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    To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
    To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
    To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
    Audiobook16 hours

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

    Written by Adam Hochschild

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 4, 2011
    ISBN9781452671314
    Author

    Adam Hochschild

    ADAM HOCHSCHILD is the author of eleven 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.

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    Reviews for To End All Wars

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It takes us through the years leading up to the War to the end of the War by looking at multiple British people. It includes military and political leaders, socialists, women's rights advocates, imperialists and anti-imperialists, and just about everyone in between. The overall tone of the book is that the anti-war people were the real heroes and that the pro-war people were generally not smart enough to see how bad either they were or the war was. I learned a great deal about many people whom I did not know a lot about. I would recommend this because it is a great overview of the time period without being a military history.
    • 4/5
      An excellent book about WWI although primarily from the British point of view. A primary focus is the anti-war sentiment and resistance - an interesting aspect seldom included in histories of armed conflict. It is hard to believe that a continent so ravaged by war was quickly re-engulfed within 20 years - not a very positive comment on human nature !
    • 5/5
      Excellent narrative of the how World War I impacted the psyche of England. Hochschild paints a tragic picture of what pro and anti war sentiments did to towns, friends,and families. If you want to understand why all of Great Britain comes to a standstill every year on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month-- read this book!
    • 3/5
      The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 was greeted in Great Britain with a massive show of unity. Men of fighting age rushed to enlist, while organizations and factions set aside their differences in order to face their new common enemy. Yet such support was not universal. As widespread as the demonstration of support for the war was, a committed handful stood in stubborn defiance against the conflict. Adam Hochschild's book details their often lonely struggle against the backdrop of the war they so passionately opposed. In it, he attempts to provide an understanding of the choices they made, showing why they refused to subordinate their conscience to the war effort and the prices they paid for their stance.

      The people Hochschild focuses on are a select group, men and women who are bound by family and personal ties to the British elite. He starts by charting the origin of the opposition of some of them to war by detailing their opposition to an earlier conflict, the Boer War. The fighting there led people like Charlotte Despard, Emily Hobhouse, and the Pankhursts to campaign against the British war effort. For them, opposing the war was just one of many causes they undertook, as the activists Hochschild highlights were often at the forefront of radical reform in Edwardian Britain. Yet the outbreak of the war against Germany created deep divisions among their ranks, even to the point of tearing apart families such as the Pankhursts. Their stand provoked considerable public derision, and most of them were subjected to surveillance and obstruction by the authorities. Yet Hochschild sees their fight as all the more noble for its futility, ultimately granting them the larger moral victory despite the hopelessness of their cause.

