To End All Wars

To End All Wars (2011) by Adam Hochschild. A truly astonishing book that takes a fresh look at World War I. Hochschild explores not only the carnage on the battlefield, but the arguments for and against the war that took place on the home front (mostly in England). Fittingly, the book's cover features a photograph of mounted cavalrymen with their lances -- little did they know that horses and lances would prove useless in the face of modern defensive weapons such as the machine gun and barbed wire. Meanwhile, back in England, there were those, sometimes quite prominent, persons who opposed the war on moral grounds. Hochschild tells their story too, and the story of how a few brave souls stood fast against the senseless slaughter that was taking place all along the Western Front. This is a fascinating, well written book that has historical sweep and doesn't shrink from the conclusion that the First World War was the greatest calamity of the twentieth century -- not that it was avoidable, but that it was dreadfully inevitable. Grade: A