effects in terms of labour in terms of welfare they are again strikingly similar. We did not go to war in the Second World War however much we like to think that to save the Jews we did not know about Auschwitz. There are probably similar reasons for the reasons we fought the First World War. If you want to see there's more a mixture of morality and geopolitics in both times around I think that's a good way of explaining why British statesmen and population are persuaded to fight twice over. But we do seem to have a turning point round about the 60s. Everyone remembers the BBC's great series The Great War which is still striking now when you see people in their 60s and 70s the Salmon at Epe. And you also get the first real public airing of Wilfried Owen's poems in the war Requiem. Oh what a lovely war of course comes through that. What's that turning point about? What does it represent? Well I know Dan would actually place the turning point a little later which actually I don't agree with him on but I think we've had many arguments about this. I think the 1960s it is I think the generation actually now viewing the First World War through the prism of the Second World War. The good war refracts the bad war if I put it like that. There's not a lot of things going on as well. JB Priestly for example who writes very movingly in the late 1950s of his experiences of the First World War but he sees this as through the eyes of I think a founder member of CND that said oh what a lovely war the background to it is the Cold War and this idea of the First World War is this tragic mistake and we'd be going down that slippery slide again. I can't remember exactly when oh what a lovely war is premiered. Yes I know it's 63 but within six months or so of the Cuban Missile Crisis it's very close. But we're talking about that sort of reaction. I think the other thing is that there is this more general the whole I don't want to overcook this the whole idea of the 1960s people being hippies and dropping out the rest of it but there is I think undoubtedly a backlash against the Edwardian conformist conformism personified by Harold Macmillan and I think the First World War is caught up with that whole sort of again don't make too much of it but counter-cultural idea of the rolling stones, the pill and all the rest of it. Macmillan's very much the similar. And he is of course Macmillan as a Grenadier officer in the war and I think the First World War becomes involved in these sort of wider societal changes and I can't remember whether Dan made this point of his right somewhere else but it's also the fact you do have at this stage grandfathers who have fought in the war sitting down with their grandchildren and talking about it being prompted by watching the Great War TV series and various other things that were going on. I mean I think that's where you get that intersection which once you start to analyse it looks very strange of Alan Clarke and Joan Littlewood but of course I think what links those is Clarke is writing as a sort of this is about a different sort of class struggle this is the up and coming technocrats versus the old aristocratic elite. So the lesson that he owned part of the point of writing the donkeys is just to make a kind of name for himself because he felt that being a novelist he wanted to try something new so the First World War thought it was going to be. Macmillan's a few bothers. But the stand point there is of that it's a the middle class who are technically adept wanting to sweep away an older system. So I don't think that's a bit different from hippies and you know tuning in and dropping out which I think is much more 1970s. This is a debate that's going on written from the 1930s onwards and you see it there at the end of the 1930s this idea of the generals in the last war didn't know what they were doing they didn't deal with technology well and it's significant it's focused so much on technology. It's not an accurate reflection of them but that thing of Britain needs to remake itself and the weapons of war is something that you see time and time again. What's interesting is that the sort of parallel debates that I just sketched out that are happening for the centenary that also happened for the 50th anniversary that while in this country these debates were going on in Germany the debate was again about war guild this time round the argument that it had been Germany's fault was debated in the media because that had been really very much buried by the late 1930s everybody had agreed that it was kind of nobody's fault in particular the system had broken down and that was very comfortable for Germans and the contemporary background to that debate again is significant when you mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis but obviously also in the 1960s you have the Berlin Wall you have the fact that Germany is at the very forefront of the Cold War and now you get a German historian not an Australian historian teaching in Cambridge and a German historian saying it was us and so that's very uncomfortable so the debates that Germans have about the war are completely different and I think apart from the issue of the origins the First World War itself has never been in any way problematised in Germany it's never actually been debated the war itself is just a complete non-topic it's obviously a non-topic in the immediate years after the war because you know the Germans lost the war and not only do they feel they didn't start they also feel they didn't really lose it but there they are and so you have a different relationship with that war because of its outcome and then after the Second World War well it was just so much more gruesome for Germans than even the First World War although startlingly deaths are similar as I hadn't really clocked but was pointed out to me just earlier 700,000 German civilians if you include the influenza dead but that is completely overlooked in Germany and really to this day I'd say in the last two years maybe there's this sudden interest in the First World War which suddenly in Germany is called the Great War I'm not quite sure why that's significant I think it is significant I don't know what it means but suddenly it has just completely changed the way Germans see the war has completely changed I think we are sort of we seem to be shadowing the kind of gove argument really which in its essence is saying that the way we view the First World War is based upon trendy views that were developed in the 1960s it's reflected in things like oh