      All of this Hochschild describes in an engrossing narrative that conveys well the drama and tragedy of his subject. He is especially good at detailing the relationships between his characters, such as that between Despard and her brother John French, the first commander of the British Expeditionary Force. If there is a villain in his account it is Douglas Haig, whose obstinacy Hochschild savages for fueling the bloodshed. Yet for all of its strengths Hochschild's book suffers from a lack of focus. Often his subjects disappear for pages as he describes the more familiar tale of the overall course of the war; while this can illustrate what excited the passions of its opponents, the considerable amount of space the author devotes to it distracts more often than it enhances his story. While the strengths of Hochschild's narrative outweigh this deficiency, it does limit his achievement with this book, which offers an interesting look at an aspect of the First World War often ignored by other chroniclers.
    • 5/5
      Great one-volume history of WW1. It was good enough to give me both far more knowledge of the war as well as a knowledge that I know next to nothing about the war. It also has that flaw that one-volume histories of massive events can have, of the analysis not being as well done as the research.
    • 4/5
      I've never been all that interested in World War I (I'd prefer learning about "older" wars [essentially from the American Revolution through the Spanish-American War] or "newer" wars [World War II - present]), but this book still was interesting. It focuses less on the conflict itself and more on the people surrounding the conflict - since I'm from the other side of the pond, I had no idea who a lot of the people mentioned in the book were (Charlotte Despard, anyone?), but I learned a lot about those people and the war in general from reading this book.
    • 5/5
      A superbly written, masterfully told history of the Great War that is both sweeping and intimate.
    • 4/5
      I thought that as an avid reader and a lover of history that I knew the basics about World War I. I'd heard about trench warfare, chlorine gas, mustard gas, and shell shock but I didn't really understand them and I wasn't prepared for what I learned while reading this book.They called it the Great War. However, this war was apparently completely unnecessary. That's right - 8.5 million casualties, 12-13 million civilian deaths totally unnecessary brought on by a war-hungry monarch and military men who wouldn't accept the changes that the 20th century had brought to the battlefield.Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to play at war, he always wore a uniform and he wanted to prove his country's superiority. The excuse used to start the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Joseph and his wife (he abhorred war - how ironic). The Austro-Hungary empire would have probably controlled the effects with a small military action in Serbia where the assassination had taken place, but as an ally of Austro-Hungary, Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany took it upon themselves to stress escalation.So we have a war and the British, who had end the Boer wars several years before thought that they were ready to take on the Germans with the same tactics as used then. However, since the Boer wars the 20th century saw motor vehicles, machine guns, and airplanes come into existence. Gen. Douglas Haig would not accept that cavalry was no longer useful with the new methods available. Time and time again he would send men to certain death by commanding offensives directly into the German machine gun nests. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed in weeks and Haig just kept sending them.On the home front, massive labor strikes and Conscientious Objectors filled the headlines. The Conscientious Objectors were sent to prison with sentence ordering hard labor (16 hours a day) half rations and no heat. Women were imprisoned if they argued against the war.But really bothered me the most about what I learned was the actual cause of shell shock. Imagine sitting in a deep ditch for weeks on end and then suddenly being bombarded by artillery NON-STOP for days at a time so loud that you couldn't hear the person next to you talking. I personally can't handle a loud thunderstorm that's off again on again for 20 minutes - how can you handle this acoustic attack?The Allied Forces were actually losing the battle until the Americans joined the fight. The Treaty that ended the war was so vindictive that many historians see it as the a contributor to World War II.The book was slow to start, had some areas where it was extremely repetitive concerning the women that were against the war, but highly informative.
    • 5/5
      Adam Hochschild writes history in a way that makes it supremely engaging. I saw that in the first book of his that I read, "King Leopold's Ghost"--and it was also true in "To End All Wars."

      History for him is essentially storytelling. Here the story is of the First World War, primarily as it was experienced by two ends of the spectrum in British society--those at the top of the military who pushed the war's agenda, and those who stood opposite them as war resisters, often paying a high price for it. Interestingly enough, sometimes the two ends often could be found in the same family, the most famous of which were General John French, commander of British forces at the beginning of the war, and his sister Charlotte Despard, a leading suffragette. These human stories is what makes the book so compelling.

      And of course, there is the war itself, whose appalling details certainly make it the stupidest conflict of the 20th century, if not the millennium. The politics that led to it were dysfunctional, its leaders more prideful of their class-standing than their strategic prowess, the decisions made sending hundreds of thousands into the maw of death hardly less than criminal.

