To End All Wars Quotes

“Unlike, say, witch-burning, slavery, and apartheid, which were once taken for granted and are now officially outlawed, war is still with us.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“For several years now, Kipling had been sprinkling his prose and poetry with anti-German barbs. He believed this war would do “untold good” for his beloved British tommies, preparing them for the inevitable clash with Germany. The Boer War, said a character in a story he wrote at the time, was “a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“In Berlin, after she took part in a failed general strike and uprising, her petite figure with its large hat and parasol still considered a threat by right-wingers, Rosa Luxemburg was beaten and shot by army officers and her body dumped in a canal.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, for whom Hardie had campaigned years before, left a sickbed in 1918 to give a series of antiwar speeches, for which he, too, was thrown behind bars. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. “Repent?” asked Debs. “Repent? Repent for standing like a man?” Still in his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in 1920, he would receive nearly a million votes for president on the Socialist ticket.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Of all men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Trapped with his men in no man’s land, Hutchison saw, to his amazement, “a squadron of Indian Cavalry, dark faces under glistening helmets, galloping across the valley towards the slope. No troops could have presented a more inspiring sight than these natives of India with lance and sword, tearing in mad cavalcade on to the skyline. A few disappeared over it: they never came back. The remainder became the target of every gun and rifle.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Instead of the usual ceremonial garb of parliamentarians—starched wing collar, black tailcoat, and black silk top hat—he wore Scottish tweed and a Sherlock Holmes–style deerstalker cap. Once, entering the House of Commons, he was stopped by a policeman who did not recognize him but knew the building’s roof was under repair. “Are you working here, mate?” he asked. “Yes,” Hardie replied.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 – A New York Times Bestselling History of WWI Critics and Heroes

“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!”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“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.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“history, when examined closely, always yields up people, events, and moral testing grounds more revealing than any but the greatest of novelists could invent.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“the remains of 250 British and Australian soldiers were found beneath a French field in 2009.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“some half-million pounds of First World War scrap is still collected from French and Belgian fields each year.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“The unexpected aristocratic dissenter of 1917, Lord Lansdowne, was entirely right to see that the war had irrevocably unleashed “the prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“John Kipling is still among the more than 400,000 British Empire dead from 1914–1918 whose resting place is not known.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“The Allied rhetoric about self-determination of peoples did not apply to African or Asian colonies, or to Arab territories known to have oil.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Some deaths governments barely bothered to count, such as those of underfed African porters, subjected to whippings as punishment, who for years carried wounded men or 60-pound loads of food and ammunition through rain forest, swampland, and savanna. As the fighting moved, some who had first been forced to work for one side found themselves carrying supplies for the other. Of more than two million of these forced laborers, an estimated 400,000 died, mostly of disease or exhaustion—a death rate far higher than that for British troops on the Western Front.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Strikes and peace demonstrations broke out. When the high command of the navy ordered the fleet to sea for a last, suicidal battle to the death with the British, thousands of sailors defied orders, stokers putting out the fires in their ships’ boilers. At the port of Kiel, 3,000 civilians demonstrated in their support. Mutinous sailors took over their ships and raised the red flag, broke into armories and seized rifles, several thousand of them traveling to Berlin and other cities to spread their demand for a revolution.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“both sides together suffered another half a million dead and wounded just during the war’s final five weeks.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“bayonet was a weapon with a worker at each end.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Brock Millman, a careful scholar of Britain’s internal security measures, makes a convincing case that the government held back men and arms for fear of revolution at home.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“One hundred thousand workers protesting food shortages had marched to Manchester’s town hall in January. British trade union membership was rising, and 1918 saw more than 5.8 million workdays lost to industrial disputes,”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were “like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Emboldened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and tired of endless war and shortages, some 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January 1918, demanding peace, new rights for labor, and a “people’s republic.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Daily calorie consumption was more than halved, which meant that, on average, German adults lost 20 percent of their body weight during the war.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“So many horses had been sent to the front that the Berlin Zoo’s elephants were put to work hauling wagons through the streets.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“On both sides, the colossal cost of the war was measured not only in human life: British war-related spending had by 1918 reached 70 percent of the gross national product—”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“By 1917, a British fighter pilot arriving at the front had an average life expectancy of less than three months.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“More than 4,000 censors were at work monitoring both the press and the mail.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918