Publisher Description
World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s 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?
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“Interesting read. The author is a socialist, which I don’t subscribe to, however I think he had some good points. Namely that WW1 was started for not very good reasons, didn’t finish properly leading to WW2 just 20 years later, and spent a lot of lives that were unnecessary. Especially when you have inept leaders who, even in 1917 were ordering soldiers to rise up out of their trenches and charge across no mans land only to get mowed down by machine guns. I’ve always been curious to know why it seems a person has to be a socialist to say, “you know, I don’t think this war is a very good idea.””
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Jennifer (4 out of 5 stars)
