To End All Wars

To End All Wars (2011), a work of historical non-fiction by the American author and journalist Adam Hochschild, tells the story of the First World War from a panoramic perspective, but centering on the struggle in Britain between those who believed the war was a just cause and the activists who opposed it. Hochschild also devotes particular attention to the war’s many victims, including the soldiers who lost their lives and those anti-war activists who suffered for their convictions.

Hochschild begins the book by introducing his particular approach to the much-told story of the Great War. He suggests that he is viewing the events of the war ultimately through the prism of loyalty: “In a sense…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 to several of the families in these pages, some members join the fight while a brother, a sister, a son, takes a stance of opposition that the public sees as cowardly or criminal?”

From the introduction, the book proceeds more-or-less chronologically, beginning not with the outbreak of the First World War but with the Boer War, fought between the British and the South African Afrikaner colonists at the end of the nineteenth century. Several of the figures central to Hochschild’s account of war appear here, in ways that foreshadow their later actions. Alfred Milner—a cabinet minister during the War—is the Royal Governor of South Africa and one of the Boer War’s architects. Britain’s senior First World War generals, John French and Douglas Haig, also appear here, leading the relief of Kimberley (a success which partly caused their disastrous reliance on cavalry at the beginning of the later war). Rudyard Kipling, a future propagandist for the War, makes an appearance.



So, too, does one of Hochschild’s key resistance figures. Minister’s daughter Emily Hobhouse campaigns to relieve the suffering of the Afrikaners impoverished by the Boer War (27,000 of whom died in British-run concentration camps). During the First World War, Hobhouse becomes a prominent dissenter, representing Britain at a socialist conference in Switzerland and later traveling to Berlin to lobby for a negotiated peace.

In his account of the Great War, Hochschild focuses on the terrible loss of life and the many figures who tried to put a stop to it. Their motives differ enormously. The Earl of Lansdowne pushes for a negotiated peace because he is horrified by the slaughter of young gentlemen. Socialists like Fenner Brockway, Alice Wheeldon, and John S. Clarke are appalled by the loss of talented working-class men who could have helped to build a socialist revolution if they had lived. These different class-based attitudes intersect in the figure of Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell, the grandson of an earl who was also a committed socialist.

Russell, already inclined to pacifism, is hardened in his conviction when he wakes one night to the sound of his neighbors cheering the sight of a burning German zeppelin: he realizes that war has perverted both sides. He becomes a leading figure of the anti-war movement, attending the trials of Conscientious Objectors (COs) and eventually ending up in prison himself. He also throws himself behind the Quakers’ No-Conscription Fellowship.



Hochschild also tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated officer and a poet who publishes a statement (drafted with Russell’s help) that he no longer believes in the justice of the war, which in his view has become a war of aggression on the British side. Sassoon is forcibly hospitalized and declared to have suffered a breakdown. He returns to the front, still unable to believe in the War (in which he will die).

Other major figures of the British anti-war movement include the socialist Charlotte Despard, who, beginning her activist life advocating for London’s poorest families, becomes a committed pacifist, and the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, a vocal anti-war advocate who begins an illicit affair with socialist politician Keir Hardie. Hardie, a former miner and the leader of the Independent Labor Party, advocates for a universal brotherhood of workers opposed to imperialist warmongering, which brings him sharply into conflict with the British establishment.

Hochschild devotes considerable attention to the major figures of the pro-war camp, including the ruthless and incompetent Generals French, Haig, and Rawlinson. The latter complains when British casualties are too low, delighting when casualties increase into the tens of thousands. All three are responsible for pointless and suicidal charges at unbreakable lines.



Among the soldiers at the front, Hochschild focuses on the fifty COs forced into the army and shipped out to France: it is hoped that they will desert and be executed. Seventeen are sentenced to death (although they escape execution). Back home in Britain, more than 20,000 men refuse to fight, and 6,000 are imprisoned.

Hochschild concludes his account by considering the Treaty of Versailles and its legacy. He notes evidence of increasing anti-Semitism in Germany as the War ends. He reaches the conclusion that Nazism could perhaps have been avoided if Germany’s defeat had not been so heavy—if, in fact, some of Britain’s many advocates for peace had been heard before the entry of the United States into the War.

Described as a “moving, accessible book” by Kirkus Reviews, To End All Wars explores many under-told stories from the First World War, making a powerful anti-war argument.