But the third evades the difficult and tragic aspects of Britain's experience in the Great War. The first assertion is close to indisputable. "The First World War," he states up front, "remains the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure." Although his rich and provocative book argues many-too many-disparate points, its fundamental argument is that (a) the war was a uniquely terrible event for Britain, and therefore (b) Britain should never have fought it, since (c) the stakes involved were for the British not high. The underlying and animating emotion in his book is profound regret. Although Ferguson is young, clever, and ironic, there is nothing cool or dispassionate about his view of the war. In this way, among others, the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War is a very British book. For them the Great War is not yet merely history. But standing with stricken faces before the Cenotaph at Whitehall and the Ossuaire at Verdun, and tolling bells in the gloomy villages of Lancashire and the Pas-de-Calais, the British and the French, our erstwhile co-belligerents, mourned as if freshly wounded. Americans scarcely marked the eightieth Armistice Day, this past November 11.
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