NEWSPAPER readers in Britain looking back from November 1918 would have appreciated that the balance of military forces on the Western Front, after four years of relative stability, had changed crucially in the Allies’ favour since August, causing the front to move remorselessly eastwards towards Germany’s frontiers.

But readers remained insulated from the human reality of the war’s daily horrors by authoritarian censorship and by unconditional support for the war given by war correspondents and mainstream editors, who were generally even reluctant to draw attention to the decisive role since the summer of the fresh million-plus US army.

In 1936, the then editor of this paper’s predecessor, the Daily Worker, Rajani Palme Dutt summed up the war in his classic World Politics. “The war of 1914 was inevitable in the sense that imperialism could find no other solution for its conflicts … The outbreak of the war … revealed that the world forces unloosed by imperialism had fully outstripped the control of the statesmen of imperialism … The war, once begun, drove forward with its own murderous logic … The Gordian knot … was finally cut by the sword of the revolution … The Russian Revolution ended the war in the East. The German Revolution ended the war in the West.”