> there was no need for Britain to get into the fray <
It’s Monday morning quarterbacking, but I don’t care. You’re right. If Britain would have stayed out of WW I, she would have preserved her 1890’s children.
And Germany and France would have fought each other to exhaustion. There would have been - eventually - some sort of negotiated peace. Germany perhaps would have gained some border territory in France, and in Belgium. Kaiser Bill would have remained on his throne. No Treaty of Versailles, and no Hitler.
“It’s Monday morning quarterbacking, but I don’t care. You’re right. If Britain would have stayed out of WW I, she would have preserved her 1890’s children.
And Germany and France would have fought each other to exhaustion. ...”
And here I’d been thinking that this forum had plumbed every possible depth of moralizing condescension.
Stop confusing sports with warfare. Doing so leads to the assumption that rules of civility, legality, and morality can actually be applied to warfare. They cannot (vexingly, a large number of professional military members - from the highest flag-ranker to the lowliest enlistee - cannot break free of sporting/combat metaphors. Every one of them is out of date but the perpetrators of this mistake resist seeing it).
Second-guessing decisions made more than 100 years ago is unworthy. It becomes less worthy still, when the critiquer is in error concerning factual details ... historical accuracy is never good enough to afford confidence in conclusions re-drawn this way.
And times change; what was deemed “moral” (or “immoral”) 100 (or 200 or 500) years ago is now different. Whether it should be so is another issue; we may not want to admit it, but our reluctance cannot change the outcome.
France and Germany did fight to exhaustion in the First World War. The armies of every major combatant collapsed in 1917-1918, except the United States. Read the late Sir John Keegan’s single-volume history of the war, if you’re in a skeptical mood.