What should one make intellectually of the emotional contemplation of life on the Western Front? What is there to learn? Two themes recurr on the many hundreds of  substantial multi-lingual notices to be found on the battlefield and I find both to be facile and potentially dangerous. The first concerns "the futility of war"; this is allegedly something which modern school pupils are asked to comment on when considering war poetry. This would be a return to medieval education where argument was judged by its success in arriving at a pre-approved conclusion. At one level it is just excessive generalisation — like gathering one's pupils round a rotten apple and lecturing them on the rottenness of apples. But there is a more complicated mistake involved, the fallacy of the choice of circumstances (to borrow, slightly, from Marx). There is no Global Events Committee which decided to have a Great War and on which one might have voted against the proposition. The futility of resistance? The futility of keeping promises? The futility of the Big Push? These are real futilities, relevant to decisions made by actual people in actual circumstances. Only the Kaiser and Von Moltke were in a position to consider the futility of war and they both liked war — or, at least, they thought they did.

The other inference which takes thought way too far is the appeal for European unity as a way to avoid events like the Great War. People who argue this are like the generals of the war itself insofar as they are trying to solve a previous problem rather than the one they actually face. The 1914-18 war took place because European states were competing for world domination; they are no longer doing so. The wars of the last generation as it is now have been like those in Abkhazia, which I have some experience of, or Bosnia, which I haven't. They arise out of excessive political unity, by the claims made by multi-national states in complex ethnic conflicts and in some respects, being semi-civil wars, they have been more unpleasant than the Great War. The slogan that should be borne in mind comes from Robert Frost: "good fences make good neighbours".

The First World War was a very bad war. War is, in a very important respect, the opposite of sport. Good sport occurs when one horse gets its nose ahead going up the hill to the finish or when all four results are possible on the last ball of a cricket match. Good war happens when the good guys wipe out the bad guys before most people realise the thing has started. But once the Western Front bogged down in the late autumn of 1914 there was the most hellish and dysfunctional system of war that mankind had ever known. The problem, summarised later by A.J.P. Taylor, was that the systems of defence were about two centuries ahead of the systems of attack. On the one hand: machine guns, shrapnel shells, mines, barbed wire, etc. On the other, men walking or running at and through the above. It is all very well to see French or Haig or Foch or Hindenburg as dim donkeys, but this was a new situation which contradicted every doctrine of "fire and movement" that they had been trained to believe.