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,

The French government employs teams of démineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; 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.

In today’s conflicts, whether the casualties are child soldiers in Africa or working-class, small-town Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan, we are accustomed to the poor doing a disproportionate share of the dying. But from 1914 to 1918, by contrast, in all the participating countries the war was astonishingly lethal for their ruling classes. On both sides, officers were far more likely to be killed than the men whom they led over the parapets of trenches and into machine-gun fire, and they themselves were often from society’s highest reaches. Roughly 12 percent of all British soldiers who took part in the war were killed, for instance, but for peers or sons of peers in uniform the figure was 19 percent. Of all men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed.

In the nobility of this work he could believe fully because, as George Orwell wrote of him after his death, the poet never acknowledged “that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.”

Not only were all sides preparing, but the high commands had detailed plans for how the war would unfold. Should Germany attack France, British and French officers had already worked out which French ports British troops would disembark at, how many French railway cars and interpreters would meet them, and where their jumping-off points for combat would probably be. Little of the preparations, however, took into account that weapon meant to slaughter “natives,” the machine gun. As British, French, and German generals spread their maps on war ministry tables, they spent inordinate amounts of time planning where to place their cavalry divisions.

Thomson remarked to a friend that “unless there were a European War to divert the current, we were heading for something very like revolution.” He was not alone in feeling this way. “A good big war just now might do a lot of good in killing Socialist nonsense,” one army officer confided in a letter, “and would probably put a stop to all this labor unrest.”

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.

Leading figures from across German society declared their support for war: university rectors, prominent intellectuals, avant-garde artists, Protestant and Catholic bishops, rabbis, even the heads of groups working for women’s suffrage and the rights of homosexuals.

French prewar planning had centered on the mystique of the attack: great masses of men filled with élan rushing forward in shoulder-to-shoulder bayonet charges or thunderous cavalry assaults that would strike fear into German hearts. Furthermore, France’s troops went into battle in the highly visible blue coats and bright red trousers that had long made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe’s foot soldiers. At a parliamentary hearing two years earlier, the minister of war had shouted down a reformer who wanted to eliminate the red trousers. “Never!” he declared. “Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”

In less than a month, nearly 300,000 of those well-dressed soldiers would be dead or wounded. No indication whatsoever of this toll appeared in the British press.

the jovial British commander spoke little French. (The field marshal himself believed otherwise. Reportedly, he was addressing one group of French officers when he heard several of them call out, “Traduisez!” [Translate!] He tried to explain that he was already speaking their language.)

In these early weeks he remained remarkably focused on the appearance of his troops—and little else. “I saw the 4th Brigade (Scott-Kerr) file by on the march,” he recorded, “—they looked splendid.”

Reflecting the power structure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, three-quarters of its officers were of German-speaking stock, while only one enlisted man in four understood the language.

Although a bumpy economy had thrown hundreds of thousands of people out of work and was raising food prices, the government quietly asked charities not to aid jobless men eligible to enlist.

Trench warfare was not new. The American Civil War had ended with a version of it, at the besieged Confederate capital, Richmond, and at nearby Petersburg, and more recently British troops had sometimes dug in to protect themselves against Boer fire. But it seemed such an ignoble sort of combat that hardly anyone in Europe planned for it,

poorer parts of London, crowds rioted after air raids and smashed the windows of merchants of German or Austrian origin, or whose names simply sounded Germanic. German bakers, rumor had it, were putting poison in their bread. The press only fanned the flames of xenophobia. Newspaper headlines screamed about “The Enemy in Our Midst.” One article warned, “If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.” In

The hysteria spread into scholarship of centuries past: the editors of the Cambridge Medieval History announced that they would drop all German contributors from their volumes.

The mighty guns of the behemoth dreadnoughts that Britain had invested so many billions in building, and their tens of thousands of sailors, were useless against the real naval threat from Germany, which turned out to be a weapon that neither side had previously paid much attention to, the submarine. (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”; one had called for captured submarine crews to be hanged as pirates.) Germany’s small but state-of-the-art fleet of U-boats sent 227 British merchant ships to the bottom of the ocean in 1915. The Royal Navy searched desperately for a counter-weapon.

The dreamy and indecisive Tsar Nicholas II himself took personal command of his armies. The Tsar, the British ambassador once observed, was “afflicted with the misfortune of being weak on every point except his own autocracy.” He moved in at army headquarters in grand style, watched parades, toured the nearby countryside in his Rolls-Royce, played dominoes, read novels, and issued odd orders, at one point promoting all the officers who happened to attend a ceremonial dinner. “My brain is resting here . . . no troublesome questions demanding thought,” he wrote to his wife.

