Some years ago there was a competition in the New Statesman magazine to produce the most startling newspaper headline anyone could think of. Among the winning entries, as I remember, was this: ‘ARCHDUKE FERDINAND STILL ALIVE. FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE’.

A mistake, a war in which 20 million people died? It seems of course preposterous: a bad—if clever—joke. And yet historians now almost universally agree that the First World War was a mistake. Not in the sense implied by that headline, that it was fought for the wrong reasons. No, a mistake in the sense—perhaps even more depressing—that there were no reasons for war at all: except, that is, for the drive to war itself. The great powers had got themselves into a fierce arms race, Germany was being made to feel increasingly encircled; yet rather than seeking obvious remedies—reversing the arms race, or resorting to more positive diplomacy—the generals and the statesmen pushed on towards the cataclysm as if they were no longer masters of their fate.

Today, as we know, there are disturbing parallels. Once again, the great civilisations of the world—the very nations that gave us our literature, music, painting, our ideas of peace and of democracy—are locked into a unending cycle of hostility. Once again there is a grim competition for superiority in arms, in trade, in attitudes, in righteousness.