18 FEBRUARY 2006, Page 26

A Franco–Russian war

From David J. Kidd

Sir: I hope Jane Kelly is as unimpressed by the replies to her letter as I am (Letters, 11 February). Britain’s Liberal administration entered the 1914 war not to defend the country but to assist French revanchists and the Tsar’s imperialist pan-Slav expansion. In his 1920 book How the War Came Lord Loreburn, Lord Chancellor in the 1906 Campbell-Bannerman cabinet, summed it up thus: ‘We went to war in a Russian quarrel because we were tied to France in the dark.’ Foreign policy made in Petrograd and Paris sealed the fate of Englishmen and women.

David J. Kidd

London N22