But the total human cost of the second war was on a vastly larger scale – an estimated 60 million dead compared with about 10 million. Nightmarish as the first war was, it was essentially a conflict between fighting men In the second, civilians were treated as legitimate targets. In the second war the decisive contribution on land was made by the Red Army, before the British (anyway outnumbered by the Americans) re-established a major front in western Europe.Incidentally, AJP Taylor makes the telling point that at Alamein “the proportion of casualties among men actually engaged was as heavy as on the Somme”. British losses on land were admittedly much lower (between a third and a half of the earlier figure), but mainly for the reason that in the second war the British Army was far less heavily engaged.

In 1914-18 Britain and France together carried the heaviest burden, and together won the decisive military victory. But it must be remembered that German unity under the Hohenzollerns had been achieved by Bismarck by “blood and iron”, in three wars cynically provoked; and that his successors inherited his brutal approach to politics while abandoning his realistically limited aims. When the Second World War ended, Poland had to exchange one form of alien tyranny for another. Only the eventual collapse of Soviet power liberated the Poles.In the first war the army was based on voluntary recruitment until 1916. Next time there was conscription from the word go.It is true, of course, that Hitler was a more terrible human being than Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Nazi regime a worse threat to civilisation than Imperial Germany. In a sense the people did play a part in the decision to go to war in 1914, and neither their patriotism nor their idealism was mindless.In September 1939 Britain was faced with a German invasion of Poland, a more distant country to which the British government had given a guarantee earlier in the year. As a result, an ultimatum was sent and war with Germany followed, with public acceptance though with markedly less public commitment than in 1914.

There was sympathy for the Poles, certainly, though far less intense than the sympathy felt for the Belgians a generation earlier. And, of course, it is a discreditable fact that, whereas the restoration of Belgian independence remained a British war aim and was duly achieved in 1918, in 1945 Polish independence was sacrificed to inter-allied expediency. But there was some division within the government, which the strength of popular indignation about Belgium helped to resolve. ASK ANYBODY for an opinion on the relative merits of the two world wars and the answer is likely to be overwhelmingly adverse to the first. Most people still appear to believe that in 1914 Britain got involved in an unnecessary war – the product of “power politics” without any moral content – whereas in 1939 the country embarked upon a crusade for freedom and democracy.

This conventional wisdom is at last coming under challenge, but it remains absurdly dominant. Historians who should know better continue to subscribe to it. As we prepare to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the idea that it was a futile bloodbath is still being aired. The truth is that on both occasions Britain went to war in defence of its vital interests. Self-preservation was the primary motive for our involvement in both wars; both were equally struggles for national survival. There was also a strong element of idealism in both wars: stronger, actually, in the first than in the second. Since Britain and France (the principal Western allies in the first war) were countries with genuinely free institutions, their fight for survival in the first war can be regarded as a fight for the general cause of freedom.