ABSTRACT
Three-quarters of a million British lives were lost in it, and hundreds of thousands of others blighted and maimed. The purpose of it all, of course, was to save Britain from defeat and dispossession, which would make the sacrifice worthwhile. In some ways the prospects for Britain looked even rosier than they had been before. The Russian Revolution was a surprise, even to some Marxists, who found it something of a puzzle too. The imperialists’ idea, formulated before the war and carried on through it, was to preserve Britain as a great power by uniting and exploiting the colonies: consolidating the empire into a single economic unit, big enough to hold its own against Russia and the United States. In the 1920s they regrouped and started propagandising again. People’s main memory of before the war was of the depression and unemployment; if they were to sacrifice themselves now, many determined that it would not be for a return to that.
