The status of the Great War as a justified and honourable undertaking has suffered considerably in recent years. Niall Ferguson, as-ever pithy and to the point, summed up the dominant view in the final sentence of his widely read book, The Pity of War, in which he dismissed it as ‘the greatest error of modern history’. More importantly, the popular perception of the war has been simplified to the point of trivialization. Depending on one's age and/or taste, it is summed up in either Oh What A Lovely War! or Blackadder Goes Forth: it is a view of a war that was unquestionably and overwhelmingly horrific, destructive and futile; a war that compares unfavourably with the purposeful nature of the ‘good war’ that was the Second World War. It was not always so. This chapter will look briefly at changing interpretations of the Great War before discussing in greater detail some of the key themes that will be explored in relation to MacGill's war writings.

When war broke out in 1914 there was, unsurprisingly, a strong belief in the rightness of the cause for which Britain was fighting. The conflict against Germany was seen in terms of a moral crusade. Addressing the House of Commons on 6 August, the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, made clear his views. War was not something to be entered into lightly because of its ‘terrible, incalculable suffering’ but such was the threat posed by Germany that it was ‘the duty as well as the interest of this country to go to war’ against Germany. ‘[W]e are unsheathing our sword in a just cause … to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed … by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.’ The fight, in other words, was ‘in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilization of the world’. Not only would the war be a’ liberal crusade’, it would be the war to end wars. With the jaundiced eye of the twenty-first century, it is easy to see such views as being (at best) hopelessly naive or (at worst) cynical.