To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild (PDF)

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In this riveting and suspenseful New York Times best-selling book, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before…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 war’s 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.Hochschild 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?

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: 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”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”In prose as compelling as a masterful novel, Hochschild illuminates the lives of those who consigned millions to oblivion, and also introduces us to those who fiercely opposed the carnage—those who imagined, as we might, that the world could be otherwise. We emerge from this exemplary book with the knowledge that war is not inevitable, and those who work for its abolition inherit their dedication from sane men and women of great moral strength who recognized, as we must, that the future depended upon them. Hochschild’s accomplishment, as a writer and historian, is formidable and inspiring.”- Carolyn Forché, editor of AGAINST FORGETTING: 20th Century Poetry of Witness”The lives of the author’s many characters dovetail elegantly in this moving, accessible book…An ambitious narrative that presents a teeming worldview through intimate, human portraits.”- Kirkus Reviews”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”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 “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 “The lives of the author’s many characters dovetail elegantly in this moving, accessible book… An ambitious narrative that presents a teeming worldview through intimate, human portraits.” — Kirkus Reviews “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 “Riveting… [Hochschild] has assembled an irresistible, unforgettable cast of characters.” — Associated Press “Superb… Brilliantly written and reads like a novel… [Hochschild] gives us yet another absorbing chronicle of the redeeming power of protest.” — Star-T — From the Back Cover “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.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh AirWorld 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 war’s 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?”Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story and explores it in provocative ways . . . Exemplary in all respects.” — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post”Superb . . . Brilliantly written and reads like a novel . . . [Hochschild] gives us yet another absorbing chronicle of the redeeming power of protest.” — Minneapolis Star TribuneADAM HOCHSCHILD has won a reputation as a master of suspense and vivid character portrayal with King Leopold’s Ghost, Bury the Chains, and other books. His skill at evoking individual struggles for justice amid the sweep of historic events has made him a finalist for the National Book Award and won him a host of other prizes. About the Author ADAM HOCHSCHILD is the author of ten books. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars. His Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award. He lives in Berkeley, California. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. An early autumn bite is in the air as a gold-tinged late afternoon falls over the rolling countryside of northern France. Where the land dips between gentle rises, it is already in shadow. Dotting the fields are machine-packed rolls, high as a person’s head, of the year’s final hay crop. Massive tractors pull boxcar-sized cartloads of potatoes, or corn chopped up for cattle feed. Up a low hill, a grove of trees screens the evidence of another kind of harvest, reaped on this spot nearly a century ago. Each gravestone in the small cemetery has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses, and one has a Star of David. When known, a man’s age is engraved on the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 34, 21, 20. Ten of the graves simply say, “A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God.” Almost all the dead are from Britain’s Devonshire Regiment, the date on their gravestones July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Most were casualties of a single German machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here in a section of the front-line trench they had climbed out of that morning. Captain Duncan Martin, 30, a company commander and an artist in civilian life, had made a clay model of the battlefield across which the British planned to attack. He predicted to his fellow officers the exact place at which he and his men would come under fire from the nearby German machine gun as they emerged onto an exposed hillside. He, too, is buried here, one of some 21,000 British soldiers killed or fatally wounded on the day of greatest bloodshed in the history of their country’s military, before or since. On a stone plaque next to the graves are the words this regiment’s survivors carved on a wooden sign when they buried their dead:The devonshires held this trenchThe devonshires hold it still The comments in the cemetery’s visitors’ book are almost all from England: Bournemouth, London, Hampshire, Devon. “Paid our respects to 3 of our townsfolk.” “Sleep on, boys.” “Lest we forget.” “Thanks, lads.” “Gt. Uncle thanks, rest in peace.” Why does it bring a lump to the throat to see words like sleep, rest, sacrifice, when my reason for being here is the belief that this war was needless folly and madness? Only one visitor strikes a different note: “Never again.” On a few pages the ink of the names and remarks has been smeared by raindrops — or was it tears? The bodies of soldiers of the British Empire lie in 400 cemeteries in the Somme battlefield region alone, a rough crescent of territory less than 20 miles long, but graves are not the only mark the war has made on the land. Here and there, a patch of ground gouged by thousands of shell craters has been left alone; decades of erosion have softened the scarring, but what was once a flat field now looks like rugged, grassed-over sand dunes. On the fields that have been smoothed out again, like those surrounding the Devonshires’ cemetery, some of the tractors have armor plating beneath the driver’s seat, because harvesting machinery cannot distinguish between potatoes, sugar beets, and live shells. More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 percent failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people — 36 in 1991 alone, for instance, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line. Dotted throughout the region are patches of uncleared forest or scrub surrounded by yellow danger signs in French and English warning hikers away. The French government employs teams of démineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. More than 630 French démineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated. Even though I was born long after it ended, the war always seemed a presence in our family. My mother would tell me about the wild enthusiasm of crowds at military parades when — at last! — the United States joined the Allies. A beloved first cousin of hers marched off to the sound of those cheers, to be killed in the final weeks of fighting; she never forgot the shock and disillusionment. And no one in my father’s family thought it absurd that two of his relatives had fought on opposite sides of the First World War, one in the French army, one in the German. If your country called, you went. My father’s sister married a man who fought for Russia in that war, and we owed his presence in our lives to events triggered by it: the Russian Revolution and the bitter civil war that followed — after which, finding himself on the losing side, he came to