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

by Adam Hochschild

German women who managed to attend were arrested on their return.

What made gas warfare provoke such rage, the historian Trevor Wilson suggests, was something else. For all of recorded history, soldiers had believed that victory went to the manly, the fearless, and the daring. Now, with deadly gas brought to you not from the hand of an enemy you could see and slay, but by

the very wind, all bravery seemed useless.

The Germans failed to take advantage of the fear, confusion, and temporary breach in the Allied lines their first

gas attack caused.

no country had been prepared for a war of this

length, least of all Britain, with its small professional army used to fighting ill-armed colonials.

British artillery had shot off almost as many shells as in the course of the entire Boer War.

Sir Edmund Gosse. War, he wrote, “is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy’s Fluid [a popular antiseptic and deodorant] that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.”

thirdhand story or wisp of rumor was treated as the truth,

(Various pre-1914 British admirals had grumbled that submarines were “un-English,” or “the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface,” or “an underhanded method of attack”;

Cossacks and other troops drove at least half a million Jews from their homes. Three-quarters

By the end of 1915, Russia had well over three million homeless refugees—in

The Tsar, the British ambassador once observed, was “afflicted with the misfortune of being weak on every point except his own autocracy.”

For the troops, however, rifles remained in short supply, and some infantry units moved up to the front carrying only axes.

In December, part of Russia’s 7th Army would march to their front-line positions without winter boots. Here