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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Despite the rule of silence, he passed on news of the momentous events in Petrograd to his fellow prisoners in the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison newspapers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other convicts had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on forty squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner’s supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue of the paper—only one copy, of course, could be “published”—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared. Thanks to information from an imprisoned army deserter, the Walton Leader published one of the few uncensored accounts in Britain of the slaughter at Passchendaele.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a War of defence, has now become a War of aggression and conquest. The letter writer, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, had just published a much-praised book of war poems.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“What made it so easy for Haig to demand high casualties was that he chose not to see them. He “felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations,” wrote his son, “because these visits made him physically ill.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the attack’s first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more who were badly wounded would die in hospitals later.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

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

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

“Kill Germans! Kill them!” raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon. “. . . Not for the sake of killing, but to save the world. . . . Kill the good as well as the bad. . . . Kill the young men as well as the old. . . . Kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant [a story then circulating]. . . . I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr.” The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“WSPU supporters, shrinking in number but ever more extreme, set on fire an orchid house at Kew Gardens, a London church, and a racecourse grandstand; blew up a deserted railway station; and smashed a jewel case at the Tower of London. They cut the telephone wires linking London and Glasgow, and slashed the words NO VOTES, NO GOLF! into golf course greens and then poured acid in the letters so grass would not grow. One newspaper estimated that suffragettes had inflicted £500,000 worth of property damage, some $60 million in to-day’s money.”
― 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

“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. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“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, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“AT EVERY POINT on their journey, the new King and Queen were greeted with thunderous cheers. As their ship sailed from Portsmouth, it was flanked by 15 vessels of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet—mighty ships with names to match: Indefatigable, Invincible, Indomitable, Superb.”
― 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

“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