America. We shared a summer household with this aunt and uncle, and friends of his who were also veterans of 1914–1918 were regular visitors. As a boy, I vividly remember standing next to one of them, all of us in bathing suits and about to go swimming, and then looking down and seeing the man’s foot: all his toes had been sheared off by a German machine-gun bullet somewhere on the Eastern Front. The war also lived on in the illustrated adventure tales that British cousins sent me for Christmas. Young Tim or Tom or Trevor, though a mere teenager whom the colonel had declared too young for combat, would bravely dodge flying shrapnel to carry that same wounded colonel to safety after the regiment, bagpipes playing, had gone “over the top” into no man’s land. In later episodes, he always managed to find some way — as a spy or an aviator or through sheer boldness — around the deadlock of trench warfare. As I grew older and learned more history, I found that this very deadlock had its own fascination. For more than three years the armies on the Western Front were virtually locked in place, burrowed into trenches with dugouts sometimes 40 feet below ground, periodically emerging for terrible battles that gained at best a few miles of muddy, shell-blasted wasteland. The destructiveness of those battles still seems beyond belief. In addition to the dead, on the first day of the Somme offensive another 36,000 British troops were wounded. The magnitude of slaughter in the war’s entire span was beyond anything in European experience: more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the toll was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war’s outbreak were dead when it was over. “The Great War of 1914–18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman. British stonemasons in Belgium were still at work carving the names of their nation’s missing onto memorials when the Germans invaded for the next war, more than 20 years later. Cities and towns in the armies’ path were reduced to jagged rubble, forests and farms to charred ruins. “This is not war,” a wounded soldier among Britain’s Indian troops wrote home from Europe. “It is the ending of the world.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐First thing’s first: This is NOT a retrospective of the entire first World War. If you’re looking for a detailed account of the major battles, key turning points, and figures that shaped this horrible conflict, look elsewhere. What this book IS, is a snapshot of the reason for the conflict, how ridiculous it was in retrospect, and most importantly, how ridiculous it was to a few brave men and women who risked their entire livelihood making bold statements denouncing this “patriotic” war.To understand the time and places a bit better, we must remember that war was not necessarily looked at with the same degree of horror that it now is a century later. Up until this “war to end all wars”, it was expected amongst most civilized society that, in all probability, there would be an instance where one’s country would engage with another “enemy” country, lives would be lost, civilians would be tortured, and innocent weaker countries would be bloodily dominated by barbaric bullies of stronger nations. Seems pretty catastrophic in hindsight as it should, yet…well, this is just how things were.Take, for instance, how this war started. Essentially, an anarchistic individual from a country most have never heard of assassinated an arch duke of a rival country (that again, most had never heard of). The victimized country declares war on the anarchist’s country because of this one incident, and the allies of each of the two countries line up against one another for total domination. Silly, stupid, and sad.Initially when the war begins, most are excited. A war! We’ll show them who’s boss! Sadly, reality seeps in quickly. For various reasons, this war is essentially a stalemate for four years, with no progress being made, yet the dead bodies atrociously pile up in the millions.There are those on the fringe who realize this is ridiculous, and they make their voice known. I was not very (and in some cases, not at all) familiar with names such as Keir Hardie, Emiline and Sylvia Pankhurst, Stephen and Emily Hobhouse, and Charlotte Despard. These figures are not only opposed to the war, but opposed to the many social injustices across Europe in most major countries that essentially caused this travesty to occur. There is a lot of focus in this book on the protests, hunger strikes, and revolutionary activities to change things. These individuals have always had pacifist and socialist tendencies, and this awful war culminates their anger, yet most of their angry sentiments are wasted on a blindly faithful public, even as the body count piles up and the general public become enraged and sickened as well.There are those who might be put off by this book’s obvious “left” political leanings, but we must remember the times that the majority of the people were living in more than 100 years ago. Life was only good for a very privileged few, and for the majority of the poor and underprivileged, there was, literarily, no escape from a life of poverty and subjugation. The author gives one humorous (I use that term loosely) example of how the aristocracy in England tried to “help” the poor: At times, the privileged few in the upper realms of royalty would travel to the poorest of the poor in London and distribute flowers to the poor and down trodden. Flowers. It kind of reminds of the Monty Python sketch of the famous Robin Hood-like character who would steal from the rich and give to the poor, only instead of stealing money, he stole lupids (a kind of flower).This book is mainly focused on the comings and goings in England (the author even says so at one point during this narrative), and even though England were the “good guys” during this war, the author reminds us that England was just as guilty as Germany when it came to barbaric acts of subjugation. He uses the Boer war in South Africa, concluded only a few years before this war starts, as an example, detailing not only the actual conflict, yet the horrid way the women, children and non-soldiers were treated. So, true, acts such as the German army butchering the country of Belgium during the opening months of the war is basically ignored within these pages, but the author is reminding us that such acts were common everywhere, and the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” wasn’t as black and white as one would like to think. He also places strong emphasis on some of the war’s most inept, bungled commanders as they sacrifice hundreds of thousands of young soldiers in battles that never seem to accomplish much of everything. So, yes, this is definitely an “anti-war” book.So when the dust finally settles and peace is finally declared in 1918, we can all finally see how bloody a mistake this war actually was, and that the few, brave, outspoken were actually on to something with their observations. Sadly, like a lot of history, it’s too little and too late. With out going into too much detail (and the author really doesn’t here, either), the peace treaty that ended this conflict was so inadequate, that it actually was a major factor in the causes of the second world war.There’s an overall good balance between the war on the actual battlefields and the war that the protest movement was wagering as well. Personally, I would have preferred more emphasis on the actual battles, yet the author is very convincing in his point that it was the actions of these radicals back “home” that helped educate and shape the attitudes of many, and helped convince those everywhere, that although this conflict sadly did not “end all wars”, it at least educated the planet of the ridiculousness and butchery of such a conflict. The world would never be the same.

