To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
Adam Hochschild, 2011
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547750316
Summary
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.
Hochschild focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s 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? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1942
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard College
• Awards—J. Anthony Lukas Prize; Mark Lynton History Award;
Lionel Gelber Prize (Canada); Duff Cooper Prize (Britain)
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.
His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey (1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.
Hochschild's books have been translated into five languages and have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, and the Society of American Travel Writers. Three of his books—including King Leopold's Ghost—have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. King Leopold's Ghost was also awarded the 1998 California Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction.
Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's magazine, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. A former commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," he teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997-98 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India.
He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
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.... 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.... This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.
Christopher Hitchens - New York Times Book Review
Hochschild writes sharp portraits of the many men and women, some of them warriors and some of them doves, who come under his microscope, and he is fair to them all. His depiction of life in the trenches is so vivid that some readers may have difficulty stomaching it, as is also true of his account of the awful battles at the Somme and Passchendaele; his ultimate judgment of “the war’s madness” is fully earned by the evidence he presents. “To End All Wars” is exemplary in all respects.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
(Starred 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 prosuffrage 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.
Publishers Weekly
Mary is a serious lawyer, married with two kids, whose husband is a perennial mama's boy incapable of grocery shopping on his own. Mixed in with the trials and tribulations of the protagonists are humorous vignettes from the lives of some of their other friends and acquaintances—many of whom
Library Journal
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
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for To End All Wars:
1. What is the irony inherent in the book's title. Why did Woodrow Wilson affix that epithet to World War I? What did he mean by it?
2. Why did many of the upper classes oppose the war, considering it unjust? Hochschild memorializes what he considers their courage. Do you consider them courageous...or disloyal or cowardly?
3. The Earl of Lansdowne's opposition to the war stemmed from differing concerns than those held by individuals like Fenner Brockway, Alice Wheeldon, and John S. Clarke. In what way was their underlying opposition different?
4. Talk about the class system in Britain and other countries of Europe? How did the onset of war delineate and exacerbate class divisiveness?
5. How does Hochschild portray the British generals who prosecuted the war? What was their attitude toward casualty numbers?
6. In what ways was the First World War different from all previous wars? Why was its destructive power so terrible—so "astonishingly lethal" in Hochschild's words?
7. What does Hochschild mean when he says that the war "forever shattered the self-assured, sunlit Europe." How was the world changed by the war—culturally, philosophically, as well as geopolitically?
8. How does Hochschild link the first with the second World War?
9. Hochschild indicates that American intervention actually helped to prolong the war and lead to a more vindictive armistice. Do you agree with his assessment?
10. Hochschild tells much of the history of the war through the side of the British and, especially, those who opposed the war. In doing so, he calls into question the meaning of "loyalty" and the conflicts that arise in defining which loyalty takes precedence. Where does one's true loyalty lie—with country, military duty, or family...or as Hochsfield puts it:
Was loyalty to one’s country in wartime the ultimate civic duty, or were there ideals that had a higher claim?”
Where do you think loyalty lies? Where would your loyalty be?
11. How does Hochschild portray Bertrand Russell? Do you agree with his portrait of Russell? What does Russell mean when he claims in 1914 that he was "tortured by patriotism"?
12. Talk about the role of propaganda in the war effort. How do our attempts to build support for a war today compare with the techniques used during World War I?
13. Lord Lansdowne published a paper in which he pointed out that the war led to "the prostitution of science for the purposes of pure destruction." Was he right? Historically, science has always been put to use in wartime in order to gain defensive as well as offensive advantage? What then is the proper use of science?
14. What have you learned about World War I from reading Hochschild's book? Have your views of war, the conduct of war, patriotism, or heroism been confirmed...or altered in any way?
15. Does this work have relevance to the 21st century? Are there lessons we can gain from reading Hochschild's account of a war that took place a century ago?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)