As with many episodes from this war, it is hard for us to see the attack on September 26, 1915, as anything other than a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions their men faced. Strikingly, however—and this is especially typical of the war’s early battles, when all soldiers were professionals or volunteers—few survivors talked of it in this way. For them to question the generals’ judgment would have meant, of course, asking if their fellow soldiers had died in vain. From the need to avoid such questions are so many myths about wars born.

British generals denied the awesome power of the chief weapon involved. “The introduction of the Machine Gun,” declared a memo from French’s headquarters to the Ministry of Munitions two months after the battle, “has not, in the opinion of the General Staff, altered the universally accepted principle that superior numbers of bayonets closing with the enemy is what finally turns the scale.” Even some two and a half years later, in May 1918, the British forces would have only one machine gun for every 61 men. The Canadians would have one for every 13, the French one for every 12.

John Buchan lent a helping hand to the spy mania. In October 1915, just after Loos, he published what became his best-known book (later brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock), The Thirty-Nine Steps. In this novel and its sequels, Buchan essentially invented the most popular form of the modern spy story: a daring, athletic hero, chase scenes, friends who turn out to be enemies, enemies who turn out to be friends, coded messages, and grand conspiracies that will destroy everything if the hero cannot escape from a castle dungeon in time. With Britain’s soldiers dug in below ground on a front that barely moved month after bloody month, the public was relieved and delighted to read stories like these, in which individual feats of boldness carried the day.

The year 1915 had begun with the Germans occupying some 19,500 square miles of French and Belgian territory. At its end, Allied troops had recaptured exactly eight of those square miles, the British alone suffering more than a quarter-million casualties in the process.

Haig’s very uncommunicativeness allowed civilians and soldiers alike to read into the man the qualities they wanted to see. “Haig was a silent man. . . . You had to learn a sort of verbal shorthand made up of a series of grunts and gestures,” wrote his aide-de-camp Desmond Morton. Of one such instance Morton recalled, “The briefing lasted about twenty minutes and consisted of Haig with a pointer in front of a large-scale map of the battle pointing at various spots and making grunting noises with a few words interspersed. ‘Never believed . . . petrol . . . bridge gone . . . where cavalry?’ and so on. Fortunately I knew the cipher by this time. I am sure Haig felt he had given me a long and lucid lecture on the whole affair.”

Haig had risen through the military bureaucracy by attracting not those with talent or new ideas but rather those who would not outshine him. There was no shortage of mediocrity in the British army of this era, but he was unusual in openly endorsing the quality. Years before, when his sister wrote to him doubting that a certain officer joining his staff was “clever enough for the job,” Haig replied: “The so called sharp people very often disappoint us or cheat or have some other drawback such as being disagreeable, bad-tempered, etc. All I require is people of average intelligence who are keen to do their work properly.”

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.” Delighted, the NCF proceeded to issue a poster with exactly those words on it, credited to Bodkin. The government then arrested an NCF member for putting up this subversive poster. In response, the NCF’s lawyer demanded the arrest of Bodkin, as the author of the offending words.

So many deaths for a sliver of earth so narrow it could barely be seen on a wall map of Europe. How was it all to be explained back home? No one was more aware of that problem than the apostle of high casualties himself. “A danger which the country has to face . . . is that of unreasoning impatience,” Haig wrote in mid-1916. “Military history teems with instances where sound military principles have had to be abandoned owing to the pressure of ill-informed public opinion. The press is the best means to hand to prevent the danger in the present war.”

The British military, like most armies, replicated its society, and every officer had a batman, or personal servant.

Despite efforts to blame factory fires or accidents on them, not a single known act of enemy sabotage took place in Britain during the entire war.

Senior Admiralty officers had long resisted one possible solution: sending merchant ships in convoys, guarded by a screen of destroyers or other small warships. Convoys were cumbersome, limited to the speed of the slowest ship, and ports became clogged when dozens of ships arrived together. The navy chiefs, writes war historian Trevor Wilson, “were imbued with a proud tradition, according to which going hunting for the enemy seemed a proper course and chugging along in support of merchantmen did not.”

The navy preferred to be, as it were, cavalrymen of the sea.

