“World War I was supposed to be the “war to end
all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the
tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war
stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational
explanation.
To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored
moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of
these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a
future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a
clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately
connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women
pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western
Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up
publishing newspapers that attacked each other. As Adam Hochschild brings the
Great War to life as never before, he forces us to confront the big questions:
Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn’t cooler
heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?”
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