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

by Adam Hochschild

more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the toll was proportionately even higher: 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.

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

The tank suffered, too, from the era’s strange mismatch between firepower and communications: it carried no radio, only homing pigeons, which could be pushed out a small opening in hopes they would fly back to headquarters.

As the launch date grew near, Haig seemed to interpret everything around him in military terms of obedience and duty. When Lady Haig told him that she was expecting their third child, he wrote back, without any trace of jest or irony, “How proud you must feel that you are doing your duty at this time by having a baby and thereby setting a good example to all other females!”

Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.