British commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig, childishly devout and completely unable to engage in conversation (there is a lovely anecdote about a briefing by Haig that consisted only of grunts and the occasional random word fortunately, his subordinates were fluent in Haig-speak), had an almost criminal disregard for the lives of his soldiers, but he was one of the few people with any influence to argue that harsh peace terms would destabilize Europe.Įmmeline Pankhurst, the radical suffragette, cheered when her allies bombed the house of Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George in 1913, but a year later the war had made her such a hawk that she was almost a puppet of his government and had turned against her own daughter Sylvia, who continued to espouse pacifism. His narrative takes the main actors from the turbulent years of social and political unrest before 1914 to the even more turbulent years after 1918, and reveals them as bundles of contradictions who defy easy categorization.
This simplistic calculus - pro-war = traditionalism = bad anti-war = modernism = good - has already derailed many a book, but Hochschild is too good a writer to fall into that trap. The conflict pitted the bulk of the British population - who supported the war, cheered the suspension of civil liberties and eagerly consumed all manner of alarmist propaganda - against a small group of pacifists and socialists who opposed the war, pleaded for tolerance, and remained passionate defenders of social justice. To End All Wars is about the clash of world views that occurred as traditionalism and modernism jostled for primacy in wartime Britain. When I teach the First World War to my students, I often ask them one of those impossible, unanswerable questions to jump-start the debate: Is it more convincing to see the war as the last gasp of the old order, or the first breath of the new? Of course, it's both - but after reading Adam Hochschild's absorbing new book, I am more persuaded than ever that the Great War fits better at the close of the 19th century than the dawn of the 20th.
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