The alternative vision is the one that I subscribe to, and along with me, most historians in this country and in America, and indeed increasingly erm a young generation of German historians, and this is that things began to go wrong well before nineteen fourteen, and that the Germans in fact deliberately started the First World War as the Treaty of Versailles said they did, that nineteen eighteen was not therefore the beginning of the evil, but merely a hiccup in erm a German attempt to conquer Europe, erm as it were, a play with two acts, the first act being nineteen fourteen to eighteen, and then the second act being nineteen thirty-nine to forty-five, two attempts to dominate the continent of Europe by military force.