Monday 4 August 2014

Aug 4 1914 - Britain Declares War on Germany

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then without hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

August 4th - The saying is that War is young men sent to die fighting old men's battles and this latest one isn't going to be any different.
It was inevitable after all the posturing and threats that we would be going to war with someone, it seemed we have been gearing up to it for years and it's Germany and the Austria-Hungarians that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith today announced we are at war with from 11pm.
The danger was always that with two great power blocks, Britain, Russia and France on one side and Germany and the Austria-Hungarians on the other, that the game of brinkmanship would go too far and actually start a war and the tipping point seems to have been the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which led to a frightening chain of events that ended a few weeks later with Britain declaring war on Germany.
So now we are at war but not because we are defending our own country, it is in defence of Belgium because of an alliance.
We don't need to be involved, we can sit it out and our own young men need not die in order to fight against
the cousin of our own King George V, the grandson of Queen Victoria.
Let the old men fight it out themselves, leave us to get on with our own lives because while our fathers, uncles
and brothers are dying, the old men who began the whole thing will be the ones in the safest seats at home.   

6 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I think the whole point of the post as she said at the top is that she wrote it as though it was this day in 1914 so she wouldn't know how it worked out.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

if A/H is Adolph Hitler then not really because in 1914 you wouldn't have known who A/H was.
It isn't easy to comment on this because we know what comes next but if we are ignoring what we know came next and are just thinking how we would feel on the day GB declared war on germany then i would assume i would feel how i feel at the start of every war GB has had and be against it so i would probably be broadly agreeing with lucy. I don't know much about the build up to it though so that may have influenced my thinking which is why it makes it hard to comment on events i don't really know much about but do know how they ended.
It is a real test to ignore all you know and put yourself in the shoes of someone at the outbreak of ww1.

Anonymous said...

Austria/Hungary!!!

q

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.