Seldom, points out the historian Brock Millman, “did the government prohibit, where it could discourage, or discourage where it was safe or politic to ignore.”

dry, neatly sandbagged replica of a trench that had been constructed in London’s Kensington Gardens. (A similar trench, no less unrealistic, drew many visitors to a park in Berlin.)

the British soldier’s cold-weather greatcoat was not waterproof. It absorbed mud and water like a relentless sponge, adding up to 34 pounds to its weight.

the most sophisticated propaganda operation the world had yet seen. It produced a torrent of patriotic materials, including paintings and drawings by special war artists sent to the front, pictorial magazines, boys’ adventure stories portraying the Germans as bloodthirsty barbarians, cards for cigarette packs, and a “German Crimes Calendar” with a new atrocity for each month.

One officer calculated that if the British continued to gain ground at the pace so far, they would reach the Rhine in 180 years.

Alice was doing her hard-labor sentence in the Aylesbury Gaol, where the peephole on every cell door was at the center of a painted eye, complete with lash, brow, and pupil, eternally staring at the prisoner.

The elderly peasant, Roman Stashkov, had been included at the very last minute. Joffe and Kamenev, driving to the Petrograd railway station, had suddenly realized that, for political reasons, their delegation had to include a representative of the class that constituted the vast majority of Russia’s people. They noticed the unmistakably peasant-like Stashkov walking along the street, stopped their car, found that he belonged to a left-wing party, and invited him along. The bewildered Stashkov, his enormous gray beard untrimmed, sat through the meetings at Brest-Litovsk beneath glittering chandeliers, but could not rid himself of the habit of addressing his fellow delegates, in the prerevolutionary manner, as barin, or master.

The bearded old peasant Stashkov, unfamiliar with wine, asked which was stronger, the red or the white—and then proceeded to get cheerfully drunk.

Wartime privations inflamed an angry nationalism in Germany, producing a foretaste of the hysteria that, a quarter century later, would reach a climax of unimaginable proportions. Ominously, making the fraudulent claim that Jews were shirking military duty, right-wing forces demanded and won a special census of Jews in the army. Anti-Semitic books, pamphlets, and oratory proliferated. By 1918, the head of the Pan-German League was calling for a “ruthless struggle against Jews.”

he had competition from the army. Its own busy operatives produced a voluminous Weekly Intelligence Summary for John French’s Home Forces headquarters, with eight categories including “General Public Opinion” and “Acts of Disloyalty.” Reports under each heading were contributed by regional army commands around the country, one of which added a ninth category, “Movements of Irishmen.” Agents dutifully recorded the graffiti in army latrines; scrawled on the wall of one in Yorkshire was “What the hell are we fighting for, only the capitalists.”

the new law enfranchised almost all men over 21—over 19 if they were in the armed forces. However, given that some half-million British soldiers had so far been killed, many MPs worried that enfranchising all women would make them a majority of voters—something clearly unthinkable. How could that be avoided? Very simply: the new bill enfranchised only women over 30. Nor was even that unconditional: property and other qualifications excluded about 22 percent of these older women.

arrived to begin serving his time, Russell wrote, the warder taking down his particulars “asked my religion and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.’”

The two commanders had, for several years, in effect run a military dictatorship. But knowing they had lost the war, they shrewdly maneuvered a new civilian government into power—headed by a chancellor responsible for the first time to the legislature, not to the Kaiser—so that the blame for what was certain to be a painful peace settlement would fall on civilians.

Although the agreement signed several days later, over the protests of the shaken German delegates, was called the Armistice, in reality it was a German surrender. It was a most unprecedented one, however, for the surrendering army, despite being severely bloodied, remained well armed, several million strong—and almost entirely on the territory of its enemies. But with a near-starving Germany in turmoil behind it, and rear-area troops deserting, it could not fight on, even though only a few months earlier, almost at the gates of Paris, it had seemed poised to win the war. Triumphal German government propaganda had continued to the last minute—newsreels never showed troops retreating or surrendering—leaving many civilians thinking that, whatever their sufferings, the country’s soldiers were on the verge of victory.

Germany, too, experienced great upheavals, but in the Armistice agreement the Allies had deliberately allowed the German army to keep thousands of machine guns for crowd control.

He and other skeptics had been unable to persuade Lloyd George to ease the harsh terms imposed on Germany. The prime minister had won an election the month after the Armistice by thundering about making Germany pay for the war, and Clemenceau of France was even more vehement.

The resulting peace treaty, wrote the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan years later, had “the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand.”