Views of War: Britain Before the ‘Great War’ – and After

Abstract

The First World War changed everything, including European attitudes towards war–and we should not forget what a sea-change this represented. But we should not underestimate the extent to which war before 1914 was thought possible, probable and even desirable. And this was as true for Great Britain as it was for its main German rival. Certain currents of thought made the idea of war seem acceptable. A number of organizations indeed propagated the notion that imperial expansion and conflict–fuelled by jingoism and dreams of Empire–were to be expected in a world where the fittest survived and the weak did not. With the coming of peace following such huge losses on the western front, the mood, inevitably, shifted in almost the opposite direction, and after 1919 public opinion became decidedly anti-war and deeply opposed to rearmament, even when Britain was confronted with the threat of Hitler. Appeasement thus was not merely a policy agreed from on high, but had the solid backing of a public whose attitudes had been so altered by the experience 1914–1918. This mood only began to change after Munich and Kristallnacht. Even so, the mood in 1939 was very different to what it had been in 1914: war with Germany now was not embraced enthusiastically but as a politicaland strategic necessity imposed from without. The Great War had left its indelible mark on those who remembered.