These works share another characteristic feature, in that their authors tended to be men who came from sheltered, upper-class backgrounds. Between contrasts of style and personal response, the content and theme of most of these trench novels is largely the same - idealism turned to disillusion, the miseries of trench living, the destructive weight of modern firepower, the obscenity of death on a modern battlefield. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, Richard Alderton’s Death of a Hero, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Robert Grave’s Goodbye to All That, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Siegfried Sassoon’s Memories of a Fox-Hunting Man, R.C. In the late 1920s a spate of World War One memoirs and novels was unleashed on the reading public. Trench warfare is by its very nature a morbid affair, but the horrors of the First World War, and in particular the Western Front, have been widely over-exaggerated. Image Sources: World War I: Encyclopedia Roberts & Tucker ww1 ww1 centenary ww1 history 1914 history world war one first world war great war britain diplomacy grey edward grey diplomatic history personalities diplomat He remained politically active but spent most of his retirement with his two real passions, fishing and birds. He was the longest continuously serving British Foreign Secretary. Grey resigned his post with the fall of Prime Minister Asquith’s government in December 1916. His negotiations abetted the Italian entry into the war on the Allied side in 1915. After the war began, he attempted to limit its scope, and then to find more allies for the Entente. The historian James Joll suggests that Grey’s schoolboy honour might have been what persuaded him to involve Britain in the conflict.ĭuring the crisis in July 1914, after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Grey tried to mediate between Austria and Serbia and their allies. However, Britain’s position remained relatively unclear in 1914 - it wasn’t solidly bound to help France in case of war. His greatest flaw may have been overestimating France’s power while believing at the same time that Germany’s was deteriorating, an idea that led him to tie Britain closer to France and into a possible war. He helped guide the nation through the Moroccan Crisis, two Balkan Wars and the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. His greatest passion was fishing, it seemed he regarded diplomacy more as a burden he had to dutifully bear.ĭespite a lack of enthusiasm, Grey maneuvered Britain’s foreign policy skillfully in the antebellum period. Aloof and cold except to his closest friends, Grey was a Wykehamist who maintained a slightly priggish sense of schoolboy ethics and fair play his whole life. Sir Edward Grey was Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1914. The diplomatic issues of the Great War and the pre-war world are equally fascinating and worthy of study. Indeed, the origins of the First World War are still a matter of contention a century later. The First World War is more than military history. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” “The lamps are going out all over Europe.