To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild

As the poet and soldier Edmund Blunden put it in describing that deadly first day of the Battle of the Somme, neither side “had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won.”

Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce’s novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that “war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong.”

“Once you have lain in her arms,” another writer and Western Front veteran, Guy Chapman, said of war, “you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her. . . . No wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation. . . . Even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell. They rise from her embraces, pillaged, soiled, it may be ashamed; but they are still hers.”

The landlord calls it rent and he winks the other eye, The merchant calls it profit and he sighs a heavy sigh, The banker calls it interest and puts it in the bag, But our honest friend the burglar simply calls it swag.