⭐The War to end all wars as not. This book relates the history, mainly in England, of how so many misteps led to WWII.

⭐Adam Hochschild has been nominated for the National Book Award before. Surely he will be on the short list again for this near-perfect account of World War I as told primarily from “the stories of one country, Britain,” as the author says in the introduction. He gives equal time to those for and those opposed to the war. The statistics are staggering. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme 21,000 British soldiers were killed or fatally wounded. (That or course is about one third of all the U. S. soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War.) On the same day another 36,000 British troops were wounded. At the end of the war one half of all French soldiers between 20 and 32 died. The U. S. War Department puts the total deaths from all countries at 8.5 million. Other counts would add another million to that number. Twenty-one million were wounded. Civilian war deaths are estimated at 12 to 13 million. A half million more died in the war’s final five weeks. On the final half day of the war, after the Armistice was signed, 2,738 men “from both sides” were killed and another 8,000 wounded. Mr. Hochschild in the chapter entitled “The Devil’s Own Hand” speculates on the deaths that probably should be counted from the war, later suicides, deaths in other conflicts triggered by this war, the deaths of “underfed” African porters that probably numbered 400,000, the spread of the great influenza pandemic connected to the war took 50 million lives or more. The list seems endless. Furthermore, 20,000 British men of military age refused to go to war with 6,000 of them serving prison terms for their beliefs.As Hochschild points out, one of the things unique about this war is that proportionally more noblemen died than commoners. For example, of all the men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed. (We might ask how many sons of U. S. Senators and Congressmen have ever become casualties of any war the U. S. has waged or even seen active duty for that matter.) And the “inept” British generals judged the success of their campaigns by how many soldiers died! Furthermore, they believed they would win this war quickly by the advancing cavalry even as the Germans introduced the Brits to barbed wire and chlorine gas as new ways to fight their enemy equipped with swords and on horseback.These figures, a little like the current U. S. debt, are hard to get your head around if you just look at the numbers. What Mr. Hochschild does brilliantly is make these astronomical figures mean something by tracing the lives of several individuals through the war and what happened to them if they survived the war. In a word he puts a face on the carnage: Field Marshal Sir John French; his sister Charlotte Despard; Rudyard Kipling; Alfred, Lord Milner; Lady Violet Cecil; Emily Hobhouse; Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia (a gutsy lady) Panknhurst; Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (a piece of work); John Buchan; Bertrand Russell; Joseph Stones; Stephen Hobhouse; Alice, Winnie and Hettie Wheeldon et al.Briton did a good job in getting prominent writers to sell the war. They included Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells–and of course Rudyard Kipling. Before I read this outstanding account of the British in the war, I knew Kipling, who lost a son in the war, pretty much only as the man who gave the world that dreary poem “If” that has been quoted ad nauseam at countless high school graduations in the U. S. Hochschild portrays Kipling as an altogether reprehensible jingoistic , bellicose supporter of the war who disliked Germans, democracy, taxes, labor unions, Irish and Indian nationalists, socialists, and women suffragettes.” And he labeled Irish Catholics “‘the Orientals of the West.'” And John Buchan was virtually a propaganda prostitute for the British, cranking out novel after novel that the British would not stop reading. Bertrand Russell, however, remained against the war and went to prison for his beliefs.I usually shy away from these kinds of books as I find them often tweedy and cumbersome. Mr. Hochschild, however, makes World War I completely accessible to me, the average reader, who is no authority on wars in general or this one in particular. I literally could not put the book down.Highly recommended.

