As you probably know it’s (just over) 100 years since Britain entered the First World War, costing her and the Empire somewhere around 3 million casualties (killed, missing, taken prisoner and wounded).
On its centenary there’s a debate about whether Britain should have stayed out of the war - if we could have stayed neutral and let Germany, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, France, Russia etc. duke it out on the continent and watch from the safety of our island.
I want to know the prevailing opinion here. Approach the question from today - for once I’m not talking about time travel and if you personally were in the British cabinet and couldn’t have known the consequences stemming from the war.
On the one hand, there’s the view that Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ to Emperor FJ on Serbia meant that she has the blame for WWI; in that they could have told Austria that they wouldn’t support them then there would have been no war; and that Britain was honour bound to protect Belgium. We also have to accept that if Britain had stayed out of it, Germany wins - for better or worse.
On the other hand, there’s the view that what the blue hell could have possibly been worse than the horrors of WWI, the follies of the victors and the twenty year armistice. That what WWI gained us was not worth even a fraction of the men killed and maimed over its 4 year course.
Divided the poll according to whether you won first prize in the lottery of life or not.
