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

by Adam Hochschild

More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 percent failed to explode.

Every year these leftover shells kill people—36 in 1991 alone, for instance, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line.

they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year.

More than 630 French démineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946.

one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war’s outbreak were dead when it was over.

Of all men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed.

No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance!”

Moreover, they spoke out at a time when it took great courage to do so, for the air was filled with fervent nationalism and a scorn for dissenters that often turned violent.

more than 20,000 British men of military age had refused the draft.

more than 6,000 served prison terms under harsh conditions:

Cecil Rhodes declared when still an Oxford undergraduate,

“and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”

Later, he went on to say, “I would annex the plan...

British territory did cover nearly a quarte...

I thank the Goodness and the Grace That on my birth hath smiled, And made me in these happy days A happy English child. I was not born a little slave To labour in the sun, And wish that I were in the grave,

And all my labor done.

both single-barreled and fully automatic: it used the energy of its own recoil to eject each spent cartridge and pull the next one into place—and it kept shooting as long as a soldier squeezed the trigger. A jacket of water, refilled as the liquid boiled away, kept the barrel from getting too hot. The Maxim could fire 500 rounds a minute.

Indeed, thanks to the Maxims, in a few hours the British were able to fire an extraordinary 500,000 bullets at the hapless Sudanese.

the civilian celebrity who honors the warriors.

David Lloyd George, a Welsh member of Parliament and skilled orator, was one of the war’s boldest critics.

every shell fired at the Boers, Lloyd George thundered, carried away with it an old-age pension.

was loyalty to one’s country in wartime the ultimate civic duty, or were there ideals that had a higher claim?

Here, too, came an eerie glimpse into the not-so-distant future, as the British opened a network of guarded concentration camps, row after row of white tents, often surrounded by barbed wire.

(When a final tally was made after the war, it would show that 27,927 Boers—almost all of them women and children—had died in the camps, more than twice the number of Boer

soldiers killed in combat.)

South Africa the black majority would be powerless. “The white man must rule,”

All his life he looked back fondly at his youth as an officer in an elite regiment, and he loved all things military,

seldom wearing civilian clothes except when hunting.

warfare that might be decided not by bravery, dash, and generalship, but by industrial might.

“I am thoroughly satisfied from what I have seen in South Africa that the necessity of training cavalry to charge is as great as it was in the days of Napoleon.”

In print, Haig attacked a skeptic who dared question the usefulness of a cavalry charge in the age of the machine gun and the repeating rifle.

It was as strong a tactic as ever, Haig was certain, since the “moral f...

irresistible force, coming on at highest speed . . . affects the nerves and aim of...

horse, after all, had been central to warfare since the earliest recorded history, a position of dominance unshaken by every advance in weaponry from the crossbow to breech-loading, rapid-firing artill...

“the role of Cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing,” thanks, in part, to “the introduction of the small bore rifle, the bullet from which has little stopping power against a horse.”

In 1904, as the last colonial spoils in Africa were being divided up, France made a secret treaty with Spain sharing Morocco between them; the following year, the German Kaiser visited the territory, and from his yacht declared his support for Moroccan independence. It took a months-long international conference of colonial powers to calm the

roiled waters.

In the long run, larger and more moderate suffrage groups would be more responsible for actually winning women the vote.

For someone whose writing was so widely loved, the poet and novelist was a man of many dislikes. Among them were Germans, democracy, taxes, labor unions, Irish and Indian nationalists, socialists, and, near the top of the list, the women he called “suffragines.”

“The rich and comfortable classes have annexed Jesus and perverted His Gospel,”

“And yet He belongs to us.”

Dreadnought-class battleships, whose high-speed steam turbines and long-range 12-inch guns made previous warships obsolete.

Almost all the great powers were now spending between 5 and 6 percent of their national incomes on their armed forces, even though the usual motives for conflict were relatively few.

One newspaper estimated that suffragettes had inflicted £500,000 worth of property damage, some $60 million in to-day’s money. By now, more than 1,000 of them had gone to prison, and one spectacularly sacrificed her life before a huge crowd and newsreel cameras in 1913—Emily

Emily Wilding Davison, a

WSPU member who ran onto the racecourse in the midst of the Epsom Derby and grabbed at the bridle of the King’s horse, which struck her while galloping at full speed. She died of her injuries four days later. Queen Mary referred to her as “the horrid w...

After all, many working-class men also did not have the right to vote, since roughly 40 percent of Britain’s adult males were too poor to qualify. Basil

The major powers of Europe seemed to be getting along splendidly, as well they might, since King George V, the look-alike Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II were all kin. George was a first cousin of Nicholas on one side of his family, and of Wilhelm on the other; he was also related to the wives of both. The three future monarchs had met as children, moored

their royal yachts next to each other on holidays in the Baltic, and had all been together in Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter the previous year. Wilhelm was godfather to one of Nicholas’s children and had been at the bedside of his grandmother Queen Victoria when she died. In late June, a squadron of British battleships and cruisers were welcome guests at Germany’s annual Elbe Regatta.

Loving medals and epaulets as much as ever, the Kaiser proudly donned his gold braid as an honorary ...