⭐Adam Hochschild is one of my favourite writers and when it comes to his historical texts I am always delighted by the reading experience. This is his latest offering and in it he looks at the conscientious objectors who said they would not kill fellow men in World War I and the contribution that their sacrifice made towards true ‘civilisation’.He has, as ever, done extensive research and uses personal stories to bring the history to vivid life. We have the story of the Pankhurst’s, Kier Hardie, General Haig and many more. He also chronicles what took place in this first truly World War looking at the fates of those lesser known victims from ‘the colonies’ of the European belligerents.The personal stories are by far the most interesting and characters like Bertrand Russell making inspiring reading as well as the poet Wilfred Owen. There is so much here that I thought it would be one of those books that would take a month to read – I devoured it in less than a week. The story of Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack is both moving and enlightening on the ‘Victorian’ views of Mr Kipling – but he was very much ‘a son of Empire’ as I have heard it described.I can not recommend this book highly enough – it is one of those historical books that you could read again immediately upon completion. It is also very sad and moving in the recounting of lives pointlessly lost and the leaving of half a world where loved ones grieved, as they all tried to work out – what was the ruddy point of it all? I am already longing for Adam Hochchild’s next offering – absolutely recommended.

⭐I first saw this book on a warm Saturday afternoon when I chanced upon a rally in Glasgow by the Scottish Socialists protesting the recent decision to bomb ISIS bases in Iraq. The book was part of a swag of Socialist books and pamphlets and it was the title and blurb that drew me in. Here it seemed was a history of World War One that wouldn’t focus solely on the bloody carnage on the Western Front, nor the more familiar, to my Australian upbringing the useless slaughter of Gallipoli. I couldn’t afford the price of the hard copy but the Kindle edition is much cheaper and so I downloaded it that night.I wasn’t disappointed, even though the price is far higher than other e-books. Hochschild’s history of the war does indeed chronicle the savagery of trench warfare but it also covers in great deal the heroic work of anti war agitators and draft resistors who, against overwhelming odds, went to war against a government determined it seemed to embark on a campaign of mass slaughter of its own people. One interesting feature of this work is the fact he starts not with the assassination in Sarajevo but with the Boer War where one of the most powerful armies in the world was tied down for three years by a ragtag guerilla army. Britain won that war not through military success but because it utilised a particularly vile battle tactic, the concentration camp, which would be borrowed and refined by Nazi Germany forty years later. This blurring of the lines between combatant and non-combatant he argues was the first sign that war as the world knew it was rapidly changing, and that’s without mentioning the the most obvious changes, machine guns and barbed wire.He faithfully recounts the events leading up to the war, the frenetic arms race and the clash of empires, the British, German, Belgian, Russian and Ottoman, who were all nibbling at each other’s ‘possessions,’ for want of a better word. His history also records the rise of the suffragettes with such heroic characters as the Pankhurst family, who would be splintered by the war. Other notable heroes and heroines in no particular order are: Keir Hardie, Bertrand Russell, Charlotte Despard, sister of General John French, Stephen Hobhouse, John S Clarke, Alice Wheeldon and her family, and Albert Rochester. These are but a few of the brave souls who stood against the tide of xenophobic hatred sweeping through Britain and Europe at the time.Thus this book is about a war on two fronts, the more traditional front line and the home front but where other military histories merely assign a chapter to the home front as a kind of admission that, “we’re very grateful for your support,” Hochschild has made the home front such a major part of the book that it’s impossible to separate the two fronts without cutting the book in two. Divided into six parts and an introduction, parts two through six follow the progress of the war with the introduction laying out the background with part one introducing the dramatis personae and part seven the aftermath of the war and the fate of the major characters. Haig comes under particular fire from Hochschild who singles him out in particular for his incompetence although French, Foch and Hindenburg are no less a target. The rise of the propaganda machine is also covered in detail. Arguably it was the efficiency of the propaganda machine along with its twisted co-conspirator the military censor that helped keep the war dragging on for four years. In this aspect Hochschild exposes men like Kipling and John Buchan, who wilfully prostituted their writing talent for the benefit of the war department.As war histories go there are probably more detailed blow by blow books but in this centenary of the start of the ‘War to End All Wars,’ Hochschild’s history is a vital counterpoint to the cowardly Conservative ministers and revisionist historians who wish to rewrite the history of the Great War and make it seem like a fight for democracy and free will, which is all the more dubious after reading this book. That it has a Socialist slant is beyond dispute but he doesn’t shirk from exposing the betrayal of the Socialist cause by the Bolsheviks and the great retreat of the Labour party from Bolshevism. I thought the last comment particularly summed up my feelings towards that war and all the wars since then when Alice Wheeldon, wrote from her prison cell. “The world is my country.”

