LAST year at this time, I was standing outside a City of London livery hall, looking towards the Tower of London.

While we waited to be called into dinner, we were entertained by a military band. It was a drowsy, misty early evening, hot and the air motionless. The atmosphere was so intense you felt something momentous was about to happen.

We are told that that is how it felt in early August 1914: a glorious summer entirely suited to the sumptuous and self-satisfied Edwardian era. Then someone shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and Europe became a bloody hell.

I’ve read dozens of books about the First World War and most of them struggle to explain why it happened at all. Most historians agree that it was a war which no one wanted, but that the political brinkmanship and military preparations intensified to such a pitch that war became inevitable: an accidental tragedy.

I don’t know quite when it was, but at some point history seemed to cease and myths and legends took over. An orthodoxy took root which declared that the war was a pointless waste of millions of lives nurtured by bloodlust and the passion for vengeance.

Of course, it was at the cost of countless men’s lives but I’m not at all sure it was pointless. There is a powerful argument, based on compelling evidence, that Prussian militarism aimed to conquer all Europe – just as it had tried under Bismarck in 1870.

Then the phrasemakers took over and we were told that our generals were no good, specifically that the Tommies in the trenches were “lions led by donkeys”. Soon the whole travesty of the Blackadder version prevailed and the war was seen as a class thing: the working class in uniform, the poor bloody infantry, led to their slaughter by the callous nobs.

And in a macabre way the war became romanticised and sentimentalised as we began to speak of it as “a war to end all wars”.

That was a foolish statement, if ever there was one. As GK Chesterton said: “As talk of a war to end all wars you might as well talk of a day’s work to end all work.” It’s just as meaningless. And indeed it was proved to be meaningless, for we were at it again – with even more terrifying weaponry – in 1939.

Part of this prevailing orthodoxy was the celebration of the so called war poets – but selectively, only those like Owen and Sassoon who denounced the war. And that other meaningless phrase was born, “antiwar”.

For the truth is that anyone in his right mind is anti-war. We should always exhaust all other alternatives before we resort to war. But what when they have been exhausted?

What then? I was Chaplain to the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Association for 12 years and I know first hand that no soldier wishes for war – because it’s the soldier who has to fight it. But I have heard another view and it is that, terrible as war is, there are worse things and one is to allow tyranny to triumph. Few people in England in 1940 believed it would be a good thing to give in to Hitler. I believe things were not much different in 1914.The war was a catastrophe but I’m convinced we should be thankful for our soldiers who won it. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.