{"id":10422,"date":"2024-10-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10422"},"modified":"2024-10-07T19:29:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T23:29:13","slug":"to-end-all-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/08\/to-end-all-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"To End All Wars."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I read Adam Hochschild\u2019s book King Leopold\u2019s Ghost<\/a> <\/em>back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I\u2019d have to say now it\u2019s one of the most influential books I\u2019ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium\u2019s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It\u2019s the most damning work I\u2019ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild\u2019s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918<\/a><\/em>. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage\/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war\u2019s effects on women\u2019s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war \u2013 Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

Hochschild\u2019s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn\u2019t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that\u2019s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page \u2013 one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war\u2019s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What To End All Wars <\/em>is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild\u2019s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn\u2019t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country\u2019s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics \u2013 but only as they connect back to Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren\u2019t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family\u2019s conservative periodical The National Review <\/em>(unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain\u2019s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her \u2018shops\u2019 to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To End All Wars<\/em> didn\u2019t radicalize me the way that King Leopold\u2019s Ghost<\/em> did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It\u2019s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Naguib Mahfouz\u2019s Midaq Alley<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Adam Hochschild\u2019s book King Leopold\u2019s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I\u2019d have to say now it\u2019s one of the most influential books I\u2019ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium\u2019s King […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1182,161,814,225,867],"class_list":["post-10422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-history","tag-highly-recommended","tag-history","tag-non-fiction","tag-world-war-i","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10424,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions\/10424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}