Review: To End All Wars

By: Ethan Johnson
March 5, 2015

The history of the First World War has been told and retold, but in To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Half the Way Home, introduces a war that contrasts many authoritative narratives. He uses the personal accounts of Britons to argue that the war was neither noble nor just, but bred from stubbornness of those in power and won in spite of those working to dissolve national boundary lines. He does so by exploring the voices that pull the reader from the safety of the present, and settle them in deep historical context. All of which are buried in loyalty and rebellion: the Unionist turned conscientious objector, the suffragette turned prisoner, and author turned propagandist. Ardent wartime opponents like Charlotte Despard, Keir Hardie, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her daughters find a voice alongside their nationalist countrymen in Hochschild’s account—pushing the reader to challenge their understanding of the British home front. By offering this set of counter-narratives, he describes a much larger historical field that responds to the vexed question of why people either supported or opposed the war, and the ways in which they did so.

Hochschild’s revisionist account, however, comes up against the work of many respected First World War military historians: people like Brian Bond and Nigel Cave. They both construct arguments that employ the advances in war technology (like the use of tanks, mustard gas, and barbed wire) to support their narratives of progress. Adversely, Hochschild argues that British technology was incredibly underdeveloped because of the nation’s inability to adapt to a new type of war: a war of attrition. He pursues this argument by drawing on the letters of soldiers on the front lines, essays from contemporary scholars, biographies, and poetry. As Hochschild explains, the difference between new warfare and the wars the British generals were used to fighting condemned their undertrained soldiers to death at the hands of German barbed wire, machine guns, and heavy artillery fire.[1] These are interesting points to bring up, especially in light of other—quite different—opinions on the scope and power of technology and British adaptation in the war.  What I find interesting about his interpretation is the way he uses a narrative voice to explore this point, and then uses primary sources to secure his interpretation.

Hochschild closely followed the suffragette and socialist movement his work, not because of their part in sparking war, but because they worked to stop it. He uses these forms of resistance as perspectives from which to express the massive tensions across Europe, and specifically in Britain, that had to work within severe limitations after the war’s onset. To End All Wars emphasizes the suffragette movement’s ability to successfully maneuver politics throughout the duration of the war to show how wives and mothers could oppose the war, but support their soldier and nation. Before the war’s beginning, as Hochschild highlights, the heightened sense of revolution, brought on by the spread of socialist ideals, swept across Europe and offered an alternative to the war. The struggle was working to dissolve national lines and create a bond between workers that would allow the standard of living to increase rapidly, and war to be averted. With leaders like Keir Hardie and Jean Jaures, the movement was picking up enough steam to inspire workers to take the streets, offering an ominous foreshadowing to the mobilization of the same demographic during the war.  Hochschild underscores the importance of the socialist movement when he argues for the movement’s role as a counterweight to the war. The story of the socialists and suffragettes is one of both rebellion and loyalty: reflecting the subtitle. The turbulent politics of the war bend both movements into unexpected actors, allowing Hochschild to offer his alternate version of the event.

While he investigates both the suffragette movement and the socialist movement quite exhaustively, his work is treats the tensions between Britain and Ireland less robustly than the attention given to other topics. Hochschild sprints through the importance and challenges Britain faced when it came to keeping Ireland subdued. The Easter Rising is addressed in about a page and a half, only to see the implications arise (to a disheartening degree) a few chapters later. To some extent, though, this is understandable. The obvious tension, and eventual full blown rebellion, between the two did not offer much insight into his construction of the story or Britain’s involvement in the war. Conscription is the major issue he touches in Ireland’s relation to the British war plan—why, he asks, would Irishmen fight alongside Britons and their colonial subordinates if they could not be awarded respect? Hochschild clarifies his point through an analysis of John French, a major character in the work, to express national tensions regarding how the British government dealt with unruly Irish subjects, while striking an uneasy balance that attempted to skirt a full blown rebellion.

The audience of Hochschild’s work is important when considering what he’s trying to accomplish. Though To End All Wars is easily accessible and well received among most audiences, he uses the type of research and interpretation that is expected from a professional work. He successfully incorporates both direct quotations and paraphrases from primary sources into his own prose, keeping his narrative interesting but true to the evidence. By doing so, he also successfully pulls the reader into his argument—allowing the reader to empathize with a large range of characters. He delves deeply into a few specific moments during the war, evaluates the relationships among characters in his work, and then constructs a narrative from that dynamic between time and character. Though Hochschild offers an interestingly revisionist take on the First World War, his strong use of evidence offers a previously under-developed narrative of how loyalty and rebellion shaped the social and political realities of a war torn region.

Photo courtesy of BBC Radio

[1] Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2011: 137, 139, 144.