If only ...

In the early summer of 1910, a naval officer, bound for the Antarctic, paid a visit to the office of Thomas Marlowe, the editor of the Daily Mail. He had come in search of some badly needed funds for his expedition, but just as he was leaving he paused to ask Marlowe when he thought war with Germany would break out. ‘I can only tell you,’ came the reply, ‘that there is a well-informed belief that Germany will be ready to strike in the summer of 1914 and it is thought that she may do so.’ The officer mulled this over, doing his calculations. ‘The summer of 1914 will suit me very well,’ he said, ‘By that time I shall be entitled to command a battle cruiser of the Invincible class.’

It is ironic, as his biographer Diana Preston noted, that Captain Scott might only have survived the Pole to end his days at Jutland, but the prospect would certainly neither have disturbed nor surprised him. From the day that the Admiralty had identified Germany and not France as the likely enemy, the navy had trained for Armageddon. Newspaper editors and invasion scaremongers rattled their sabres. Socialists and syndicalists across Europe were deeply suspicious that the governing classes would play the patriot card; and what with Jacky Fisher ready to announce as early as 1911 — as if it were a wedding and not a war he was planning — the precise date, place and British ‘Admiralissimo’ for the coming Battle of Jutland, the outbreak of the Great War can seem to have been only a matter of time.

‘Very few things happen at the right time,’ however, as Herodotus said, ‘and others do not happen at all,’ and if Europe was certainly ready for it when it came — Rupert Brooke was not just speaking for himself when he wrote ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’ — does any of this mean that war was inevitable? ‘1914 might be remembered for a coup in Germany,’ Jack Beatty opens The Lost History of 1914, his exuberant and bulging rag-bag of counterfactual history that challenges the ‘cult of inevitability’ that Europe’s war-leaders were retrospectively so eager to embrace: