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

st1\: *{behavior: url(#ieooui) } A page-turning, epic history of the modern era's most morally challenging war World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation--and as a symbol of war's eternal insanity. Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why, over four long years of futility and carnage, couldn't cooler heads prevail? In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings the war to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of its critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Today hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars." Can we ever avoid repeating history?