First of all, what a great title, right? World War One was labeled the "War to End All Wars" by those in England who believed it needed to be fought, but those who thought WWI was unnecessary and a massive tragedy worked hard, literally, to end all wars. Very clever.
Second, man, you really need to study more about WWI. It is absolutely fascinating. In those four years, most of what we all think of as the modern world came about. Rapid global travel, mechanized militaries, 'Total War' that targeted civilians and economies as much as the enemy's soldiers, the emergence of submarines, aircraft, instant electronic communications, and the very shape of the countries we all recognize on our maps today, all of these things sprang up when the world went to war in 1914.
Speaking of maps, this book has some good ones. They aren't very pretty, but they are actually useful. Maps of both European Fronts clearly show where the action all happened, and there is even one map numbering the dizzying sequence of domino-like events that lead to so many nations declaring war on one another where only days before there had been peace and prosperity. See, Erik Larson? Using good maps to make your story more understandable is not that hard!
To tell the story of the fight against the Great War, Hochschild has to start with two other stories, the movement to attain women's suffrage in England, and the rise of International Socialism. Both of these groups existed because their members felt they had no power over their own lives. Women (and roughly 40% of British men) weren't allowed to vote at all, and workers all over the world (the proletariat) were feeling the oppression of laboring for an economic system that was demanding much from many to improve the lot of only a very few. When you have those same groups of people being told that they and their loved ones need to fight and die in a war in order to spread freedom and democracy while their allies hail from Tsarist Russia, and they are asked to fight alongside soldiers from India and South Africa, where the natives also aren't allowed to vote, you have a recipe for some serious social conflict.
In fact things in Britain were growing worrisome enough for the government and the upper class of English society that some British Hawks actually welcomed the coming war in the hopes that it would help quell what was fast becoming a full fledged revolution at home. Suffragettes were attacking MPs, burning down homes and churches, throwing bricks through windows, and had even attempted to bomb the house of David Lloyd George, who would become the wartime Prime Minister. Ireland was straining to be free from the rule of the British crown. The great British Empire was beginning to fray at the edges. It is remarkable what people will do when they decide to fight for the right to have their voices to be heard. It is also remarkable what people in power will do to stay there.
You found it fascinating to see the run up to the war from the perspective of the average citizen. Like Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," "To End All Wars" takes history that you knew failry well and flips it on its head, showing you what you thought you knew from a different angle. History does not just happen in the halls of power or on the fields of battle. It happens in people's homes and on their streets, in their churches and in their classrooms. Hindsight always makes history seem like a foregone conclusion, but it is important to you to remember that there were activists and pacifists who fought against the outbreak of war at the time, not because it was merely symbolic, but because there really was a chance to avoid what seemed inevitable. There really was. The way the war ended proves that. Sadly the people on the home fronts of the world realized the futility of the war far too late.
"To End All Wars" leads you through the events of The Great War, the unimaginable slaughter, the awful waste of lives thrown into hopeless shoulder to shoulder marches against the weapons of modern warfare with horrific consequences. Fifty thousand British soldiers dead in one day and a quarter of a million dead in one battle, and the casualty lists kept growing month after month, year after year. The situation became so perverse, that the British commander on the Western Front began measuring his forces' success, not by the ground they gained, but by the casualties they took. He was assuming (mistakenly) that the Germans must be suffering an equal amount. He even became disdainful of officers whose units did not sustain appalling losses. What kind of a general wants his men to die!? If ever there was a war to protest, this was it.
The military leaders of the Western Front were slow to realize that the world had changed. Wars needed to be fought differently now. It took many years and millions of lives before either side began to develop alternative tactics to suicide charges. A public which was quick to cheer the war at its beginning and quick to vilify its critics, slowly came around to the side of the people who had been protesting the war for years. By the time the war was almost over the aristocracy that had ruled Russia for 300 years had been murdered and replaced by a revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet government, the French armies were refusing to fight in suicidal assaults any longer, the British military was withholding forces from the front in order to keep them at home to maintain order, British women had been given the right to vote in order to prevent a full-fledged revolution, and the armies of Germany, still undefeated on the battlefield, were starving and abandoning their positions at the front with words of revolution on their lips. The German navy refused direct orders to sail from their ports and the Kaiser's own brother, commander of the entire Baltic Fleet, had to disguise himself to get out of the port city of Kiel alive. Germany's allies didn't surrender so much as give up fighting because their armies just evaporated.
