If we stick with the metaphor than they kept a book and tried to cover every eventuality. This question is taken as fact, however I would disagree that Germany was taking a gamble. There was want for an independent body or a leader with clout to put a stop to it. From the contents of a vast melting pot of facts and opinion he tries to argue that war, or early engagement of the British Expeditionary Force, may have been an outcome.

For example, when he states that, ‘without the war of attrition on the Western Front, Britain’s manpower, its economy and its vastly superior financial resources could not have been brought to bear on Germany sufficiently to ensure victory’ (p457) is stated as an absolute with a counter-factual offered as the alternative - Britain would have had to compromise rather than fight on in any other way.įerguson offers a myriad of factors: people, nationhood, economic growth, the Press and railways, burgeoning democracies, the weakness of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empires and the extend of the British Empire.

Ferguson doesn’t sit on the fence, he has an opinion and makes it forcefully. Ferguson strips out the facts and attacks each in turn often in meticulous detail, all referenced and from a single perspective. The ‘war poets’ are one aspect of the misconceptions that have developed around the First World War, hijacking how people felt about the war at the time with a post-war negative and sentimentalised view.įerguson picks out ten questions to scrutinise, myths to unwind, misconceptions to set straight, as well as original views of his own. The words are not those of the author, but rather taken from one of the war poets. Parties with the potential to become massive and majoritarian gave up the goal of victory by keeping out an electoral clientele of working-class women and perhaps male sympathizers who saw that domination-whether economic or gender-was domination no matter what the form.The title ‘The Pity of War’ says little about the book’s contents. The situation became even worse as these parties bureaucratized in the interwar years and devoted themselves to guarding entrenched positions for well-paid functionaries. address economic issues that would have benefited women workers, or to concern themselves with what they saw as women's insignificant problems. Under the banner of class solidarity, the various European parties generally refused to bring in women on equal terms to men, to. This excellent collection of articles on interwar socialism shows the bottom line of socialist political theory: The vast majority of party leaders utterly refused to surrender the male bonus of political and economic privilege-even if it meant losing political wars.

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson