I'm not for a moment arguing that the Germans wouldn't have inflicted a fairly draconian peace on this country. And it was not in our interest in 1871 to fight to keep Alsace Lorraine for the French and stop the French having to pay a large indemnity. But of course he plays a major role and I don't doubt that. Lloyd George later changed his mind and thought that we'd slivered into war. My claim is quite simple. The one set of people who didn't need to get involved in the horror with the British are you? You can have all the good ones but to be fair we've just got to... I'm going to chop that up to
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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