The centenary year of the outbreak of World War I opened in Britain with an exchange of artillery barrages by the major political parties, each wheeling out its big historical guns on behalf of rival views of the war’s origins and meanings. The initiator of hostilities in this case was the Conservative education minister, Michael Gove, who took on the now rather moth-eaten academic and journalistic consensus about the war as having been something between a mistake and a crime by asking provocatively in The Daily Mail, “Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?” The heroes in question were, of course, British soldiers of the Great War whom a certain historical tendency associated by Mr. Gove with the name of Sir Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, tends to regard as victims or dupes, rather than heroes. “The men who enlisted in 1914,” Sir Richard is quoted as having written, “may have thought they were fighting for civilization, for a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: They were wrong.” And, if that seems an unusually positive statement for a historian, Sir Richard is said further to have denounced the alternative view—proleptically, Mr. Gove’s view—as “narrow, tub-thumping jingoism.”