      Woodrow Wilson's assertion that this would be the "war to end all wars" now stands ironic. World War I was so traumatically terrible that one would think it would lead anyone to swear off the very idea of war altogether. The fact that it didn't compounds the tragedy.
    • 4/5
      A book that brilliantly succeeds in finding a new way to talk about the First World War, by looking at the protesters and conscientious objectors who opposed it along the way. I must admit, in my head antiwar protests started sometime around the 60s with Vietnam; but it turns out that the British peace movement during 1914–18 is one of the most impressive in history.So riveting are many of the details here that you end up feeling amazed and annoyed that they aren't included in more general histories of the conflict. I've read countless thousands of words on John French over the last year, yet I somehow had no idea that the field marshal's own sister was Charlotte Despard, one of the most intransigent, outspoken activists of the period. Despard denounced ‘the wicked war of this Capitalistic government’ while her brother was busy orchestrating it – and yet the two of them were as close as ever, regularly visiting each other and writing off their siblings' political views as charming quirks.Despard also championed many other progressive causes of the time, notably women's suffrage. The so-called suffragettes are a key part of the story, and a good illustration of how divided liberal activists were when the war broke out. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel went from planting bombs in Lloyd George's house to working hand-in-hand with him from speaking-platforms and in editorials: ‘If you go to this war and give your life,’ Emmeline told a cheering crowd in Plymouth, ‘you could not end your life in a better way – for to give one's life for one's country, for a great cause, is a splendid thing.’ An argument that became impossible after Owen.Perhaps it helped cement the votes-for-women movement as being within the establishment – sure enough, women were enfranchised in 1918 before the war ended. Nevertheless as a modern reader all your sympathies are with the younger Pankhurst daughter, Sylvia, who remained absolutely committed to the antiwar movement and was more or less thrown out of her own family as a result. Sylvia's secret lover – the pacifist independent MP Keir Hardie – is another key character in here, and one I'd previously known nothing about. Both of them were shunned, isolated, mocked.Bertrand Russell also flits in and out of these pages, a towering moral presence. Every time I read about him I admire him more and more. Russell was jailed for six months for his antiwar activism (when the warder took down his details on arrival, he asked Russell's religion, and he replied, ‘agnostic’. Asking how to spell it, the warder sighed, ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God’). He still managed to keep in touch with two of his lovers while in prison, too – he wrote to a French actress in French, a language his jailers couldn't understand, and sent letters to another woman smuggled out in copies of the Proceedings of the London Mathematics Society, which he told her was ‘more interesting than it appeared’.Hochschild does a brilliant job not just in uncovering the activities of these characters, some of whom have been comprehensively neglected, but also in tying their stories together: the narrative often reads like a novel with a large but interconnected cast. The whole thing is animated by a steady but unintrusive sense of injustice, and the writing is clear, notwithstanding a few foibles (he deploys, for instance, that odd American hypercorrection ‘felt badly’).What's particularly sad, after following these people for so long, and hoping for some kind of victory on their behalf, is seeing how desperately almost all of them latched on to the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's a harsh but enlightening test of moral character to see how quickly people could bring themselves to bail on the Soviet dream when things started going wrong – not a test many leftists passed with flying colours (but that's a story better told elsewhere). And overall, this is a story of failure and disappointment, though the tone is moving and hopeful rather than depressing. The title points up the overarching irony. President Wilson had called the slaughter the ‘war to end all wars’ – but Sir Alfred Milner was more prescient in 1918 when, peering into the future as the bodies were cleared away, he described the Treaty of Versailles as ‘a Peace to end Peace’.
    • 3/5
      A nice effort, but maybe a little disappointing for me. I have read numerous books on WW1 and he provides a decent broad overview of WW1 and the protest movement such as it was. If however, you are very familiar with WW1 much of this will be mere filler with very little new insight into the conduct of the war and it is mostly just wasted ink at that point. I was not very familiar with the protest movement and perhaps what the book does best is to make one realize how feeble the movement truly was. Maybe there is simply not an entire book there, especially confined as it is to the experience of Great Britain. Still worth a read and especially for the uninitiated to the entire picture.
    • 5/5
      Adam Hochschild is a gifted storyteller, whose survey of the First World War brings to life its battles and the societies it utterly transformed. He focuses on a handful of key families and individuals, following them from a few decades before the war to the end of their various lives years or decades after the Armistice. He follows equally the pro- and anti-war factions in British and German societies (and to a lesser degree French and Russian). Filled with facts, the book nevertheless reads like a novel, smoothly, engagingly. That World War II was an inevitable consequence of World War I is repeatedly stressed from various angles. The reader can see all the social and military crises of our early 21st century mirrored in those of the early 20th. The roots are all there. The problems have not been solved. People with little interest in military history who wish to understand our own times better -- how we've become what we are and what we need to do to be more like what we ought to be -- will find this book fascinating and thought-provoking.
    • 4/5
      I think for many Americans this book will be something of a shocker. It tells the story of the British anti-war movement during World War I. First is the story of the enormous incompetence of those prosecuting the war; the highest ranking authority on the civil side was Prime Minister Asquith, and on the military side, the Generals French and Haig. This is a tale of enormous inhumanity, not just for the enemy, but for one's own troops as well, who were ordered to make suicide attacks by the tens of thousands. (Sadly things were even worse on the German side. See my review of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel.) Hochschild tells his tale economically thereby establishing the broader context for the other aspects of his story.

