Noble though the wartime aspirations of the liberal Establishment might be, New Jerusalem nevertheless constituted – just like the postwar illusion o… - Correlli Barnett

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.

For other great powers did not see the world as one great human society, but – just as the British had done up to the nineteenth century – as an arena where, subject to the mutual convenience of diplomatic custom, nation-states – the highest effective form of human society – competed for advantage. They did not believe in a natural harmony among mankind, but in national interests that might sometimes coincide with the interests of others, sometimes conflict. It followed that they considered that relations between states were governed not by law, nor even by moral principle, but by power and ambition restrained only by prudent calculation and a sense of moderation. War therefore, in their view was not a lamentable breakdown of a natural harmony called peace, but an episode of violence in a perpetual struggle. European powers looked on armed forces not as wicked, but as among the instruments of diplomacy. Indeed, whereas in Britain romantic emotion expressed itself in visions of a world society, in Europe it had given rise to a fervent nationalism. In the late nineteenth century the world was becoming not less dangerous and anarchical, but more so. Moralising internationalism, born out of liberalism by evangelical faith, was therefore an unsuitable guide to British policy.

Yet although Bonaparte could not perceive it, those atoms were held together by a principle – love of liberty; the right to arrange your own affairs in association with your fellows without being told what to do by a government and its bureaucrats. He could not begin to comprehend that through such free association and debate Englishmen might arrive at a union far more resilient than the brittle artificial unanimity he had imposed on France; at a truly national purpose in contrast to the mere acquiescence of the French people in his own designs. He failed as well to note the dynamism of a country where initiative and decision flourished everywhere in the soil of liberty instead of being the monopoly of one man at the top like himself. And despite his fulminations about English gold buying allies to fight against France, he no less underestimated the strategic importance of England's resources as the world's most powerful industrial and trading nation.