The First World War has often suffered from comparison to the Second, in terms of both public interest and the significance ascribed to it by scholars in the shaping of modern Britain. This is especially so for the relationship between the Left and the two wars. For the Left, the Second World War can be seen as a time of triumph: a united stand against fascism followed by a landslide election win and a radical, reforming Labour government. The First World War is more complex. Given the gratuitous cost in lives, the failure of a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ to materialise, the deep recessions and unemployment of the interwar years, and the botched peace settlements which served only to precipitate another war, the Left has tended to view the conflict as an unmitigated disaster and unpardonable waste. There is also the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm and imperial Germany were far less odious villains than Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. This has led to a tendency on the Left to see the later conflict as the ‘good’ war, fought against an obvious evil, and the earlier conflict as an imperialist blunder, the result of backroom scheming, secret pacts, and a thirst for colonies. This ahistorical view fails to take into account the fact that the labour movement of 1914 lacked the paradigm of Nazi Germany as a reference point; the First World War was the great struggle of their day, ‘the war to end all wars’, a zero-sum conflict between British liberal democracy, however imperfect, and an authoritarian, autocratic regime commanding a highly industrialised economy and a vast military. Yet it was not necessarily the case that a belief that Germany had to be defeated translated into hatred of Germans, much less admiration for the British government. What then was the extent and nature of support for the war amongst the British labour movement, at both an elite and subaltern level? Was there a continuity between the patriotism of the war years and the decades before 1914, or did the war see a break with the traditions and attitudes of the past?

A great deal of work on left-wing attitudes towards the First World War has been undermined by one or two preconceptions.