To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

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To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918

By Adam Hochschild (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Pg. 448. Paperback, $28.00.

Synopses &Reviews

Publisher Comments:

World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation.

To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the wars critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.

As Adam Hochschild brings the Great War to life as never before, he forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn't cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?

Review:

"WWI remains the quintessential war — unequaled in concentrated slaughter, patriotic fervor during the fighting, and bitter disillusion afterward, writes Hochschild. Many opposed it and historians mention this in passing, but Hochschild, winner of an L.A. Times Book Award for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, has written an original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place. These mostly admirable activists include some veteran social reformers like the formidable Pankhursts, who led violent pro-suffrage demonstrations from 1898 until 1914, and two members of which enthusiastically supported the war while one, Sylvia, opposed it, causing a permanent, bitter split. Sylvia worked with, and was probably the lover of, Keir Hardie, a Scotsman who rose from poverty to found the British Labor party. Except for Bertrand Russell, famous opponents are scarce because most supported the war. Hochschild vividly evokes the jingoism of even such leading men of letters as Kipling, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. By contrast, Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle. (May)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

Review:

"In this deeply moving history of the so-called Great War, those opposing its mindless folly receive equal billing with the politicians, generals, and propagandists obdurately insisting on its perpetuation. Implicit in Adam Hochschild's account is this chilling warning: once governments become captive of wars they purport to control, they turn next on their own people." Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

Review:

"Adam Hochschild is the rare historian who fuses deep scholarship with novelistic flair. In his hands, World War I becomes a clash not only of empires and armies, but of individuals: king and Kaiser, warriors and pacifists, coal miners and aristocrats. Epic yet human-scaled, this is history for buffs and novices alike, a stirring and provocative exploration of the Great War and the nature of war itself". Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange

Review:

"The lives of the authors many characters dovetail elegantly in this moving, accessible book....An ambitious narrative that presents a teeming worldview through intimate, human portraits." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"An original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place....Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle." Publishers Weekly, starred review

Review:

"Riveting....[Hochschild] has assembled an irresistible, unforgettable cast of characters." Associated Press

Review:

"Superb....Brilliantly written and reads like a novel....[Hochschild] gives us yet another absorbing chronicle of the redeeming power of protest." Star-Tribune

Review:

"This is the kind of investigatory history Hochschild pulls off like no one else....Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged." NPR's Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan

Review:

"This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard." Christopher Hitchens, New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story, and explores it in provocative ways....Exemplary in all respects." Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Review:

"Hochschild has once again produced a moving account of one of the most terrible events of the recent past, bringing this story to life like few historians writing today." Seattle Times

Review:

"Compelling....A gifted storyteller, with an eye for the telling detail, Hochschild effectively and eloquently brings to life the senselessness of the war." Oregonian

Synopsis:

A sweeping history of World War I, showcasing the war's critics as dramatically as its heroes and victims.

Synopsis:

In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before, focusing on the long-ignored moral drama of its critics, alongside its generals and heroes. A brilliant new history of the Great War that raises the eternal question of why such a terrible war was ever fought.

Synopsis:

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the wars critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. 

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history?

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About the Author

Adam Hochschild has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta, the New York Times magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. In King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and other books, Hochschild has earned a reputation as a master of suspense and vivid character portrayal. His skill at evoking such struggles for justice has made him a finalist for the National Book Award and won him a host of other prizes.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

List of Maps ix

Introduction: Clash of Dreams xi

Part I Dramatis Personae

 1. Brother and Sister 3

 2. A Man of No Illusions 16

 3. A Clergymans Daughter 27

 4. Holy Warriors 40

 5. Boy Miner 54

 6. On the Eve 65

Part II 1914

 7. A Strange Light 79

 8. As Swimmers into Cleanness Leaping 98

 9. The God of Right Will Watch the Fight 114

Part III 1915

 10. This Isnt War 135

 11. In the Thick of It 147

 12. Not This Tide 160

Part IV 1916

 13. We Regret Nothing 177

 14. God, God, Wheres the Rest of the Boys? 200

 15. Casting Away Arms 215

Part V 1917

 16. Between the Lions Jaws 241

 17. The World Is My Country 257

 18. Drowning on Land 275

 19. Please Dont Die 289

Part VI 1918

 20. Backs to the Wall 309

 21. There Are More Dead Than Living Now 329

Part VII Exeunt Omnes

 22. The Devils Own Hand 347

 23. An Imaginary Cemetery 360

Source Notes 379

Bibliography 411

Acknowledgments 423

Index 427

About the Author 449

http://ww.powells.com/biblio/2-9780618758289-3

The Pacifists and the Trenches

Corbis (1915)

Members of the Women’s Peace Party arriving in the Netherlands from America in April 1915 for the International Congress of Women, a four-day antiwar protest held at The Hague.

