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The full title of this book is ‘The Guilty Men (and Very Few Women) Who Caused the First World War.’

When the causes of the Second World War are studied and discussed it is normal for blame to be given to certain individuals, for example Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. When the causes of the outbreak of the Great War are discussed, especially in school history textbooks, words, phrases and concepts (alliances, empires, nationalism, militarism, arms and naval races) are more likely to be blamed.

Certainly this has been so since the early 1990s in Britain when all the implementation of the National Curriculum in state schools compelled the teaching of ‘The Twentieth Century World.’ In the second secondary school that I taught from 1986, only pupils who opted for History from Year 10 would have been taught anything after the Civil Wars of the 17th century. Even then, the GCE and GCSE courses focused on Britain from 1815 to 1914 and did not include the causes of the First World War. It is to be assumed that millions of people around the world have got their knowledge of the First World War from TV documentaries and the Internet rather than school lessons and books.

I believe that most people in Britain and many elsewhere can identify the names Gavrilo Princip and Franz Ferdinand because they know about the assassination in Sarajevo – ‘the spark that lit the fuse.’ They probably know something about Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. But how many people know about von Moltke, Bethmann-Hollweg, Jagow, Berchtold, Conrad, Sazonov, Poincaré, Palaeologue and ‘Apis’ (Dragutin Dimitrejević) or anti-war and anti-militarism politicians, writers and businessmen such as Bebel, Heinrich Mann and Jaurès, although many in Britain know that the first Independent Labour M.P., Keir Hardie, was an outspoken pacifist in 1914.

Part Two of this book uses much previous research to analyse the lives of about one hundred men who played roles of varying importance in causing the Great War of 1914 to 1918. There were a tiny number of women (usually wives and mothers such as Queen Victoria) who cannot be completely ignored, but the obvious conclusion is that almost all those who can be said to have caused the war were right-wing, militarist, monarchist, anti-democratic, incompetent old men, most of whom outlived almost all of those died as a result of the war that they started. Field-Marshal von Moltke even confessed his part. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg admitted in the Reichstag in August 1914 that the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 was a breach of international law.

Part One of the book is a long introduction that discusses the previous literature about the causes of the First World War. After the war ended, the question of blame became an even greater controversy, firstly at the Paris Peace Conference that led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Those wanting a summary of the research on those two subjects should look at the first chapter of my first book, ‘The Crowe Memorandum: Sir Eyre Crowe and Foreign Office Perceptions of Germany, 1918-1925.’

As stated, many words and concepts have been blamed for the war (and cannot be ignored by historians), but in the summer of 1914 one phrase was repeatedly spoken and written in the palaces; it was ‘the Monarchical Idea.’ The word ‘monarchy’ though is not just about royalty. It is derived from the idea of ‘rule by one person.’ It is the opposite of ‘democracy,’ which meant ‘rule by the people’ in Ancient Greece. The Great War destroyed many royal monarchies, but the danger of ‘rule by one person’ is as dangerous as ever in the world today, especially those who have inherited great wealth and/or power rather than earned it by their hard work or merit. That is why I discussed the meaning of the word ‘work.’

Semantics also explain why I have stressed in Part One that a nation is its people and that governments and individuals, not nations, should be blamed for 1914, especially as no nation that went to war from 1914 to 1917 was a democracy. In Britain, not all working-class men had the vote in 1914 and, of course, no women. Women did not cause the First World War; nor did ‘socialism.’

There is also a brief guide to the history of some of the major combatants in 1914. Inevitably, there are huge gaps in any such guide, but it is to be hoped that it will be helpful to some students and the general history enthusiast.

Part One uses and thus pays tribute to the great work done since 1919 by remarkable historians such as Kausky, Albertini, Taylor, Fischer, Tuchman, Wehler, Williamson, Hewitson, Mac Donough, Ferguson, Clark, McMeekin and Hastings. I disagree at times with the opinions of them all, but I admire their work nonetheless.

My own interest in the subject has three main origins. My paternal grandfather, Harry Dunn, died aged 38 in 1932 after being invalided out of the King’s Liverpool Regiment through sickness during the Great War. The father of a primary school friend had a sweet shop near the school and would often sing popular songs of the war when we walked in. He was a veteran and was the first person who talked to me about it. But most of all in 1964 the BBC showed a seminal 26-part series entitled ‘The Great War.’ Millions watched it and the words, images and music made an indelible imprint.