From 30 January 1933 onwards the English had had to deal with a German government whose leader poured public scorn of the utmost brutality on the fun… - Correlli Barnett

With the outbreak of war in 1914 the internationalists in the Liberal and Labour parties, already losing credit, seemed to go into intellectual bankruptcy. The moral law was demonstrated to carry less weight than a military railway timetable. A solemn treaty was shown to have the protective power of a magic charm. The natural harmony of human interests was disproved by the spectacle of great nations at each other's throats. The pacifying and unifying effects of modern science and communications were ridiculed by the convenience with which railways launched into battle millions of men equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The liberal-evangelical faith in love, reason and the brotherhood of man was cruelly mocked by the ferocious hatreds bayed by the mobs in the great cities of Europe.

The approach of European countries to industrialisation and the role of education was different from Britain's from the start, and it sprang from a fundamentally different concept of the role of the state itself. Even in the pre- or post-industrial area of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European monarchies had regarded it as their function to promote commercial and industrial progress by interventionist measures, including the setting up of training schools for particular crafts and professions. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it became entirely natural for European governments to follow their older traditions and seek to guide and foster their countries' industrialisation. In particular they saw that the state alone could bring about a structure of national education at all levels which would feed industry with well-educated and trained personnel.

Britain's proportionate losses in killed of men aged 15–49 was just under half that of France. Britain suffered a 6.7 per cent loss as against Germany's 10 per cent. Therefore the "Lost Generation" as applied to the whole nation is confirmed as a myth. No one has disputed that losses fell disproportionately on the products of the public schools and Oxbridge. But this raises two questions. In the first place Bomber Command's losses in aircrew in the Second World War (an equivalent élite of educated and intelligent young men) were considerably higher, at 55,888 dead, than that of subalterns on all fronts on the Great War of 37,452, but no one has sought to romanticise Bomber Command's losses or seek to use such loss to explain our national decline, in the fashion of the "Lost Generation" myth. In the second place, Dr. Strachan and others of his standpoint may over-estimate the value to Britain of these highly publicised public-school and Oxbridge heroes. Does one really see Pre-Raphaelite knights like Julian Grenfell or Rupert Brooke saving Britain from industrial decline and leading us to the conquest of markets in high technology? Consider how useless the most famous survivors proved, such as Sassoon and Graves, or, for that matter, Eden.