Despite the best efforts of historians to record its significance, World War I has been, in Western culture, overshadowed by its bigger, louder successor. This is logical. After all, World War II was the first war of the modern era, a war prosecuted with cutting-edge weapons and contemporary nation states. Not only did World War I involve horse-mounted cavalry, the generals who fought it out deployed 19th century ideas of honor and bravery and, in doing so, consigned their men to be slaughtered by the millions. World War II was ignited by an epic antagonist in Hitler, a man so demonic, he could not have been imagined by dramatists. World War I was launched by the pettiness and the pride of monarchs who, in committing their countries to the ruinous conflict, wrote the final chapter on their era before ushering themselves into history. But while it's clear to see how the bigger, starker World War II defined the remainder of the century, World War I gave rise to powerful voices and vital ideas that laid down the destinies of political movements for decades to come.
In To End All Wars, Mr. Hochschild, a journalist and author, traces the lives of several influential figures in British politics and society in a largely successful attempt to create a portrait of life during World War I. From the political dissidents who were jailed for their unwillingness to fight to the staunchly pro-government loyalists who considered such dissent in a time of war treasonous, Mr. Hochschild uses his subjects to explore not only the manner in which public opinion was shaped during this dark period of European history, but the extent to which great strife polarizes people by creating opposing camps into which people, on the basis of class background, political affiliation, and career path, sort themselves. In the case of Britain from 1914 to 1918, this sorting created three distinct, powerful groups: the conservative loyalists who believed in the war, who felt it a matter of British pride to fight it out, and who deemed dissent to be un-British; the socialist opposition who hated the war, who wanted it ended as soon as humanly possible, and who advocated political revolution to see those objectives realized; and everyone else stuck in the middle who were asked to fight the war, to die in its battles, to suffer its deprivations, and to bear up under its pains with dignity and grace. No surprise then that this unhappy stew generated extraordinary tumult in Britain during these five years of international calamity.
From Lloyd George, Rudyard Kipling and John French, loyalists all, to Emily Hobhouse, Keir Hardie and the Pankhurst clan, socialists all, Mr. Hochschild's vivid biography of a society during one of history's most senseless wars is surprisingly gripping. After all, this is a tale not of battlefields and tactics; this is a chronicle of the lives of desperate and passionate people who stood at the nexus of a pivotal moment in humanity's history and insisted that their presences be felt, that their ideas be heard. Through their own words, and Mr. Hochschild's reconstructions of their lives, the reader is presented with a composite view of the homefront during wartime and the epic conflict which, for such citizens, characterizes all wars.
Do we agitate against our government, like Sylvia Pankhurst and Bertrand Russell, putting our beliefs ahead of the betterment and unity of our nation during a difficult time? Or do we support our leaders like Kipling and French, demanding that the people suspend their beliefs for the betterment of the cause and the nation? To do the former is to risk being labelled un-British, or un-American, an unpatriotic traitor to ones people and the soldiers dying for the cause. To do the latter is to risk being a helpful stooge for the government, a willing dupe who, infected by propaganda, spreads this insidious virus to the people. It is a question yet to be satisfactorily answered, but one which Mr. Hochschild's subjects all confront in their own ways.
This is a wonderful examination of a vital time in our world's history, a time in which the fate of a century was being written not only in the blood of the men dying in Flanders Fields, but by the revolutionaries who dared to be heard, dared to force their ideas into the world. A riveting tapestry of time lost to history. (5/5
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