Uniting Loyalty and Rebellion: The Story of How World War I Ended

Alastair Rosie: I first saw this book on a warm Saturday afternoon when I chanced upon a rally in Glasgow by the Scottish Socialists protesting the recent decision to bomb ISIS bases in Iraq. The book was part of a swag of Socialist books and pamphlets and it was the title and blurb that drew me in. Here it seemed was a history of World War One that wouldn't focus solely on the bloody carnage on the Western Front, nor the more familiar, to my Australian upbringing the useless slaughter of Gallipoli. I couldn't afford the price of the hard copy but the Kindle edition is much cheaper and so I downloaded it that night.
I wasn't disappointed, even though the price is far higher than other e-books. Hochschild's history of the war does indeed chronicle the savagery of trench warfare but it also covers in great deal the heroic work of anti war agitators and draft resistors who, against overwhelming odds, went to war against a government determined it seemed to embark on a campaign of mass slaughter of its own people. One interesting feature of this work is the fact he starts not with the assassination in Sarajevo but with the Boer War where one of the most powerful armies in the world was tied down...

United Kingdom on Nov 30, 2014

Clem: First thing’s first: This is NOT a retrospective of the entire first World War. If you’re looking for a detailed account of the major battles, key turning points, and figures that shaped this horrible conflict, look elsewhere. What this book IS, is a snapshot of the reason for the conflict, how ridiculous it was in retrospect, and most importantly, how ridiculous it was to a few brave men and women who risked their entire livelihood making bold statements denouncing this “patriotic” war.

To understand the time and places a bit better, we must remember that war was not necessarily looked at with the same degree of horror that it now is a century later. Up until this “war to end all wars”, it was expected amongst most civilized society that, in all probability, there would be an instance where one’s country would engage with another “enemy” country, lives would be lost, civilians would be tortured, and innocent weaker countries would be bloodily dominated by barbaric bullies of stronger nations. Seems pretty catastrophic in hindsight as it should, yet…well, this is just how things were.

Take, for instance, how this war started. Essentially, an...

United States on Aug 09, 2014

oto_jo: There is an excellent review in Amazon titled 'not what it says on the the tin' I read it and initially chuntered because at start the book seemed to be very much about the dissenters. However, by the end of reading the book I very much agreed with the author of that review. In someways it is a bit hard to classify what the book is about. It is more a broad history of the first world war and its consequences with emphasis on some unusual protagonists. It is not a massively detailed history and it is largely told from the perspective of the Brits.

Adam Hochschild is a brilliant writer. This is the second book of his that I have read. The first being King Leopold's Ghost. In my opinion King Leopold's ghost is perfect, while to End of All Wars is very good but has small flaws.

As noted in other reviews, the book starts more or less with the Boer war. This was a perfect place to start because it introduces the rapid repeat machine gun and how it changed modern warfare (something the wwI generals did not ever seem to get to grips with). It also introduces and establishes the main protagonists for the book.

Adam Hochschild clearly did a lot of research in writing...

United Kingdom on Aug 11, 2013

Dr D: An unusual & engrossing read. It's not an historical accountant's report of which division moved where, the efficiency of various weapons or the inhuman tactical brilliance or stupidity of military commanders (although there's a bit of that)... it's essentially about a few notable people, both objectors to and supporters of the First World War, what they thought & what they went through at the time.

Hochschild is clear that the voices of objection & dissent were only ever from a small minority, that the vast majority of public opinion on all sides was (at least initially) eager to engage in an unimaginably brutal conflict for what amounted to quite pathetic reasons. Of course they had no way of knowing quite how brutal it would be & even after years of fighting it was still not clear & quite unimaginable to many who had not experienced it directly. These are a series of stories of tremendous ethical & moral courage of some in the face of quite extreme social coercion, torture & even execution. In many ways it is about some maintaining their grip on humanity in an era of mass cultural insanity. There are also the stories of a few of the people who...

United Kingdom on Jul 25, 2012

bookelephant: This is a very readable book managing to combine a canter through the story of the First World War with some interesting individual stories. However it will not tell you "how the First world war divided Britain" - it really only tells you much about a very limited (if compelling) cast of characters. Yes it is fascinating to know about the division between Sir John French and his activist sister Charlotte Despard (what a girl!), and to be reminded of the disjunction in the Pankhurst ranks etc etc, but it is not (as the title would seem to claim) a broad based social history of Britain in the war. Many of the fault lines in the British social scene are touched upon - but very much in a micro sense - only as relevant to this small cast.
Which brings me to one of the two problems I felt with the book as written. The bottom line is that having chosen a small number of pretty remarkable individuals, they are all to big to be reduced to bit parts in this book - each one actually cries out for his or her own story, and one feels a little short changed and only getting the edited highlights. Of course most of them do have books written about them and one can go off and read them but...

United Kingdom on Aug 23, 2011

WALSHY: More comments on 'To End All Wars'

I will not repeat the overall comments on this book made by other reviewers as they describe the overall structure and lay out of Hochschild's arguments well and in a detailed fashion.

One great strength of the book is to show how statesmen, civil administrators and a general staff raised in a Victorian society reacted to the experience of trying to win a war based on industrial models of waging battle, aided by science and emerging technologies. Leaders of an army raised on the bayonet and the lance would find it hard to grasp that these weapons did not cut barbed wire, let alone deal with enemy forces aided by spotting aircraft and wireless. Raised in a time when colonial wars only needed troops foraging from the ground they were on, it was a struggle to set up the sheer depth and intensity of the logistics needed to support and provide for an army in the field for year after year, and which at its peak (I am informed by Correlli Barnett) numbered nearly two-thirds of the population of the London of that day.

It is easy to deride Haig, but he, despite all his defects of character, was probably the best person from the...

United Kingdom on Jul 11, 2011

Paul Y. Gelman: The First World War is still a subject which attracts a lot of attention from both professional historians and amateurs alike. The reasons are many, but one of them is the fact that almost every month new things are discovered about those horrible massacre fields in which millions of people were butchered aimlessly in one of the most bloody wars ever to have happened in the annals of humanity.
Mr. Hochschield is one of those whose interest in the war was piqued by various reasons, some of which are explained at the beginning of this interesting book. In it, there are chapters which describe in detail the carnage ,the violence, the endless suffering and agonizing experiences undergone by civilians and soldiers during 1914-1918. The author also chose to concentrate on pacifists who were against the war,among them Bertrand Russell and another British woman, whose brother was commander in chief at the Western front. Her name was Charlotte Despard, a suffragettte, a communist and a IRA supporter, while her brother was Field Marshal Sir John French, who also held the post of viceroy of Ireland.
The first quarter of the book gives the reader a general survey of the state of...

United States on Apr 23, 2011