Anchorman has posted an article that talks about conscientious objectors in another thread.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13172243.Let_s_commemorate_the_WW1_objectors/Part of the thesis of the article is that WW1 was not a just war. This paragraph caught my eye.
The Great War wasn't a defence of democracy. Women didn't have the vote. Neither did 40% of adult men in Britain. In Germany, all men had the vote. If we were fighting for democracy, we had strange allies: Tsarist Russia and the militaristic Japanese imperialists.
Leaving aside the gross distortion of the German political system (Kaiser Wilhelm could not be voted out and he very much ran the country at least until well after the war started), this makes a good point. This was not like WW2 in which we were fighting a vicious ideology as well as a foreign power, this was just a consequence of the political manoeuvring of the time. In fact Britain had no commitment to join in until Germany invaded Belgium. We had a treaty with Belgium to come to their aid. In those days we didn't turn our backs on our friends in Europe when the going got tough.
Given the above, it has been suggested that it would have been better if the Germans had won the Battle of the Marne in 1914 which would have ended the war on the Western Front there and then. The whole history of the twentieth century would have been completely different. There would have been no four years of slaughter that cost Western Europe so much. The Russian Revolution probably wouldn't have happened, at least it wouldn't have ended up with the communists in control. There would have been no WW2.
Of course, other things might have gone wrong, but it's hard to imagine how it could have been worse.
