The Great War and the Twentieth Century
Reynolds believes that the British were ‘distinctive in their experience both of the war and of its postwar impact’. For Britain, alone among the belligerents, was fighting for principle. It had not been attacked and was not seeking more territory. But perhaps he underestimates the acute sense of danger that so many in Britain felt in the face of the possible occupation of the Channel ports by a hostile power. Britain was fighting not just for moral principle, but for deep-seated reasons of national self-interest.
.. In Germany attitudes were quite different from those in Britain. The defeat of 1918 was so sudden and unexpected that it was easy for the army leadership to claim that it had been stabbed in the back by Marxists and Jews. The sentiment ‘Never Again’, so powerful in Britain, found little echo in Germany. Indeed, many on the Right looked back with nostalgia to the wartime experience of comradeship and, like the Italian Fascists, hoped for a return match to secure the gains of which they had been cheated in 1918. The only mistake they had made, they believed, was to have been insufficiently ruthless. That was not a mistake they were going to make again. It is hardly surprising if the liberal-minded men who ran Britain between the wars – MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain – failed to comprehend such a mindset.