      At the heart of the book, what makes it unique, are stories of the trials and tribulations of the British anti-war movement. Peopled in large part by well-meaning persons of a socialist bent, the movement was undermined and smeared by the British government who had all aspects of the national press completely under its thumb. Part of the anti-war story is about the Conscientious Objector (CO) community. I'm so glad Mr. Hochschild is getting this story out with this book, for their treatment by members of the British police authorities, who shamelessly violated their civil rights, was horrendous. Early on the COs were sent to the front anyway, where the plan was to shoot them when they refused to obey orders. Fortunately, political advocates at home prevented this from happening. They were then moved to a filthy prison in Boulogne where the rats ran over them at night, and the food was disgusting. But even this, I suppose, was better than sitting at the front listening to the big guns thunder and wondering if you'd live to see your loved ones.

      Another thing Hochschild does well here is to tell the tale of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent collapse of the Czarist state in 1917 in context with how the Brits were trying to win the war. This is fascinating.
    • 4/5
      I find that books that I am reading affect my moods. I found this to be the case with this book. A history on some of the movers-and-shakers involved in and around WWI specifically in England was at times frustrating, saddening, and caused me a fair amount of grief in the reading. To my knowledge, none of my family served or was affected directly by the war - but it was such a fruitless and damaging war on many levels that continue to today (ie Iraq, Iran, N. Ireland, all developments of WWI). Written by the co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, it definately had an edge and a specific political message - but even accounting for that - WWI was a collosal mess.
    • 3/5
      This short book investigates a seldom seen side of the British effort in the Great War: the anti-war movement during that cataclysm. Conscientious objectors ("COs") are the focus of the work with a very general account of the British military campaigns of the Great War as a backdrop. An entertaining and informative read.
    • 5/5
      Just like King Leopold's Ghost this is a remarkable read that takes you places that other treatments of the subject do not. The writing is illuminating, full of depth and a joy to read.
    • 5/5
      Great book! An excellent supplement to Tuchman's classics "The proud tower" and "Guns of august".
    • 4/5
      One of those books where now I wish I'd written my review closer in time to when I read it. (I read this right before American Colossus, FWIW.) The horror of WWI as seen in the conflict between its supporters and opponents, mostly in Britain, mostly looking at families who were split.
    • 5/5
      A refreshing book!

      I've read too much WWI-revisionism lately, so it is heartening to see someone pick up diligently that contrary to what so many revisionist historians want to tell us, the British public and the soldiers themselves by no means were oblivious to the disastrous management of the war and its not exactly so clearcut and humane background as per allied interests.