what a lovely war it's reflected a little bit later in Blackadder and so on that in a sense that traditional view of the First World War is a construct of relatively recent times now that only works if you can't see what is happening inside European society and inside the European armed forces that are engaged at the time of the First World War it is absolutely right that a very large proportion of those who were conscripted to fight or volunteered to fight when it broke out in 1914 were gulled by the dominant ideas of the time the nationalism the imperialism, the racism all of the other ideas that were used to mobilise people and get them into the trenches and get them killing workers in uniform and peasants in uniform on the other side but there was a minority a significant minority that opposed it from the very very beginning and that minority got bigger and bigger and bigger until across Europe across the fighting fronts there was a wave of mutinies and mass desertion and revolutionary movements among the soldiers which shut down the war on the eastern front in 1917 and then shut down the war on the western front in 1919 and on the home front a wave of strikes that culminated in a tidal wave of revolution that swept across Europe between 1917 and 1923 and actually brought the entire system the entire European state system the entire European capitalist system close to collapse we got closer then than at any other time in human history that creates the legacy creates a mass opinion that says this was an appalling slaughter and why is it so different the reaction to what is going on in 1918 than it has been before it's because war has changed it's because they have turned war into an industrial process up until this point armies were relatively small they tended to fight discrete campaigns in particular places in distant places what's happening now from 1914 onwards is that entire societies are completely engulfed by industrialised slaughter and the products of human ingenuity human engineering human labour are turned into a vast mechanism for the destruction of life that's why the slaughter is so massive that's why the reaction is so huge and that's why we have today a mass anti-war movement that is the real legacy of the First World War the size of the anti-war movement in Britain today you wish you wish that was your legacy in a way I too wish that was the legacy I'd be much more pessimistic than you are I think the really awful lesson of the First World War is actually this isn't something that creates a mass anti-war movement in many of the participant countries that we have to learn from this conflict is the ability of human societies which in many ways bring a great deal of good to their members to self-delude into fighting these appallingly grotesque conflicts which kill millions of people which inflict this grotesque damage but that's not something which is just inflicted on people from above sadly this is something which is driven by popular emotion from below as well and the German army on the Eastern Front doesn't break down in 1917 that's quite significant for what happens on the Eastern Front in 1917 the Allied armies don't break down on the Western Front in 1918 again that's quite significant for the outcome of the war so I think the really interesting point that you raise and the thing which is significantly absent from all the discussions about commeration is how do we commemorate 1917 there's been very little thought about that but that's actually once you get into that great upheaval that lasted long after 1918 these are actually much more difficult things for national governments to commemorate and I think one of the things that we'll agree on is Michael Gove if he's still in office is going to have a terrible difficulty trying to work out well how do you cast a conservative narrative around 1917 it strikes me that the purchase of the First World War on Britons is as strong as it's ever been, perhaps stronger and I'm thinking in particular of poppy wearing now which is far greater and seems much more ubiquitous than it was when I was a child even though there were people from the First World War there then newsreaders stopped about late September these days but there was a very interesting point I want to open this up to the audience next but there was just one interesting point by an Irish historian I'm sure you know him Edward Madigan who had an interesting point about why the British and I think he specifically said the English was so obsessed by the First World War and he said it was the only opportunity perhaps he was just surmising but he said perhaps it was the only opportunity the English had to present themselves as victims and I think that's quite an interesting point but just on that we can open it up to the user Frank Jackson World Disarmament campaign the bizarre thing the thing that seems to me to be bizarre about this can we just have questions please not statements, questions only please I thought we were going to have a debate actually we can have a debate but we need questions to have a debate so what extent do you think that the Jameson Raid and by that you mean the war war in general as well presumably to what extent did the Jameson Raid affect the First World War Gary oh thanks for that ok I've already said in my opening statement I think that war was caused by the individual decisions of particular leaders in Austria and Germany that's not to deny of course that there are long term factors like imperialism like the arms race like capitalism like various other isms which are important they're important I think in making war not inevitable but probably more likely however I immediately caveat by saying that the arms race there is no real evidence that arms races ultimately lead to war the French British naval arms race late 19th century didn't thankfully the American Soviet arms race nuclear arms race of the 70s and 80s didn't and by 1914 even the Anglo-German arms race had really led with the Germans being defeated in the sense that the British fought them and so the German plan for undermining the Royal Navy's march of security had failed what it had done of course was to poison relations between Britain and Germany it actually took a complete stroke of genius for Britain to get into bed not only with France additional enemy but Russia it's great imperial rival over India and yes of course that's what happened between 1904 and 1907 so your point I think imperialism helped create preconditions in which war might occurred but to quote