Imagine: in October 1918, Lloyd George’s Cabinet is planning for a prolonged struggle in 1919. Haig’s solution promises to avoid a confrontation even bloodier than the Somme or Passchendaele. The Government agrees. Germany’s main condition is to keep the vast swath of Russia that her troops have occupied since the Bolshevik revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March.

With peace made with Germany on Haig’s terms by mid-October, the British troops already in Russia have a German ally to help them to crush what Churchill calls “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism”.

The even worse spectre of a Bolshevised Germany is also averted. German revolutionary activities in the ports, and in Berlin itself, are crushed by German troops from the Western Front.

The Kaiser re-enters Berlin before the revolutionary railway workers seize the junctions and prevent his return (as they intend to do in November). Hitler, returning from the hospital where he was treated for gas inhalation, finds not a demoralised Germany, but a confident, victorious one, of which he can be proud. Nazism never comes to pass.

Times Archive, 1922: Earl Haig on the British Legion Campaign

'The objects of the legion are to look after the welfare of all ranks of ex-Service men and their dependents'

In the Middle East an early peace with Turkey hardly dents British ambitions. General Allenby has been master of Jerusalem since the end of 1917. Only the French suffer, as Damascus is still under the Turks: but for Britain that is a bonus, forestalling French ambitions where they most clash with those of Britain. Lloyd George, with his prewar experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer, sees yet another benefit. Britain’s mounting war debt to the US grows no more. The Cabinet discussions of how the war would be fought in 1919 are against a background of growing British indebtedness. By making peace with Germany, Britain can destroy the eleven-month-old Bolshevik regime. Imperial Russia pays the vast war debts it owes Britain, debts that the Bolsheviks will refuse to pay.

With that money Britain really is able to build a postwar Britain “fit for heroes”.

Of course, Britain’s commitment to create Polish and Czechoslovak states must be set aside, with additional benefits: there is no need to betray Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 and no need to go to war for Poland in 1939.

And yet . . . With its empire intact, German militarism does not have to wait for Hitler to revive it. France does not accept Alsace-Lorraine, conquered in 1871, remaining German.

Betraying new nations before they even came into being is a shameful act that costs Britain its moral standing in the world. General Pershing offered another solution: that the Allied troops, led by his Americans, enter Germany before agreeing to an armistice. Only then, he believed, would Germany accept that its aggression in 1914 had not paid off, and that it was truly beaten.

In the event Europe saw neither Haig’s negotiated peace nor Pershing’s unconditional surrender – only a 20-year uneasy truce culminating in an even greater, global conflict.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s books include The Atlas of the First World War

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