Adam Hochschild does many things well in this account of World War I as experienced by Great Britain, not least taking a very familiar story and making it new. We all know that the war bogged down in ghastly stalemate as it degenerated into a battle of attrition in the trenches; that the political leadership of virtually every participating nation was foolish at best, incompetent at worst; that the war’s awful casualties — “more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts,” civilian deaths “estimated at 12 to 13 million” — were exacted for no clear purpose; that the terms laid down at the Treaty of Versailles left Germany bitter, angry and vindictive, paving the way for Hitler and the even worse cataclysm that followed. We know all of this, yet Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story and explores it in provocative ways.
Best known for “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa” (1998) and “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” (2005), Hochschild was drawn to World War I by its terrible deadlock, by the “astonishingly lethal” toll it took on the British ruling classes, by “the way it forever shattered the self-assured, sunlit Europe of hussars and dragoons in plumed helmets and emperors waving from open, horse-drawn carriages.” He chose, however, not to write a conventional narrative history of the war — which, after all, has been done before, and in some cases done very well — but to concentrate on the war as undergone by those in Britain who took diametrically opposing views of it:
‘To End All Wars’ by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 448 pp. $28)
“A war is usually written about as a duel between sides. I have tried instead to evoke this war through the stories within one country, Britain, of some men and women from the great majority who passionately believed it was worth fighting and some of those who were equally convinced it should not be fought at all. In a sense, then, this is a story about loyalties. What should any human being be most loyal to? Country? Military duty? Or the ideal of international brotherhood? And what happens to loyalty within a family if, as happened in several of the families in these pages, some members join in the fight while a brother, a sister, a son, takes the stance of opposition that the public sees as cowardly or criminal?”
Or, as Hochschild puts it more bluntly a bit later: “Was loyalty to one’s country in wartime the ultimate civic duty, or were there ideals that had a higher claim?” Writing about James Keir Hardie, the Scottish labor leader who passionately opposed the war and paid a heavy price for his convictions, Hochschild puts another spin on these wrenching questions: “Hardie faced a dilemma common to peace activists then and now: how do you oppose a war without seeming to undermine the husbands, fathers, and brothers of your fellow citizens whose lives are in danger?” Most vividly, Hochschild gives us Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and incredibly productive writer who in 1950 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, who “loved his country deeply but believed from the start that the war was a tragic mistake.” To say that Russell was heartbroken is no exaggeration:
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