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Published: May 13, 2011  

Woodrow Wilson’s fatuous claim about the European war of 1914-18 — sarcastically annexed by Adam Hochschild for the title of this moving and important book — was an object of satire and contempt even as it was being uttered. “A peace to end peace,” commented Sir Alfred Milner, that powerhouse of the British war cabinet, as he surveyed the terms of the Versailles treaty that supposedly brought the combat to a close. Increasingly, modern historians have come to regard that bleak November “armistice” as a mere truce in a long, terrible conflict that almost sent civilization into total eclipse and that did not really terminate until the peaceful and democratic reunification of Germany after November 1989. Even that might be an optimistic reading: the post-1918 frontiers of the former Ottoman Empire (one of the four great thrones that did not outlast the “First” World War) are still a suppurating source of violence and embitterment.

In his previous works, on subjects as diverse as the Belgian Congo and the victims of Stalinism, Hochschild has distinguished himself as a historian “from below,” as it were, or from the viewpoint of the victims. He stays loyal to this method in “To End All Wars,” concentrating on the appalling losses suffered by the rank and file and the extraordinary courage of those who decided that the war was not a just one. Since many of the latter were of the upper classes, some of them with close relatives in power, he is enabled to shift between the upstairs-downstairs settings of post-Edwardian England, as its denizens began in their different ways to realize that the world they had cherished was passing forever.

No single narrative can do justice to an inferno whose victims still remain uncounted. Hochschild tries to encompass the global scope of the disaster, and to keep us updated with accounts of what was occurring at a given time in Russia and the United States, but his main setting is England and his chief concern the Western Front. In this hecatomb along the minor rivers of Flanders and Picardy, the British people lost the cream of their working class and the flower of their aristocracy. The poems of Wilfred Owen and Rudyard Kipling, in their contrasting ways, still have the power to touch the tragic chord of memory that Hochschild strives to evoke.

For men like the Earl of Lansdowne, who tried to propose a negotiated peace, the terrifying thought was the slaughter of the class of well-bred young officers. (Of the 10 grandsons of the Marquess of Salisbury, five were killed in action.) For others, like Fenner Brockway, Alice Wheeldon and John S. Clarke, the war represented the human sacrifice of those miners, railwaymen and engineers whose skills should have been used instead to depose the aristocracy and build a new society. For them, it was a matter of common cause among British, German and Russian workers, and for this principle they risked harsh imprisonment, punitive conscription and even death. Ironically, perhaps, the most renowned of these resisters was Bertrand Russell, a dedicated leftist who was harder to silence precisely because he was the grandson of an earl. Hochschild has done his level best to build a memorial to these dissenters, and is hugely to be congratulated on his hard work: as a buff on this subject, I thought I was the only one who knew about Clarke, an obdurate Marxist who earned his living as a circus impresario and lion tamer.

However, once the howitzers had started their bellowing, proletarian internationalism had a marked tendency to evaporate. Only Lenin and a handful of other irreducible revolutionaries bided their time, waiting for the war to devour those monarchs who had been foolish enough to start it. Meanwhile, fratricide was the rule. Under the fog of war, the Armenians (not really dealt with here) were put to the sword in the 20th century’s first genocide, and British artillery was used in Dublin streets to put down an Irish rising.

Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands. What this meant in cold terms was the destruction of whole regiments, often comprising (as in the cases of Newfoundland and Ulster) entire communities back home who had volunteered as a body and stayed together in arms. They vanished, in clouds of poison gas, hails of steel splinters and great lakes of sucking mud. Or lay in lines, reminding all observers of mown-down corn, along the barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements against which they had been thrown. Like me, Hochschild has visited the mass graves and their markers, which still lie along the fields of northern France and Belgium, and been overwhelmed by what Wilfred Owen starkly and simply called “the pity of War.” (Owen was to die pointlessly as the guns were falling silent: his mother received the telegram as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the armistice — or better in retrospect to say “fragile cease-fire.”)

