At 2300 hours on Tuesday 4 August 1914, Britain went to war. A few weeks earlier such an event had seemed improbable. Even after the assassination of the unpopular Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia in Sarajevo, on 28 July 1914, it had generally been assumed that any dispute could be resolved without fighting – let alone fighting that involved Britain. As the culmination of a crisis that had careered out of control, the declaration of war was a shock to which a rash of suicides and premature births testified. For many people, there was a sense that the coming of war brought with it a different world, marking the end of an old order with the assumption of new powers by the state. Although there was a common ...
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