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

by Adam Hochschild

For history, when examined closely, always yields up people, events, and moral testing grounds more revealing than any but the greatest of novelists could invent.

They raised a question that would resound even more contentiously in the next decade, in a war whose costs, human and financial, were astronomically higher: was loyalty to one’s country in wartime the ultimate civic duty, or were there ideals that had a higher claim?

The contest between the two nations to mobilize shipyards, foundries, and machine tools to build these fearsome vessels gave a hint of something new in the military trade: warfare that might be decided not by bravery, dash, and generalship, but by industrial might.

For him, as for many other delegates, socialism was less a matter of workers owning the means of production—although he firmly believed in that—than a moral crusade for a society that put workers before profits, public good before private wealth, and, above all, peace before war.