⭐There is an excellent review in Amazon titled ‘not what it says on the the tin’ I read it and initially chuntered because at start the book seemed to be very much about the dissenters. However, by the end of reading the book I very much agreed with the author of that review. In someways it is a bit hard to classify what the book is about. It is more a broad history of the first world war and its consequences with emphasis on some unusual protagonists. It is not a massively detailed history and it is largely told from the perspective of the Brits.Adam Hochschild is a brilliant writer. This is the second book of his that I have read. The first being King Leopold’s Ghost. In my opinion King Leopold’s ghost is perfect, while to End of All Wars is very good but has small flaws.As noted in other reviews, the book starts more or less with the Boer war. This was a perfect place to start because it introduces the rapid repeat machine gun and how it changed modern warfare (something the wwI generals did not ever seem to get to grips with). It also introduces and establishes the main protagonists for the book.Adam Hochschild clearly did a lot of research in writing the book, but with his journalist’s eye he knows what to tell and what to leave out and he always finds the interesting details to tell which make you sit up. I never really thought about the legacy of metal and bombs left in the fields of Flanders. I had only ever known of Emmaline Pankhurst as a heroine of women’s equality. The picture AH paints is much more complex. Douglas Hird came across to me as one of the greatest mass murders in the 20th century, though AH does make the case that his sheer pigheadedness probably contributed to the Allies winning the war at a point when Germany looked like they could win the field.The Germans struck me as vastly more intelligent and creative in trying to solve the deadlock of trench warfare. I never realized how close they came to winning the war. All in all by the end of the book, I felt I needed to learn more and have just bought ‘The Great War’ DVDs as the next easy step in my education.

⭐Sir,Many books have been written during span of one hundred years of Great War, and many would be written in future also.why this war named to be ^Great War^ because Britain fought it for noble cause- for the noble cause of Belgium and France resulting disaster for the Great Britain. It was premonition at the death of Queen Victoria that it is doubtful if the Great Britain would continue to enjoy the days as enjoyed by her during heyday of Victoria. The Britain suffered a lot, lost the3 great empire due to this war, 192000 women became widowed and 400000 children orphaned. Even then P M lost his elder son, future PM lost his son every high and low participated in this war not for one year but for more than 4 years. Rudyard Kipling lost his only son John Kipling^ He was John to all the world , but he was all world to us^ This is why this book is unique. It is good that a chapter has been inserted in it namely ^Not this tide^^Has anyone else has world of him Not this tide For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing and this tide^ Rudyard Kipling from My boy JackThis book is well researched and written in simple language showing how harmful this War was for Great Britain and how the people differed. It was the greatness of its people who endured the pain with fortitude, courage and dignity even other countries left in mid as Russia. I enjoyed the book and recommend that those who have literally taste should compulsorily read itks chaturvediMathura India

⭐A scholarly work, superbly well-researched and documented, a lesson for us all on the absurdity of war and its terrible consequences.

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