      Much recommended!
    • 4/5
      Something completely different in a World War I book. Most history books detail the battles, analyze the people and the governments, discuss the soldiers lives before, during and after the war, along with the lives of their families or those they leave behind. Adam Hochschild takes a different look at WWI, from the standpoint of those who were AGAINST it. Although the book does stay in chronological order, and discusses the battles and the soldiers, more emphasis is given to the conscientious objectors, the protestors, from Charlotte Despard (sister of Field Marshal Sir John French) to Alfred, Lord Milner, who called the Treaty of Versailles "a Peace to end Peace." A fascinating perspective.
    • 5/5
      The book is an excellent review of WWI, seen from the British perspective. The author described the anti-war movement, along with women's movement from before the war, during, and the afterwards.
    • 5/5
      This is a history of World War One written from a from an English perspective with an emphasis on the home front opposition to the war. A good example is the author's chronicle of the lives of Sir John French and his sister Charlotte Despard. French was the English Commander in Chief for a portion of the war. Charlotte Despard was a member of the Labor Party who very critical of her brother and and the war. They became bitter enemies for life based upon their opposing ideas about the war. Keir Hardie, a working class M.P. for the Independent Labor Party, was another strong opponent of the war. His great despair over the support for the war from socialists all over Europe contributed to his death in September of 1915.Along with the ongoing dispute with his sister the book chronicles the political infighting between Douglas Haig, commander of the British 1st Corps, and French. Haig wanted French's job and wrote letters to everyone who would listen to him. He even had dinner discussions with the King about French's failings as a general. The British lack of victories and his machinations led to Haig being named Commander-in-Chief of the BEF in December of 1915.Those who opposed the war paid a stiff price. Conscientious objectors were placed in prison with murderers where all had to observe the "rule of silence" something which emphasized their isolation from normal life. Six months at hard labor was enough to break a strong healthy man and lead to his early death. Opposition newspapers had their presses destroyed and speakers against the war were attacked and beaten.Pro-war propaganda came in many forms. Early in the war they used a poster of Lord Kitchener pointing and saying "Britons wants you". Later in the war and a bit more subtle was the poster of two children asking their father" What did you do in the Great War Daddy?". John Buchan, the author of "The 39 Steps", was one of the most prolific writers for the propaganda department.Late in the book the author quotes Niall Ferguson as saying that it would have been better to let Germany win the war than have England suffer the death and destruction of the war. The author's documentation of that death and destruction is very thorough and makes you wonder if perhaps Ferguson may be right.It takes a lot of courage to ask that question, even now. This book shows that the answer is not as clear cut as we would like to think
    • 5/5
      An extraordinary history of WWI, which weaves the story around detailed biographies of a dozen or so men and women -- military, government, pacifist, socialist, feminist, and the arts. All of the characters are English, but if there is a bias to the history it certainly isn't pro-British but anti-war, portraying the conflict as a sacrifice of young men for imperial territorial gain. Most of the military commanders (for all sides) were clearly incompetent to deal with a war which, for the first time, involved tanks, machine guns, airplanes, and massive civilian deaths. A moving and cautionary history.
    • 5/5
      This 2011 book is an account of World War One and concentrates on telling of the persons opposed to that war, especially in Britain. In showing the enormity of the mistakes made by the people such as Haig and Milner, and contrasting that with the utter sincerity of the people such as Charlotte Despard (sister to Field Marshall John French) who opposed Britain being in the war, one has to conclude that the better side of the argument was with war opponents, even though politically they could not have prevailed. But the argument that the evils of World War One as it played out over four awful years and surely led to Hitler and the World War Two horrors is a powerful one and has much to commend it. I have long been of the opinion that Britain was right to enter World War One and that US was too, but this book makes a compelling case that the world would have been better off it they had not. The world did not end when German triumphed in 1871 and one has to conclude that the evils of a German victory in 1914 could not compare with enormity of the horrors of the long years of the War and its causing of World War Two This is a powerful book, excellently researched, and one any student of the first world war will be totally caught up by, as I was.
    • 5/5
