Introduction

Abstract

A vast amount of print and paper has been expended in an attempt to understand why Britain and Germany found themselves engaged in a world war which was to shake the foundations of their shared civilisation. The difficulty of the task has been compounded by the apparent lack of any concrete grounds for conflict; there was no direct clash over territory, thrones, or borders. Given the abundance of diplomatic documentation and memoir material, it was natural that historians should have first sought the answers to these elusive questions in the archives of the respective Foreign Offices and in the biographies of the leading participants. Even in the in ter-war period, there were studies not just of‘maps and chaps’ but of such non-diplomatic factors as public opinion, the arms race and the economic roots of inter-power rivalry. The sheer richness of the material made the task difficult and rewarding though the results seem to have confirmed the old adage that important historical questions are never finally answered. In recent decades, though the same problems are still being investigated, the focus of attention has shifted. Historians have become far more interested in the domestic roots of diplomatic and strategic decision-making. The search for the ‘unspoken assumptions’, as James Joli has called them, which govern men’s actions has tipped the balance of inquiry away from a concern with diplomatic documents to the study of the roles, motivations and reasoning of the men responsible for the pre-1914 situation.¹

War is not a tragedy. … It is, quite simply, a disaster which, like a railway accident, may affect for a little time those involved but does not divert at all the main historical movements.

guy chapman, Vain Glory