We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi. Again, Hochschild is an acute register. He has read the relevant passages of “Mein Kampf,” in which a gassed and wounded Austrian corporal began to incubate the idea of a ghastly revenge. He notes the increasing anti-Semitism of decaying wartime imperial Germany, with its vile rumors of Jewish cowardice and machination. And he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.

This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His memoir, “Hitch-22,” will be published in paperback next month.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 15, 2011, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Mortal Debate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/book-review-to-end-all-wars-by-adam-hochschild.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Apr/May 2011

The Good Fight

Revisiting the harsh lessons of the First World War

Matthew Price

 

There's not much good that reform-minded liberals can take away from the First World War. If the American Civil War was the first modern "total war," World War I greatly accelerated the West's passage into such conflict, involving fully mobilized home fronts and new modes of technological combat that produced unprecedented casualties. The Great War also proved a major setback to the European left, which was helpless as the international socialist movement's working-class constituencies fanned out in support of their home countries' nationalist causes.

For Adam Hochschild, author of two well-regarded accounts of Europe overcoming some of the ugliest parts of its past—King Leopold's Ghost, a 1998 account of the legacies of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, and Bury the Chains, a 2005 chronicle of the nineteenth-century crusade to abolish slavery in the possessions of the British Empire—the Great War still resonates with cautionary lessons for champions of social improvement. Hochschild effectively sums up the dilemma in the subtitle to his new To End All Wars—A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918. The periods political struggles forced participants to declare which side they were on, and for Hochschild the inner dynamic of the Great War pivots on the question of loyalty and rebellion. But this is not a story in which the rebels carry the day, and so To End All Wars does not have the Whiggish uplift that buoyed Hochschild's earlier studies—whatever the obvious brutality associated with their subjects.

The Great War presents supreme narrative challenges for any historian. It marked a dramatic break with the Victorian age and with the delicate (if bloody) balance-of-power accords that guided its vision of European diplomacy, but there's no persuasive single-bullet account of the conflict's origins. That's why, for example, the provocative British historian A. J. P. Taylor was moved in exasperation to blame the whole thing on railway timetables. Hochschild's account largely sidesteps questions of causation to highlight the way the war itself caused many of the signature ills of the modern age. "If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the twentieth century and undo one—and only one—event," he asks, "is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?"

Of course, there is no such magic at hand, so Hochschild can do little beyond taking readers through the well-worn saga of the damage the Great War wrought on the modern temper. In doing so, he delivers up a litany of utterly conventional judgments: The conflict was horrifically bad; callous, inept generals doomed brave troops to needless slaughter; the Allies bungled the peace, paving the way for even greater horrors.

World War I British enlistment poster, 1915.

To End All Wars is not a comprehensive account of the fighting. Rather, Hochschild zeros in on the British experience. Moving from the western front to the home front, he counterposes two story lines that highlight "clashing sets of dreams"—one about those who opposed the war, the other about the warriors and politicians who carried it out.

Hochschild's freshest sections detail the many prominent antiwar Britons, among them the philosopher Bertrand Russell; Keir Hardie, miner-turned-MP and a founder of the British Labour Party; and the suffragette firebrand and devoted woman of the left Sylvia Pankhurst. But Hochschild also tells the story of several average men who refused to fight—some twenty thousand British conscripts declined to mobilize for battle, and more than six thousand of this number served harsh terms in jail. "It was in Britain, more than anywhere else, that significant numbers of intrepid war opponents acted on their conviction and paid the price," Hochschild writes.

The victories of British war resisters proved distinctly quixotic and short-lived. The war was a disaster for leaders of the socialist movement and the Second International: Working-class internationalism proved to have virtually no mass appeal once hostilities set in among Europe's great powers. Many British unions came out in favor of the war, a propaganda coup for the government. The suffragettes became bitterly divided. If Pankhurst opposed the war, her suffragette mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel, were vehement in their support of it.

Hochschild laces his chronicle with pungent quotes that highlight the internal tensions that besieged the pacifist and internationalist left in Europe—and indeed, the conflicting impulses that often assailed the individuals who led the antiwar movement. Russell, though he loved England, could not accept the hypocrisy of Allied war aims: "This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and French say they are fighting for democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta." War resisters could claim exemptions from the draft if they were doing work of "national importance," and at a tribunal, one diehard socialist was asked whether he was doing such work: "No," he replied, "but I'm engaged in work of international importance."