David Stevenson who I think is probably in my view one of the shrewdest historians writing on the first war at the moment he said Europe might have been a house of cards in 1914 but it still took somebody to topple the cards Lady in the right I just wanted to ask a couple of questions the first is I'd like to know what the panel thinks about the whole period from the Scramble for Africa to 1914 because it seems to me this is absolutely central to the building up of different rivalries to the way in which you have competition between the big empires and that this has an effect on the kind of rivalry which then leads with the arms race and if you remember the dreadnoughts that Lloyd George built what they doubled the amount of spending on dreadnoughts in the years before the first world war what impact does that have and secondly I'd like to ask particularly to Annika but I find it almost unbelievable that people can say that after the first world war Germany didn't talk about the war the whole of the process up to 1933 and the rise of Hitler was precisely about what the war had caused, the outcome of the war the Versailles Treaty all of those things people came out of the war hating the war they didn't want another war and that it seems to me is very very important in the 20s and 30s people knew the consequences of the war and actually the picture we get of the war today comes from the witnesses to the war, it comes from Robert Graves it comes from Wilfred Owen, it comes from the people who lived through it and it comes from Warquat on the Western Front it comes from all of those things and we understand that and not allow the kind of Michael Gove view of the 60s which made us all soft and we should get back to militarism again Annika? Well of course you're right that there is all quiet on the Western Front and there is engagement with the war in that way but I don't think it is the same as it is in this country it is a different relationship because the attitude towards the first world war in Germany is one of anger it's a country that does not make its peace with the end of the war in the way that I think Britain does make its peace and the idea is that at least the sacrifices were worth it because this was the war to end all wars and you can believe that until another war breaks out well in Germany that's not really the attitude you are completely right that Versailles and the outcome of the war is a huge topic in Germany and it is a topic that unites practically every German regardless of their position the very left and the very right agree on the fact that Versailles that the war-guild ruling in particular has to be undone that this was a victor's peace that this was just the most shameful thing and that is one of the reasons why Hitler comes to power because he can harness this anger but it is a completely different attitude to the First World War in Germany in Britain so if I said that nobody thinks about the war that's clearly not the case but they think of it differently partly because they lost it and partly because they cannot make their peace with the peace and so when you then get Hitler in 1937 when he says in the Reichstag you know I finally rubbed out that signature from the treaty that was forced out of us and I finally returned Germany back from being like a leper among the nations back to its former glory then that sort of ends this nearly 20 years struggle which is all about undoing the outcome of the war so it's a very different way of relating to the war than there is in this country and if you're mentioning remark of course it's very controversial it's not like here most people seem to share this notion that the war was a terrible experience remark's book is one of the ones that gets burned by the Nazis precisely because that's not what they want to hear they want to hear that it's going to be okay to fight another war and this time we're going to win so Ernst Younger he's got valuable reasons for that perspective a woman in the black t-shirt thank you the first thing I was wondering about the idea of popular consent which I really just don't buy I mean if you once you were in the trenches if you didn't go over the top in the trenches you did face getting shot so I don't see how I don't see how you can argue that it is popular consent when it's either going kill those Germans or kill those British people or get shot yourself and then the second thing is just really on the idea of sort of Britain good Germany bad really argue that that is the case would you really try and put that argument in somewhere like India where other British colonies where there was no democracy I just don't buy the idea of Britain as some kind of beacon of democracy in civility I don't think anyone is suggesting that in fairness I don't think anyone has ever said Germany bad Britain good on this panel well that's what I think we're dealing with shades of grey there can I answer the concern the gentleman on the end said I'm very glad that my country went to war my ancestors went to war and we came out on the winning side but that was my question I think it's more complex let him answer that then if I take the first one about consent you're actually wrong about what kept British troops in the trenches it was very largely a combination of comradeship, belief in cause really basic things like having the rations arriving on time mail arriving from home that sort of thing 350-ish British soldiers executed for military crimes during the great war out of an army of 5.4 million 5.4 million also served in the army at some point during the war a large number of the people who were executed were repeat offenders British army discipline could be pretty harsh could be pretty brutal but the idea of people stood a really good chance of being shot if they deserted or went absent without leave is simply untrue and a really key reason why people stayed in the trenches was excellent leadership at junior officer level to put it very crudely once the public school boys had been killed off at the beginning of the war they were replaced from people from all parts of society about 40% of all officers in 1918 were from a lower class or lower middle class background and they were paternal, they looked after their men the soldiers were perfectly capable of telling them where to get off if their side of the bargain was broken there were a few isolated mutinies they tended to be very much against local conditions and that sort of solidarity saw the forces of the British Empire through to conclusion in 1918 that