Books have been written on this and many are being written now. A tidal wave of polemical articles and documentaries is gathering. My son asked me what I thought about this, so I needed to gather my thoughts.

As with any such debate you can find evidence to support both sides.

There is no doubt that the Tommies in the BEF in the main believed in their cause and what they fought for, despite everything they went through. The number of mutinies in the BEF was unbelievably small. Up to 1916 all soldiers were volunteers and this was true of the Australians and Irish throughout the War. After the War like the ‘Old Contemptibles’ I met, most continued to believe it was worth the Sacrifice. Haig was respected and even in the 60s the Poppy Fund was knows as the Earl Haig fund. However you could argue that this was as much about lost comrades and the need to give meaning.

Undoubtedly the German Reich and the German Army would have imposed German Economic and Political domination over the Low Countries and France and Eastern Europe.

Certainly the ghastly logic of the War where technology gave the defenders in trenches armed with machine guns and backed by artillery the advantage from November 1914 to March 1918 the advantage meant there was little alternative to frontal assault with waves of troops. The logic ran that having entered the War Germany had to be defeated, and if Britain was to do this, there was no other place than the Western Front and that meant Tommies going over the top. The debate between Haig and Lloyd George continues, could we not knock away the props of Germany? Why waste men in frontal assaults?   These will be debated for ever but miss the higher question? Was it worth it?

Was the death of 886,939 (2.19% of the population and wounding of 1,663,435 in the UK forces worth it? This was 12% of the men that served. Overall as a result of the First World War across military and civilians there were 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded. There were c10 million military deaths, two-thirds in battle and the remainder from disease. Was it worth it?

To answer this I look to my own family where my grandmother lost her five brothers in the trenches or later of wounds. She could never bear to talk about it. Or there is the family of a friend of mine where the three brothers were killed, two at Gallipoli within days of each other. Their riding equipment was left untouched as they had left it.   Against this is the great uncle of another friend of mine who was an Old Contempible shot a German Uhlan from a Belgian pub in 1914 and served throughout the War without a scratch. (Considering that of the 150,000 of the BEF sent to France in 1914, 90,000 were casualties and 50,000 dead by Christmas odds were against him).   I do not know for a fact but I expect that all of these men and their families believed that they were serving in a just cause and that their sacrifice had meaning.

Others will disagree, but it seems to me that preventing the Channel Ports falling into hostile hands, and the dominance of Western Europe by the Kaiser Reich was not worth so much suffering and so many deaths in the BEF. If the War was fought to preserve what was seen as the values of civilization in 1914, it certainly failed since the World was irrevocably changed by War on an unprecedented scale and ferocity.