Wars deform liberal democracies, and Britain was no exception. The onset of the war put its tolerance for dissent to a severe test—and it's easy to make the case that the nation failed it badly. Particularly egregious was the government's case against Alice Wheeldon, one of the most curious figures in Hochschild's narrative. A socialist and antiwar campaigner, she gave shelter to draft resisters in Derby House. In 1917, she was arrested for conspiring to attack Prime Minister David Lloyd George with a poison dart. The evidence was flimsy—as was the government's case, buttressed by the testimony of two rather dodgy secret agents.

The preposterous episode was right out of a John Buchan thriller—though Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, was among the many British imperialist cultural figures who were early and enthusiastic boosters of the war. Hochschild devotes much of his portrait of the British imperial cause to figures like Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, the British generals, and those who "actually fought the war of 1914–1918, for whom the magnetic attraction of combat, or at least the belief that it was patriotic and necessary, proved so much stronger than human revulsion at mass death or any perception that, win or lose, this was a war that would change the world for the worse."

British general Douglas Haig, the most controversial officer leading the nation's troops, comes in for especially harsh treatment, as he has in most chronicles of the Great War's brutal fighting. A stiff-necked man who lacked any common touch, Haig is an easy target, and Hochschild cannot refuse. On the second day of the Battle of the Somme, when told casualties were more than forty thousand, the bloodless commander wrote in his diary: "This cannot be considered severe, in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked." For Hochschild, Haig is criminally culpable, obsessed with cavalry charges and the "one last push" approach to field combat, but this account is a little crude. World War I brought about a new kind of strategy that evolved as the war progressed—to inflict great punishment, armies must absorb great punishment. In our age of nonstate actors, asymmetrical threats, and pilotless drones, it's hard to imagine the kinds of massed armies that clashed on the western front; but Haig, however inhuman and unsentimental he seems, resolved to see the fight through to the end, no matter the cost. (The recently published Three Armies on the Somme, by William Philpott, is superb on such matters.)

Similarly, Hochschild paints Prime Minister H. H. Asquith as a villain in his morality tale—frivolously gamboling on his country estate as young men bled to death in the trenches: "Derisively nicknamed 'Squiff,' the prime minister drank too much, allowed no crisis to interfere with his two hours of bridge every evening, and while hundreds of thousands died, spent leisurely nonworking weekends at friends' country houses." Yet Asquith and the oft-caricatured Kipling were also tinged with tragedy—both lost sons on the western front, facts Hochschild notes. For Kipling, the loss of his only son was a catastrophic event; his poetry and prose took an ambiguous turn. He may have been an imperial cheerleader, but he knew that such nationalist enthusiasms came at great cost.

In sizing up the war's longer-term legacies, Hochschild again falls back on conventional wisdom—insisting, for example, that "the postwar Treaty of Versailles would virtually guarantee the rise of Nazism." But this is far too pat a judgment. The peace terms that the Allies imposed were harsh, to be sure—but such accords are often the price of losing a war, and it's worth recalling that, unlike many conquered powers of the nineteenth century, Germany was neither occupied nor dismantled as a state. What's more, there's little doubt that had the Germans emerged victorious, their own settlement terms would have been no gentler—a point made decisively by the punitive 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which secured Russia's exit from the conflict.

While Hochschild gives us a gallery of sharply etched character studies, To End All Wars comes up well short of a persuasive assessment of how the Great War reshaped the military, political, and cultural order of the early twentieth century. In accelerating the European world's passage into the modern era, the conflict was too profound an upheaval to serve simply as the inevitable prelude to World War II. The conflict's origins were much too complicated to arise from a unitary cause—be it an archduke's assassination or a botched set of railway timetables. Its awful military and diplomatic course was far too convoluted and ambiguous to be reduced to a morality tale of rebels versus loyalists.

Matthew Price is a frequent contributor to Bookforum.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_01/7302

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918. By Adam Hochschild (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Pg. 448. Paperback, $28.00.

Adam Hochschild’s 2011 work, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, is set on the backdrop of World War I, one of the world’s most brutal conflicts. As its subtitle suggests, the book is more than just a military history. Hochschild’s work utilizes historical research and in-depth storytelling to provide a glimpse into the human conflict between the forces of national loyalty and dissent within wartime Britain. Indeed, this work is a story about differing loyalties among Britons, whether these loyalties were to country, military duty, or the ideal of international brotherhood (xviii).

