I don't know any responsible historian who thinks that anybody in Britain wanted a war in 1914. Whereas there were quite a lot of people in Germany who did want to war. On the matter of Belgium, it's no good treating this frivolously. It's not propaganda. The latest modern scholarship shows that the German army advancing into Belgium murdered in cold blood 6,400 perfectly innocent civilians. We've got to try and see things as they saw them. British Empire would do them, but it wasn't going to survive. They didn't know that. My blood does rather boil. And I'm tempted, I will quote, a spending bank called Charles Carrington,. A very cultured literature man
For this week's Sunday Debate, we're dipping back into the archive to 2014, when we gathered a panel of expert historians to debate whether Britain was right to fight in the First World War, a tragedy that laid the foundations for decades of destructive upheaval and violence across Europe. To debate the issue, we invited leading historians Margaret MacMillan, Max Hastings, John Charmley and Dominic Sandbrook to an event hosted by journalist, columnist and national security expert, Edward Lucas.
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