Frustrated by her students' glib use of catch-all terms such as 'militarism' in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways in which others have sought to improve students' causal understanding and finding her own path. Michalaki explains and analyses her means of getting students to approach causation through the narrative which underlies the big organising concepts, and makes a cogent case for Year 9 going more deeply than they sometimes do into the chronological and geographical background of World War I.