      This book is one of the very best I've read and I hope you will read it, too. I found the writing and story telling compelling. The premise is brilliant: it tells the story of the First World War from the viewpoint of both hawks and doves. Surely, the author is a dove, and maybe that was one of the reasons I liked the book, but his apparent political stance does not detract from the overall description of critical events that led up to, happened during, and ended the war. Moreover, the book traces the key characters to the ends of their lives. I never clearly understood WWI and how important the events surrounding the war were to the future. I never really understood how oppressive the class system in Great Britain seems to have been. I knew how destructive the war was but when confronted by the massive numbers of dead and injured my mind boggled. This book opened my eyes, taught me a great deal I should have known, and did it by telling some amazing stories.
    • 4/5
      WWI, a horrible, bloody, dirty, pointless war. This book tried to focus on those who opposed the war as well as being a general history of the struggle. It did both well, I thought.
    • 4/5
      An excellent book about WWI although primarily from the British point of view. A primary focus is the anti-war sentiment and resistance - an interesting aspect seldom included in histories of armed conflict. It is hard to believe that a continent so ravaged by war was quickly re-engulfed within 20 years - not a very positive comment on human nature !
    • 5/5
      This is a fascinating story about the other side of the Great War: How it was resisted and opposed by an array of critics in Britain. A worthy tale, and one that is of great importance to us today.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most intense books I've ever read. I recently participated in a book discussion of this one with a group of about 20 adults, all over the age of 40. Every single person in the room said "This book made me SO angry."I joined in the group discussion because it was a book that fit into my reading for War Through the Generations. Adam Hochschild gives us an unusual perspective of looking not only at the war but at the political and social conflicts that were occurring simultaneously. He interweaves these themes so that we are able to see the arrogance of those conducting the war, the anguish of those fighting the war, and the frustration of those who want it to stop, or want to abolish the class structure that is seen as one of the major factors in the horrendous and unnecessary loss of life and limb.Told almost entirely from the perspective of the British, Hochschild explains the history and concepts of Empire, class structure and struggles, and the entirely idiotic insistence of the British military of clinging to the use of Calvary in spite of the invention and use of more up to date tactics and weapons being used by the Germans.Overlaid on this discussion is the story of Britain's conscientious objectors and pacifists, along with a look at the socialist and communist movements in Russia. The role of women in the anti-war movement is also well-documented. I was especially appalled at the treatment the "stiff-upper-lip" aristocratic officers and military hierarchy displayed to men who refused to serve because their conscience told them that killing was wrong. In several instances, these men were conscripted, sent to prison when they refused to serve, and even executed as traitors. It was at this point I become so angry, I had to put the book down and return to it several days later.The author highlights several well -known Englishmen, including Bertrand Russell, Sir John French, Winston Churchill, Charlotte Despard, and Rudyard Kipling. Each had a specific view of the war, its rightness or its total stupidity. Each of their stories was heart-breaking, infuriating, and so well written that whether or not we agreed with the viewpoint, we understood it. What was so anger inducing however, was the recognition of all who were participating in the discussion of how little the world seems to have learned. We all could see clear and unequivocal correlations to wars that followed. The parallels between anti-war movements during Vietnam and today's conflicts were all clearly visible, and led us to the conclusion that this is a book that should be required reading for all Americans.
    • 5/5
      I was hoping this was going to be a prosopography of the audacity of hope, and not short history of the war with heaps of condemnation on top. Even in the introduction it claims not to be a history. Still it is a history with a lot of condemnation. I wanted more biography of war resisters and peace activists. I was annoyed at the this is why World War One was bad tone of the work. I thought, if this was a history, the author could just present the facts and the reader could decide for themselves what was good and what was bad. Isn’t it obvious that WWI was an atrocity?But I thought about it for a while. Though I personally am annoyed that this book is not exactly what it purports to be, I cannot say this book is not necessary. My own fascination with WWI stems from those in power ignoring its lessons. I have concluded that this book is very necessary and it should be shouted from the rooftops that WWI was in its entirety an atrocity whose lessons we have collectively chosen to ignore. The historians can skim the history, the rest is, in fact, a prosopography of the audacity of hope. And it does give me hope that there has always been a trickle, no matter how small, of enlightenment in the face needless death and perpetual injustice.Five glorious stars even if Arthur Morey’s pronunciations are little weird.