Sir,—In his review of Precipice by Robert Harris (HI 33.4, July/Aug. 2025), Colum Kenny is like many other historians and commentators who seem to have a strange need to blame Britain for the First World War and its ‘senseless’ loss of life. However, the Central Powers, by their aggression, started the war—Harris is quite clear on this in his book. It is true that Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, vigorously promoted the Gallipoli campaign, but it had to be approved by both the British and French cabinets. Why is the French contribution to the campaign being ignored? Is it because it does not fit the ‘Britain was to blame’ narrative? Some of the more troubled commentators label the campaign a ‘crime’. The irony is that at the same time and in the same country (!) an actual crime was being committed, i.e. 1–1.5 million Armenians were being exterminated by the Turks. This, by a country mile, was the worst thing that happened in the First World War, not Gallipoli nor the ‘Battle’ of the Somme (it was actually an offensive fought over four months). Why are the civilian dead of this war being airbrushed out of history? I know of no other war where this happens. And what sort of attitude calls soldiers killing each other in battle a ‘crime’ while ignoring genocide?—Yours etc.,
GERARD MURPHY
Kells
To be fair to Irish historians, the issue of civilian deaths in the First World War, including the Armenian genocide of 1915, is dealt with by our own Cormac Ó Gráda in The hidden victims: civilian casualties of the two world wars, reviewed in the same issue (pp 60–1)—Ed.