Did the British People Welcome the Declaration of War in August 1914?
Many people’s understanding of the past has been moulded by myth. Geoff Dyer in his book The Missing of the Somme cites a very good example. He had grown up believing that, just after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4th August 1914, his sixteen-year-old grandfather had joined the queue of volunteers at the recruiting office only to be told that he was too young and that he should take a walk around the block and reappear when he was nineteen. He did so a few minutes later and subsequently served as an underage soldier, witnessing many horrors on the Western Front which scarred him for life. Dyer’s subsequent research, however, showed that his grandfather had joined up as a twenty-year-old. So popular were such stories that his relative was ‘everyone’s grandfather’. A colourful tale of the Great War had been become common property and an expression of everyone’s concept of the truth about 1914.
