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Summary
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. He 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?
Author Notes
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 worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. He began his journalism career as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Then he worked for ten years as a magazine editor and writer, at Ramparts and Mother Jones, which he co-founded. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation.
His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. His other books include The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey; The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin; Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels; King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves; and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. He teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly 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. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Delving into prowar and antiwar opinion in Britain during WWI, Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost, 1998) humanizes responses to the conflict through biographical accounts of British soldiers, politicians, and radicals. For example, he contrasts John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, with his sister, a social activist who opposed the war, showing how the causes they pressed in prewar Edwardian England presaged their conduct during WWI. Linking his diverse cast of characters, which includes antiwar Bertrand Russell and prowar writers John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling, Hochschild presents a WWI narrative deriving from military histories by Hew Strachan and John Keegan and highlights the fact that it was belief in the war's futility, folly, or immorality that moved its opponents to action. Socialists, suffragettes, pacifists, and conscientious objectors who preferred prison to compromising their principles populate the book, and Hochschild sympathizes with them rather than British leaders who prosecuted the war. However much that perspective affects the work as history, it strengthens its appeal to those interested in and inspired by past antiwar movements.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
From historian Hochschild (Bury the Chains: The First International Human Rights Movement, 2005, etc.), a selective history of the slaughter of innocents in World War I.WWI effected the rupture of civilization on many levelsthe efficacy of war machinery for mass murder, the collapse of colonial empires, the destabilization of the status quo by modern ideas such as socialism, women's suffrage and national self-determinationand the author skillfully harnesses these numerous and often contradictory currents. Hochschild focuses on Britain and many of the significant, prominent or otherwise typical protagonists whose lives and work underscored the cataclysmic changes in this era, from loyal aristocrats to pacifists and conscientious objectors. Among dozens of others, the characters include military leaders Douglas Haig and Alfred Milner, who led the war effort against the later aggressions of Germany and Austria-Hungary; Charlotte Despard, whose work with the Battersea poor prompted her to become a committed socialist and pacifist; and Rudyard Kipling, whose writing cast a nostalgic enchantment around the British empire. Hochschild plunges into the war year by year, 191418, when Britain swung from a country eager to fight the Germans, despite labor unrest, Irish agitation for home rule and antiwar demonstrations, to utterly stricken and bereft, with unbelievablenumbers of young men cut down in the trenches. Britain had "declared that the very fundamentals of civilization were at stake," yet the war wrought unfathomable carnage andprofoundquestions about its purpose. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
At the end of this book, Hochshild (narrative writing, Graduate Sch. of Journalism, Univ. of California, Berkeley; King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa) writes that if only one event of the 20th century could be "undone," it should be World War I; many readers will agree with this statement. Covering almost exclusively the British perspective, he here tells the story of World War I through the eyes of its most prominent supporters and detractors. Hochschild's own sympathies lie with the conscientious objectors, socialists, and pacifists who opposed the war but were drowned out by the general public, politicians, and generals. The author is at his best when he describes horrible ironies of the war, such as a Swiss-arranged trade of essential war materials between Great Britain and Germany so the governments could more efficiently send their own soldiers to be slaughtered. VERDICT This book shares a similar thesis with David Stevenson's Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy and will be appreciated by anyone interested in the history of World War I or the stories of war dissenters.-Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary Lib., Oviedo, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 trench The 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." Excerpted from To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
