The First World War, with a focus on the pacifist movement in England.
My thoughts
Adam Hochschild explores World War I as not only the first total war but the first war with a sizable anti-war movement. This was the war that changed everything - the scale of warfare, the way war was conducted, and the way it was viewed back home.
I liked the organization of the book. Hochschild uses the Boer War to set the stage for World War I. That conflict involved some of the same people, from the military minds to the nascent pacifist movement. It's an effective way to introduce some of the major players and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the profiles of two women, Charlotte Despard and Emily Hobhouse, who courageously and selflessly spoke out against the war. Less sympathetic are the Pankhursts, who come across as opportunistic, manipulative, and fanatical.
I was struck repeatedly by how different things were a mere hundred years ago. Hochschild describes a battlefield where commanders couldn't tell what was going on right in front of them because they literally couldn't see what was happening through the haze of battle and lines of communication were unreliable (telephone wires were often casualties of the fighting). Contrast that to 2011, when the president of the United States monitored the raid on bin Laden's hideout halfway around the world in real time.
I can never get over the arrogance of the major powers. As in The Guns of August, To End All Wars depicts European powers that enthusiastically prepared for the outbreak of war yet did not recognize the significance of Franz Ferdinand's assassination when it happened. England, for example, was preoccupied by growing unrest in Ireland, so that scene in the first season of Downton Abbey where Carson mentions that the folks below stairs can think of nothing but the assassination of the Austrian archduke probably never happened in any English manor ever.
To End All Wars also underscores the horror of the senseless loss of life in World War I. The numbers are simply staggering, but even more appalling was the attitude of the military brass. They showed concern when their own losses were lower than expected because they estimated that meant that they'd killed fewer enemy troops. Hochshild does a good job describing the impossibilities of trench warfare, from the logistics of gaining ground to the struggle to stay clean, dry, and sane from day to day.
World War I was a hopeless, futile exercise and the terms of the armistice meant Europe was doomed to repeat it in only a few decades.
Bottom line
I'd recommend it, but not as an introduction to World War I.
Fine print
To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild
Genre: history
Photo by Goodreads
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