Shockingly, none of the members of the belligerent governments tried to find a diplomatic coourse that would lead to stopping the bloodshed. Emily Hobhouse, British antiwar juggernaut, was the only person from either side of the bloodiest war in human history (up to that point) to visit the other side seeking peace. She failed. However, Armistice Day arrived not because one army emerged victorious, but because of a mass realization by both the soldiers and the populations of the belligerent countries that the war was stupid. You had no idea that Europe had come so close to an actual continent-wide socialist revolution only 100 years ago. But that is how senseless the violence of this war was, that is how far the madness of it all drove people. Even though the body count in WWII was far, far higher than that of the Great War, at least the armies of '41 and '44 moved! The armies of 1914-18 remained so close to their original starting points that the first and last British soldiers killed in the war are buried in a battlefield cemetery under the shade of the same tree! It proved almost impossible to continue on with the charade that the war was for any noble purpose when mothers and widows were being told all of the male members of their family had died in order to move the front a few hundred yards.
Suddenly, the radicals from 1914, the Pankhursts and Hobhouses and Bertrand Russels and socialist revolutionaries were beginning to sound far more sensible than the governments which demanded more and more sacrifices for less and less benefit. To quote Bertrand Russel on pages 112 and 113,
"As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling [he as yet had no children] the massacre of the young wrung my heart... This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side."Eventually the people of the world agreed with Russel and those who, like him, were brave enough to speak out against the stupidity of the war. They would also, in time, come to trust the voices they had once tried to silence. Many of the British citizens jailed for refusing the draft later came to serve as members of Parliament or in the Cabinet. One who had not gone to jail but had spoken out loudly against the war, Ramsay MacDonald, was elected Prime Minister of England in 1924.
The propaganda machinery set in motion to swell the ranks of the Allied armies was a little too effective. It certainly inspired millions of boys to enlist, but it planted a seed of hatred that grew in the minds of even those who should have known better. In the days and months following the end of the war, British and French leaders had a choice. They could choose to be lenient on the German people, and show them mercy and some small forgiveness, or they could choose to be vengeful and petty, disguising their bullying with words like "justice" and claims to their own innocence in all the violence. They chose the later option, inflicting an overly burdensome treaty on Germany and demanding more than was just or necessary from their former adversary. The Germans had become a "them," and when we humans make anything about "us v. them" we are capable of committing some of the greatest mistakes in our history. Their mistake in this moment, their inability to rise above their own human frailty set the stage for another, even more destructive conflict. Their refusal to show forgiveness and mercy allowed the reactionary rise of the Nazi party and virtually guaranteed that World War II would be even more inevitable than the War to End All Wars.
But there were moments of hope. There always are. That first Christmas of the war, both sides were still feeling very chivalrous towards one another. The war was all still a game played by boys and men who thought of themselves as Victorian gentlemen. As the sun rose that Christmas morning in 1914, all along No Man's Land between the enemy lines, white flags were raised. Silence filled the air instead of bullets. Young soldiers crept from their trenches and started towards the battlements of their enemies with nothing in their hearts but goodwill. To this day, historians call it the Christmas Truce. Gifts were exchanged and songs were sung. Beer and wine flowed. Animosity was forgotten. Soccer games were played, and old friends, now turned adversaries, were once again united. Peace broke out in the middle of the Great War. If only these soldiers could have kept this attitude for the rest of the war, they all would have made it home alive. For this one day, these men were not soldiers, they were simply citizens of the world. For this one day they looked at the soldiers across the field from them and they did not see the enemy. They were just people, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, people are good.
On to the next book!
P.S. Don't think WWI was all bad. The Victorian era did feature some of the most epic facial hair styles of any war. Check this out.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50929/8-awesome-mustaches-world-war-i
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