In exploring this complex conflict, To End All Wars devotes great attention to the subject of British war resistors and opposition towards national participation in a conflict on European shores through detailed personal stories. One such story concerns the life of aristocratic Charlotte Despard, who worked as a tireless supporter of Britain’s poor, women’s rights, and was resolutely opposed to all of Britain’s colonial wars abroad, including the country’s participation in World War I (14). Another example was James Keir Hardie, a coal miner turned member of the British Parliament, who strived for a worldwide socialist revolution benefiting all humanity and campaigned ceaselessly against the conflict raging in Europe (55–59, 99–100). Other figures include the Pankhurst Family, once united in the struggle for women’s rights but soon divided over support of the war and the Wheeldon family, longtime British leftists who participated in aiding the escape and freedom of British deserters (98–99, 252).

On the other side of the conflict between loyalties in WWI-era Britain, Hochschild pays attention to the stories of people who were in favor of or were connected with the British military effort in Europe. A prominent example was Charlotte Despard’s brother John French, who strove to glorify the British Empire as an army officer and fought as a general in World War I (6–10, 109–110). Another important figure was Alfred Milner, an influential official enmeshed in the administration of British imperial holdings and a strident proponent and administrator of the nation’s war effort against the Central Powers (37–39, 245).  Hochschild also elaborates on known British historical figures of the period such as Cambridge professor Bertrand Russell and British general Douglas Haig, tying their respective histories into the greater national debate between loyalty to one’s country and one’s conscience during a time of war (111–113, 222–223, 299).

Competing  loyalties to country, to the army, and to ideology continued to play out on various fronts in WWI-era Britain. Hochschild notes that on the home front, the British government undertook an extensive propaganda campaign to garner public support for the war and encourage enlistment for the hard-pressed British army in Europe. A prominent example of this public relations effort was the film Battle of the Somme, which the government utilized to drum up support for the war effort (227–228). The British government supplemented this wide-ranging propaganda effort by more aggressive measures such as rigorous press censorship and government espionage to root out “agitators” and thus suppress dissent against the war effort (249).

However, anti-war sentiments still remained strong in the face of both government and social opposition. By 1916, some 200,000 Britons signed a petition calling for a negotiated peace in response to the rise of conscription by the British government, with more than 20,000 military age men refusing to enter the British armed forces before the war ended (188). This sentiment was supported by the No-Conscription Fellowship, or NCF, which worked to support and aid British conscientious objectors against official persecution (188–189). Hochschild puts particular emphasis on the fact that those who resisted the call to war as COs faced both persecution via government propaganda and imprisonment. He cites the case of almost 50 COs who, in the spring of 1916, were forcibly inducted into the military and sent to France, with the full knowledge that adherence to their beliefs would lead to their deaths by firing squad (191-192).

To End All Wars fits with Hochschild’s focus as a historian on the human drama and micro-history behind major historical events or phenomena, reflected in his other works such as King Leopold’s Ghost.[1] In terms of the existing historiography of World War I, the book does not offer any new information regarding the conduct of the conflict. Hochschild’s work is also not the first time that the cultural context of the war has been taken into account. For instance, Michael C. C. Adams’ 1990 book The Great Adventure focuses on the cultural atmosphere in which World War I took place, an environment that emphasized Victorian values of masculinity, such as knighthood, courage, and male bonding.[2] Nor is Hochschild’s study unique in its focus on antiwar sentiments in the midst of World War I, a subject that has also been covered by previous scholarship such as David Zonderman’s study of antiwar sentiments in Wisconsin during the conflict.[3]

Nevertheless, the book stands out among existing scholarship for its ability to successfully use both personal stories and historical research to understand the human reality behind the history of World War I era Britain. The accounts of both war supporters and the generals in charge and their opposites in the anti-war activists and conscientious objectors particularly stand out for their excellent combination of extensive research and storytelling. The result is a glimpse into an inner “war” over the hearts and minds of the British peoples taking into account the viewpoints of both sides without reducing either side to broad stereotypes. While Hochschild specifically focuses on Britain for his research, his work does present a jumping off point for further research in the struggle between pro-war and anti-war forces within other nations participating in World War I, such as France and even Imperial Germany. Overall, while not blazing any new trails in historical knowledge, To End All Wars is a worthy treatise that shines a humanizing light into a part of one of the world’s darkest periods.

---

[1] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998).

[2] Michael C.C.Adams. The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1990).

[3] David Zonderman, “Over Here: The Wisconsin Homefront during World War I,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 77 (Summer, 1994).

Kevin Peng

http://www.essaysinhistory.com/review/2012/133