solidarity broke down in the French army in 1917 though it was rebuilt it certainly broke down in the German army in the 100 days victorious offences of 1918 and the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians went much the same way British really were the only major force whose armies were in the field for any length of time which did not undergo a serious mutiny while the war was going on afterwards different matter people joined up to beat the Kaiser they did all sorts of things including burning down Lutentown Hall but there was a basic commitment to the calls to their officers which kept the soldiers going throughout the very grim conditions in the trenches in a different light because I feature things in a much less cosy way than Gary does not just in the armed forces but nationally but I think that question of popular consent is one where actually the best research historically is now being done but it's an area where there is more research needed but it seems to me that an awful lot of what that is pointing to is the extent to which the war has experienced a very very local level so not just as Britons or Germans but inhabitants of counties of particular towns, particular villages is a very interesting question about how the dynamics of consent work at that level so how is it that these at this kind of micro level societies across Europe depending on your perspective are persuaded our gold or persuade themselves to fight but for me there can't be much argument that the only way in which these societies can sustain this war for so long is because they have the consent of their populations so that's that's not to say this is something which everybody is willingly serving in because that's obviously not the case but the majority of the population in all of those combatant countries supports the war for quite a long time and again I think that's that's a question for me that's a much more interesting question actually than who faulted it that the war starts it's why do so many people across Europe keep fighting it even when it's obvious it's not going to be over quickly they keep going and it's going to be horrible but I think that's one excellent book by Katrina Pennell called the Kingdom United which looks at responses it's very very local archival level and that's I think if you want to know more about how people respond to the war that's where you've got to go back to is those little local archives and find out what are people doing how do they respond to this news of the war arriving Lady there Hi I have a question which I'd like each of the panel members to try and have a stab at as we've been talking about British Libraries Europeana project next Monday BBC will announce the first I think it's 200 episodes of 1400 of World War One at Home we are in this situation where we're really contemplating the relationship of the local to the global what are your kind of hopes and fears and aspirations for what we might achieve through this talking through this debate within Britain and Britain's place within the world over the next four to five years Neil Well let me say that I'm not terribly interested in Britain's place in the world because I don't see Britain as a unified entity I see Britain as a class society and what I'm interested in is the well-being of the great majority of ordinary British people who are at the moment are under massive attack by a neoliberal elite and we talked a little bit about the Second World War and the legacy of the Second World War a neoliberal elite that is determined to destroy the greatest achievement of the British people in the 20th century which is the construction of the welfare state in the 25 years or so after the Second World War and when you look at who is doing that and who supports that project it is a neoliberal elite of bankers and industrialists and millionaire politicians it's the same sort of people actually as made the decision to go to war in 1914 so it's not really a question of Britain's position in the world it's much more a question of how are working people in Britain going to organise themselves along with working people in other countries to resist what is coming down the road but it's also about this it's also about support for new military interventions in other parts of the world designed to shore up the big corporations that are based in the western world and we have no interest in those wars as ordinary people any more in the western world and we have no interest in those wars as ordinary people any more than we have any interest in the austerity cuts but our rulers do the main enemy is at home not abroad so I think I'll try and answer the question so my my view is if there's two things I'd like to come out of the next four years one is that some people who don't know anything about the war and think they're not interested and it's find out a bit more about it and that people who already think they know about the war have cause to think about why they know what they know and they can stick with their opinions or they can change them but they at least reflect on why do they know what they already know and if we can manage that I think there will have been some success so you know fortunately there's a solution for Neil there and what happens is that the process of talking about why do societies consent to fight this war 100 years ago is a way of getting people to think about why do they not conduct greater disruption to stop wars being fought today it does seem absolutely crucial I think as someone involved in public history to emphasise the global aspect of the war and to get away from this rather parochial obsession with the western front this took place elsewhere countries as Brazil was involved, Turkey the whole theatre of the Middle East is important and I think one of the reasons why Christopher Clark's book The Sleepwalkers has been a success not just in Germany but here as well is because it offers it's focus is essentially on central Europe about which many of us including myself are very ignorant so far as the First World War goes so I think what we should do over the next few years is try and open up those vistas and bring to you one thing that worries me about the local is the fact that we become obsessed by the local and forget the bigger picture and forget the high politics forget the diplomacy they all matter and they all have to be connected and I think what has happened with the First World War in particular but a lot of history lately is it's become focused on the individual and tracing the individual and it's some kind of search for authenticity and I don't think that's a good thing you have to paint the whole picture Annika You asked what are we worried about and it goes I think a long way towards what you're saying but I'm worried about a development of different national stories about the war and I think that is what's happening not just with regard to the causes but with regard to the whole history of the war that we're not integrating these stories and that we're in danger of having conflicting views of the war and I don't think that's very helpful and I'm also a bit worried that we are going to see World War I fatigue setting in before we've got to 2018 Before we've got to August In the red chart and in the red chart Since we've been talking about Germany following the fall of the Soviet Union has there been a reassessment of World War I from a Russian perspective Do you know about that? I think so I was giving a paper in Cambridge about public history and the war last week and I was talking to a Russian historian there who said what's striking is how little how little interests there is in preserving any bit of First World War history that's left how little knowledge there is of what little there is that remains that there is a archival presence in all sorts of archives but that access, interest in accessing it or doing anything with it is it's not part of the story that the Russian regime at the moment wants to tell I don't know, I mean it's again 2017 is going to be very interesting because it's very hard to see how you could avoid doing something with 2017 but quite how you construct that into a Putinist narrative I have no idea I think that's the great that's the the remembrance in the UK for all that we debated is very easy if the country ends up on the winning side in two wars there's not actually that much that's controversial whilst there's still a lot we can write about empire and all sorts of other things but remembrance for countries that are torn aside by population movements by genocide several times over the course of the 20th century is much more difficult now you seem to be the tragedy that we ought to be talking about is not really focusing on Britain at all but it's what happens on the eastern front and again maybe that should be our third aim is if people in Britain at the end of 2018 are cognisant that the war isn't just fought by some khaki figures in a trench somewhere in Belgium with maybe a few feel-grade Germans on the far side but that's it which weirdly is the perspective that some British soldiers have at the time but there's something else going on on the other side of Europe I think that would be a really useful development The man at the back would be good The big question or one of the big questions is how likely would the Second World War have been if the First World War had never somehow been allayed or had been a minor conflict personally I think there's a good chance it may not have happened but obviously to do with Hitler's sense of revenge about Versailles and everything how likely is it that the Second World War wouldn't have happened Gary One of the myths of the First World War is that the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War Do not pass, go, do not collect £200 actually there's all sorts of reasons why Versailles might actually have worked there's a separate argument which is that the real problem with Versailles there's two things first of all that Versailles having been imposed on the Germans in 1919 the Allies then simply did not enforce it the French were very keen on enforcing that the terms the British and Americans much less so the Germans spotted weaknesses which they could exploit the second argument is that in the Treaty of Versailles brought about actually the worst of all worlds that actually it enraged the Germans without taking away Germany's ability to resort to arms at some point in the future Versailles has this reputation as a very harsher Carthaginian piece it wasn't something like Bresli Togh's in 1918 was a Carthaginian piece what happens to Germany in 1945 is there's no formal peace process at all but it is a destruction of an existing social system and being rebuilt Versailles actually is a very traditional form of peace settlement albeit quite a harsh one but not harsh enough or not mild enough in my personal view the best way to treat Germany in 1919 would have been to regard the new Republican Democratic state as a successor state and actually blame the ills of the recent past on the now departed imperial government and basically give Germany a clean slate that was never going to work in the febrile atmosphere of 1919 it was a non-starter but there's a very strong argument put forward by Philip Bell and Sir Michael Howard among other people that actually what causes the Second World War in the form that we know it is not Versailles but the Great Depression because Germany is becoming reconciled if not to defeat something brought back into the family or the wider international community at the end of the 20s the Wall Street Depression followed by Wall Street Crash followed by the Depression smashes that it wrecks what is left of political stability in Germany and eventually of course brings Hitler to power we even know that he's not necessarily a given once Hitler is in power he is a completely different sort of politician than anybody's seen before he's determined a war from the very beginning and he wants a major war I can well imagine that without without the Great Depression without Hitler coming to power there's further revision of the Versailles Treaty which is being revised anyway in the 20s a small localised border war between Germany and Poland at some stage in which the frontiers are amended but not the cataclysm we actually get in 1939 so the Second World War is a product of the First World War that's certainly true but I don't think there's necessarily a direct line between Versailles and what happens in September 1939 Thanks Gary I'm afraid we've reached the end of the line here Thankfully we're not even at August 1914 yet the anniversary of that we've got 1915, 1617, 1818 and even 19 to come so I've no doubt we'll have many many more debates and it's we can see just how much interest there is in this topic from all of you who've come this evening at such short notice I'm sure we'll have more of these debates because this is a massive, complex and challenging topic for the British Library as well for organising this and thank you to our panellists